Joanna Bailie

DT: Each work of yours that we have featured on score follower seems to center around a lightly manipulated long-form field recording. You then draw attention to musical features of the recorded environment through voice or instrumental writing by transcribing embedded melodies, and interrupting or enhancing harmonically rich sounds with complementary chords. Is this an accurate summary of your workflow and style, could you elaborate on this technique, and talk about when you started doing this, and what inspired it?

JB: Yes, although I would add that sometimes, instead of field recordings, I use other borrowed material, such as heavily-processed recordings of music that I didn’t write, or sounds captured from a radio.

I’d studied electronic music in The Hague back in 1995, and even though I found it interesting, I hadn’t pursued it. At some point in the early 2000s I hit a brick wall — I was writing dense and complex instrumental music, but it wasn’t what I needed to be doing.

I always go back to this metaphor of composers either being painters or sculptors. I was trying to be a painter — starting with a blank canvas — when in fact I was a sculptor, someone who finds forms in already existing things.

I have a piece from 2002 called 5 Famous Adagios, for string quartet. All the material is derived from filtered recordings of cadence points in Bach Adagios. It’s purely acoustic, but it was a turning point — though now I miss the electronics.

The presence of a concrete electronic part — something that refers to the world outside the concert hall — allows me to play with context and meaning in a way I couldn’t before. I feel that the world is full of potential music lying dormant in real-world sounds and recordings. My job is to coax it out through manipulation, contextualization, and transformation.

Inspiration-wise, I’d mention American composers like Lucier, Cage, and Ives, and on the European side, Ferrari. When I started composing I didn’t really appreciate this kind of work, but around that brick wall moment, it clicked.

DT: Some of your works incorporate voice-over narration. The calm environments you create, paired with the strong presence of the voice audio in the mix resembles the production style one finds in guided meditation videos. Is there anything to this observation? Could you explain the importance of narration in these works?

JB: I don’t meditate or do yoga — I’ve never even listened to a meditation tape! But I do experience a slightly altered state while field recording, from focusing so intently on the randomness of the world. Maybe that’s my version of meditation.

I also love dreaming, especially those moments just before sleep. I write dreams down — obsessively — and recount them often. It’s the opposite of meditation in a way: unpredictable, chaotic. Still, maybe that slowness, and my calm speaking voice, makes people draw a connection.

Using voice-over narration lets me add even more context. It concretizes the work. I’ve never been interested in the tradition of setting text to music — I want the text to be immediately understandable.

DT: Do you run your field recordings through analysis tools to aid in transcribing sounds? Are there any other technical steps in your composition process that you would like to discuss?

JB: I use a sonogram program with a tuning fork function to help transcribe pitches and timecodes. But I do most of the transcription by hand, moving slowly through the sound file.

This slowness helps me understand the material more deeply. I don’t use tools like OpenMusic or Orchids — I want to know the sound intimately. I recently got a plugin that lets me strip away noise from recordings, which helps me shift from concrete sounds to something more harmonic.

DT: What does the “Artificial” in “Artificial Environments” refer to? What is this series about?

JB: It started earlier than 2017. In 2011 I made Analogue, and in 2015, The Grand Tour. I’ve always wanted to work with visuals — partly out of my interest in photography and its magical relationship to time, memory, and reality.

Two of my films, The Grand Tour and Roll Call, use old family photographs. I love editing film in tandem with tape parts, and I try to adapt sonic techniques to visual media and vice versa. The "freezing" effect is meant to mimic photographic cross-sections of time. Recently I’ve also tried a kind of “granular synthesis” in film — layering cross-dissolving frames instead of standard slow motion.

DT: Can you talk about how video in your recent works impacts the musical experience?

JB: I don’t know! I’m too close to the material. But video lets me build a world — a more complete environment for the piece. I aim for what Michel Chion calls “syncresis”: audio-visual moments that are more than the sum of their parts.

I use precise synchronization, like in my tape/instrument pieces. Rhythmic unison has a power. For instance, Radio-Kaleidoscope combines a turning kaleidoscope image with radio static. The connection is in the randomness, the turning, the obsolescence.

That said, combining video, electronics, and instruments without overwhelming the listener is tricky. I usually give each element time to stand alone and time to interact in combinations.

DT: The Grand Tour, Long Slow Sweep, and Roll Call make use of monochromatic or black and white photography paired with field recording. You seem to focus on memory—perhaps aural memories of the 19th–20th century. Is this a theme in your work?

JB: Absolutely. Memory and history are core themes for me. I’m fascinated by early memories — vague, fragmentary images like a beach, a train, a windsock.

We’re all made of what we remember, but our memory is flawed, subjective. Recording devices capture what we can't — they are better at remembering than we are. I’m also intrigued by nostalgia for times I never lived through, especially the 19th century: when technologies like trains, photography, and recording were born.

My favorite text on memory is Funes the Memorious by Borges, about a man who remembers everything — and loses his humanity because of it.

DT: What are you currently working on?

JB: During lockdown I had two pieces to work on — one using melodic material from car recordings near bridges, the other an audio-visual piece made from cross-dissolved long-exposure photos taken walking around Berlin.

Looking ahead, I’m working on a film-and-ensemble piece about stereoscopy, landscape, and Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer from my hometown. Another piece is about the idea that sound waves never die — they just become fainter. If we had better tools, maybe we could "hear" the memory of everything a space has ever witnessed.