Soundscapes and Natural Histories: Listening to Portmoak

by

Image: crosssection of a bank on the perimeter of Portmoak Moss, showing how deep the peat is, and its layers.

This post discusses ways in which Scottish music can help us to think about historic entanglements between Scottish people and landscape: another twist on Soundyngs’ “music . Scotland . history” 3-word content.

Scottish “music” in recent decades has expanded to include soundscapes. This approach to composition uses natural ‘found’ sound to focus listeners’ attention to the particular affordances of a particular acoustic environment, which may be the great outdoors and all that lives therein.

There is a wide spectrum of creativity associated with this work, from the kind of hi-fidelity field recording associated with BBC nature films, to the incorporation of natural sounds in folk songs from song-artists such as Karine Polwart and Jenny Sturgeon.

Sampled natural sound can be listened to aesthetically, as a quasi-music. Potentially, habits of “aesthetic” listening can help listeners to notice and value what’s out there: soundscapes can be a kind of love song to the land, and the more-than-human creatures that live around us, in effect.

In this post, Soundyngs signposts a case study of a ‘soundscape’ combining words, Scottish folk music, and natural sound to communicate the history of a particular site: Portmoak Moss, in west Fife.

Portmoak Moss (below) is a raised Lowland peat bog, a valuable environment both for the work it does in carbon capture, and for providing flora and fauna that thrive in wet, acidic conditions with a place in which to be.  It’s peat layers go back into prehistoric periods, at least 6000 years. The world is now waking up to the importance of peat bogs, as the designation of the Flow Country of Caithness and Sutherland as UNESCO World Heritage site this year has shown.  Some soundscape work by Kathy Hinde (see below, Below the Blanket) contributed to a wider programme of public awareness-raising exercises for this unique ecosystem.

Lowland sites such as Portmoak may be less dramatic in scale than the expanses of the far north of Scotland, but nevertheless have a part to play in Scotland’s habitat diversity.

a peaty pool surrounded by moss and reeds

Conservation charities such as the Woodland Trust, who own the Portmoak site, are doing great work to keep these in a healthy state, and are keen to work with local communities to make this happen.  The Portmoak community is a good example of this kind of partnership.  The salient issues for conservation are these:

  • Peatland histories include both the ‘histories’ that can be told by humans, and the ‘pre-histories’ recorded in their layers of plant material.
  • Peat bogs take thousands of years to develop, locking in carbon over that period in layers of vegetation matter.
  • Peat bogs can be destroyed quickly through human activity: drainage, forestry plantation, peat extraction, can all lower the water table and degrade the site’s ability to function as it might.
  • Local community involvement in restoration is important to curating these natural spaces, demonstrating that humans and more-than-humans can coexist as complementary forces.

An undergraduate summer project undertaken by St Andrews student Natasha Currie as part of a portfolio of projects funded by the University of St Andrews group BIRCH (Biodiversity Interdisciplinary Research Community Hub) has created a soundscape that combines Portmoak’s environmental sounds, the voices of the Portmoak Community Woodland Group, and Scottish folk music. This helps you to understand – and to appreciate – how human history and natural history intersect. Enjoy listening to the Youtube and read the full report in Further Reading below.

Further Listening and Reading

 

Leave a comment

Cookie preferences