Environments 12

Environments 12 takes the form of a multi-channel audio installation, presenting a world in which the environment itself has been updated. In this world, the reproduction, synthesis and management of soundscapes has become ubiquitous and planetised. Loudspeakers and microphones are laced through the biosphere, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology.

Environments 12 is a speculative addition to the once-popular Environments series: records released between 1969 and 1979 by the American entrepreneur and composer Irv Teibel, under the aegis of his company Syntonic Research. This series both anticipated and helped bring about a mass-market in mood-altering nature recordings. If you have ever put on the sound of a rainforest or thunderstorm to help you work or get to sleep, or to block out the noise of a busy office, that is partly thanks to Environments.

Today, most of us are familiar with this way of listening. We are used to thinking of the soundscape as something we can control, adjust, and retune. But in the 1960s, people had to be
taught. The liner notes for the original eleven Environments records are oddly didactic. They don’t just tell you what’s on the records. They tell you how to listen to them. In fact, what they say is that you don’t really listen to these records at all. You ‘hear’ them. The liner notes direct you, for instance, to play the records at the lowest possible volume, just below the threshold of attention. This, they claim, is what gives the sounds their mood altering effects. You could think of Environments 12 as an inverted environmental recording. Rather than presenting the ‘sounds of nature’ on their own, this record is about these sounds, how they came into being,
and how they’re being used to reprogram nature itself. It’s about the idea of an environment-to-come, in which the reproduction, synthesis and management of soundscapes has become ubiquitous and planetized. A strange future of acoustically enriched ecosystems, algorithmically-assisted biosemiotics, and computationally-managed interspecies conversations. A future in which the environment itself has been updated. That future is already here.

You will notice, therefore, that the record has an ambiguous temporality. Some of the stories are historical. Some are contemporary. Some are more speculative. Precisely which is hard to tell. But every story is rooted in real-world examples, in which scientists, states, and corporations are working together to lace loudspeakers and microphones throughout the biosphere.

This is all in the name of a cybernetic ecology, and in the face of an escalating climate emergency. Environments itself was in certain ways a nostalgic response to the early signs of this
very emergency. Environments 11 was released during the 1979 oil crisis. Its liner notes even promised that the record would cool the listener down, psychologically, without needing to use air conditioning!