Soundtracker, a portrait of audio preservationist Gordon Hempton, is a well timed piece of work. For the past few decades, Hempton’s self-appointed quest has been to preserve the acoustic landscapes of nature before the hum of the power line and the blast of the overhead plane eradicate their memory. The nonhuman soundscape – a vanishing communication commons – is a resource many living things depend on. And as a legitimate form of environmental degradation, noise pollution is a topic needing more attention.
Beyond the NIMBYists bothered by local road repair, there are people like Hempton, who not only grasp the profundity of our loss of silence, and the severing of our communication with the nonhuman world, but the ecological costs of acoustic fragmentation. Hempton trained as a botanist before finding his calling in digitally capturing those vanishing signals from nature. In Soundtracker we follow him around the breathtaking back country of Washington State, as he locates areas where the rustle of tallgrass and the call of seabirds still sound as they always had.
At one point in Soundtracker, Hempton quotes Emerson’s great line about “looking to what the white pine sayeth”, rightly construing the poet’s point in human language’s inability to capture nature’s expression. The only thing, in other words, is to listen. Indeed, the film’s most stunning sequence occurs during a midnight recording session in Washington’s eastern badlands. Hempton is somewhere nearby, though obscured by the darkness. The camera remains fixed for about 15 seconds, and the piercing wails of coyotes echo across a moonlit valley.
There is a sense of sorrow in this line of work. As Hempton duly notes, many of America’s great quiet spaces have been lost to the encroachment of industrial development. Soundtracking is now much more about the hunt than the guarantee. Still, the film makes a regrettable decision in focusing more on Hempton the hunter than on the valuable work he uncovers. The result is a portrait of a rather unwilling tour-guide. This is no slight against Hempton, but the commentary he duly offers feels strained by the camera’s unyielding focus. “Don’t let something hold your attention too hard” he advises us, and you get the impression he’d rather walk off the screen and leave us all to our solitudes.
Hempton wants his recordings to galvanize public support for the conversation of quiet refuges; as he observes, the recordings can never replace the being there. Sometimes though, his commitments seem to drifts into a sort of bourgeois romanticism – he allows trains to pass through his aural portraits, but can’t stand the buzz of a power generator, for instance. In light of its aesthetic investments, the conservationist’s goal is sometimes questionable. Do the ugly voices of nature deserve attention? Does the cackling blue heron get a say here?
Soundtracker has a final screening Sunday at 4 PM at Innis Town Hall. More information is available here.
photo courtesy of dew4ron7
