Anew

I chose this field recording because I liked that it’s a documentation of someone imitating the music of nature. In that original recording itself there’s so many layers of the art. There’s the birdsong that the person presumably heard many times, then spent time learning how to make the whistling sound, then they made their song, which was recorded onto magnetic tape, and converted into a digital format, which finally reached me. It made me think about at what point something becomes art. 

In my composition, I featured the field recording mostly untouched, but I added elements that also comment on when something can be considered art. There’s the sound of a flag flapping against a pole, of which I liked the rhythmic and melodic gentle clinking. There’s the sound of a tuning fork, which I usually consider not to be a musical instrument but rather a tool used before the music is made. There’s sounds of me whistling based on my memory of the original field recording, which I felt more comfortable manipulating than the original. And there’s recordings that I took of some birds from my apartment in Michigan during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This field recording is of U'wa whistling from the Andes in north-east Colombia. Some additional decisions in my composition were made based on what I learned about the U’wa people, who live in cloud forests mostly in Colombia. I used a bansuri to create some noisy flute articulations to evoke the misty air that I imagine flood the cloud forests. The U’wa people have also fought for many years to prevent oil drilling on their land. Throughout the composition there are two low drones, one meant again to evoke the ethereal cloud forest, the other meant to evoke the looming threat of environmental destruction. 

Above all, this field recording and this project made me reflect on what art is and when something becomes art. Art is amazing for its ability to transcend time and space. Through writing this composition I feel as though I have reached back to the cloud forests of Colombia in April 1973 when the original field recording was created and tie that moment in the past to this moment in the present, this cold wintery day in Baltimore in December 2025. 

U'wa whistling reimagined by Eugene Yoon.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds