Tales from the Acousmonium – Part 1

Leading sonic artist

John Cousins (b. 1943) is arguably the leading New Zealand sonic artist of his generation. Of those composers inspired in the 1960s by Douglas Lilburn’s pioneering electroacoustic music created at Victoria University, Cousins has retained the most singular focus on musique concrète, acousmatic, and other forms of electronic music. John Psathas considers that of all New Zealand composers, Cousins has “thrown the spear furthest” with his radical creative practice.

After completing university study in 1965, Cousins joined the faculty of Canterbury University where he founded an electronic music studio and taught until retirement in 2004.

Cousins effectively ceased composing for conventional musical instruments in the mid-1970s. His work has explored many different approaches: electroacoustic music, environmental and performance works, gallery installations, sound-producing sculptures, and videos. Cousins’ works have been performed in New Zealand, Australia, and the United States.

Perhaps Cousins’ highest-profile piece has been Membrane, a seven-hour performance work, and succéss de scandal at the 1984 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Critical attention and acclaim have also been given to later work. Writing about the retrospective exhibition Eddie’s Wall, critic Ian Dando adjudged it “one of the most profound and exploratory works to have come from a New Zealand composer” (Canzona, 2005, p.29).

In 2005, he was awarded the CANZ Citation for Services to New Zealand Music.

Acousmatic music

Since the early 2000s Cousins has focused on acousmatic music for single-point listening, in a burst of creative output continuing past retirement to the present. For his acousmatic works Cousins has designed and installed a custom array of 26 speakers, dubbed ‘The Acousmonium’, for his Christchurch studio. A general precedent for such an approach was French composer François Bayle’s Acousmonium, designed in 1974 and used by Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

The performance of an acousmatic work begins with the audience (one person) being seated inside the Acousmonium at Cousins’ studio. With each loudspeaker simultaneously emitting a different, spatially-choreographed signal, the listener is engulfed in a rich and sensual sonic world. Cousins considers his Acousmonium a unique “instrument” and composes his works while sitting within it.

Despite their very specific technical requirements, Cousins’ acousmatic works are direct and affecting. Often autobiographical and with recognisable touchpoints, they explore memory and history, human relationships, connections with place, and bodily and sensory experiences. Many include speech and conversation, often featuring Cousins himself. Noises of the natural world, sounds of domestic life, spectacular aural experiences (such as fireworks), and unearthly sounds created through digital manipulation: all are woven into the fabric of these artworks. The effect can be powerful and somewhat mind-altering.

What’s in the Cousins Collection?

The John Cousins Collection contains both analogue and digital materials. The most immediately accessible part of the Collection is the series Digital Materials (Series-6726). This contains almost a terabyte of digital files reflecting some five decades of John Cousins’ work, across a range of artforms. Most of the Digital Materials series is accessible online.

The digital materials are organised into 16 subseries. A key subseries is Concert and Environmental Works (Series-6726-15), containing master files relating to Cousins’ concert, and environmental works from the period 1975 to 2020. It includes high-resolution audio, accompanying videos, technical specifications, programme booklets and stereo mixdowns made available to facilitate research into the works. Many of the works also come with multi-channel documentaries which provide further insights.

Explore the John Cousins Collection (ATL-Group-00514)

To get a sense of Cousins’ art, have a listen to the stereo version of Songs My Mother Taught Me (MSDL-4918) below. Named after the fourth of seven “Gypsy songs” by Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, this 2013 work was composed around the first anniversary of the death of Cousins’ mother, Doreen Cousins. It interposes interviews with a number of people discussing “the often intimate and personal scenarios within which [such] songs were first heard” (MSDL-4919) with excerpts of songs and musical pieces, laced through with unusual sonic extrapolations.

Songs My Mother Taught Me

Songs My Mother Taught Me (2013), stereo version. Ref: MSDL-4918. Alexander Turnbull Library.

The Source Audio (Series-6726-11) is another crucial subseries. This contains the “raw material” which Cousins draws upon to create his acousmatic works. Comprised of over 6000 audio files, the content ranges from field recordings of natural environments and sounding objects, conversations, and verbal descriptions, including these, transformed using digital audio effects such as filtering, modulation, pitch bending, and stretching.

To demonstrate these transformation processes, consider some examples used extensively in the work Sea Section (2006). The sounds below all relate to a 1996 field recording of an incoming tide gurgling into rock pools (see MSDL-5155).

First, here is the field recording:

Recording of a gurgling rock pool

Recording of a gurgling rock pool GURGLES.wav

Here are five transformations applied to excerpts from this raw recording, edited and then spliced into a single file:

Gurgle transformations combined

Transformations of field recording: GURG1_.wav; GURG1XRPT_proc.wav (at 16 secs); gurgles flt2_9.aif (at 29 secs); gurgles flt2_4_flt_1.aif (at 37 secs); and Gurgles flt2 etc vtsagAINvtrns.aif (at 41 secs).

Open access materials

The Digital Materials series also contains recordings of public talks and interviews, video documentation of performance artworks, and photographs of visual art. There are detailed work notes and video diaries covering many years, providing an intimate look at the artist’s working process, travels, and thoughts. The provision of this open-access material will, we hope, encourage further research and appreciation of John Cousins’ remarkable oeuvre.

The analogue portions of the Collection include early scores for conventional instruments, open-reel master tapes for electroacoustic works such as Sleep Exposure (1979, 1990), and folders of documentation relating to performance projects such as Membrane.

Creative Commons audio for download and reuse

In addition to being accessible online, many digital files in the Cousins Collection can be downloaded for reuse. This applies particularly to the Source Audio subseries. Any material without third-party rights involved can be downloaded and reused under a Creative Commons BY Licence. This licence allows for the creation of derivative works, as long as you give appropriate credit to John Cousins and observe any other requirements.

We hope that this vast reservoir of field recordings and digital transformations will be of interest to musicians, students, and others seeking sonic inspiration.

Field recording of Cathedral Square

Field recording of Cathedral Square, Christchurch, made in 2014. Ref. MSDL-5191.

Field recording of birds made on Bribie Island

Field recording of birds, made on Bribie Island, Queensland, Australia in 2014. Ref: MSDL-5104 Alexander Turnbull Library.

How to download the audio files

To download items, click through to the NDHA player from the finding aid description in Tiaki (often there will be an intermediate “landing page” with a list of files).

Once you have reached the NDHA, click on the download icon in the top-right of the webpage. Certain types of audio files — such as AIFF files — may download automatically.

Accessing the multichannel works

Please note that the multichannel works and documentaries in this collection cannot be downloaded. Due to their very specific technical requirements, any public performance of these works requires the approval of John Cousins.

To experience them in John Cousins’ Acousmonium, please contact him via his website.

Studio 174: The sonic art of John Cousins

Further reading and viewing

_ Read Tales from the Acousmonium — Part 2

• John Cousins website Studio-174 ⁠— Contains an introductory array of documents, audio and video, mostly replicated within the Turnbull collection. Several iterations of the website have been archived in the NLNZ web archive.

• SOUNZ website ⁠— Includes a listing of resources for the study of John Cousins’ work. These include seven documentaries produced by SOUNZ, including footage of the Acousmonium and Cousins discussing his working processes.

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This blog was co-written with Thomas Lambert, who worked as a digital archivist on the collection. Thanks also to the wider team who worked on this collection: Valerie Love, Flora Feltham, Zach Webber and Jay Gattuso.