Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Voices of the Rainforest: A Day in the Life of Bosavi Papua New Guinea

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 66; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/21567417.66.1.17

2156-7417

Ingrid Monson,

Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies

When Steven Feld began his fieldwork in 1976 among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea he was so struck by the continual sounds of the rainforest that he began recording them with his Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder and learning to understand the soundscape as the Bosavi do—as sounds marking the time of day, distance, changes in the weather, and the voices of departed ancestors. The creation of the film Voices of the Rainforest has a long history that requires some historical context. After publishing Sound and Sentiment in 1982, Feld returned to Papua New Guinea to record the rainforest (and the interaction of the Kaluli with it) after having sought advice on recording in tropical rainforests from the BBC and Australian broadcasting. From these new recordings he created a soundscape radio program for NPR called Voices in the Forest, which distilled a full day in the life of the Kaluli into a thirty-minute broadcast. Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead heard the broadcast in 1983 and began playing it during the band's concert intermissions. The friendship spawned between the scholar and musician led to Hart's sponsorship of a return trip to Papua New Guinea in 1990 so that Feld could record the rainforest and the Bosavi with new state-of-the-art portable Dolby Bryston SR noise reduction equipment with improved dynamic range. The resulting CD, Voices of the Rainforest, was released by Rykodisc in 1991 and enabled generations of ethnomusicology students to hear far more clearly what he meant by the “lift-up-over sounding” (dulugu ganalan) aesthetic of the Bosavi people. At that time, Feld also created the Bosavi People's Fund so that proceeds from the recording could be repatriated to Papua New Guinea to be used for educational and health initiatives. Feld already knew that both the rainforest and the culture of the Kaluli were endangered by oil extraction and the evangelical missionization that was teaching people to abandon their traditional culture.In 2018 Feld returned to Papua New Guinea with his longtime collaborator Bambi Schieffelin and videographer Jeremiah Ra Richards to create a film based on the original 1990 Voices of the Rainforest sound recording that recomposes the audio in 7.1 surround sound and adds photos, new audio recordings, drone shots, and video to take the viewer/listener deeper into the world of Bosavi. The resulting film was created in a process of dialogic editing with Bosavi residents, including children and grandchildren of Feld's original teachers from 1976. The film combines audio recordings made at several different heights and distances and video recordings made from several different vantage points. In “At the Creek,” featuring the revered Bosavi singer Ulahi Gonogo, Feld's creative editing is informed by what Ulahi considers the three essential experiential perspectives necessary for song composition: the perspective from above (birds moving through waterways and forests), the perspective from the ground (the land, water, and feet moving through the forest), and the perspective of the mind of the composer, who gets “a waterfall in her head.” Feld uses a split screen to highlight the contrasting perspectives and to show how Ulahi's song constructs a path of place.Fully experiencing Voices of the Rainforest requires a 7.1 surround sound playback setup, which is currently hard to access but should become more available as new formats such as Dolby Atmos and Apple's Spatial Audio emerge. Feld worked with Dennis Leonard from Skywalker Sound to remaster the audio within a 360-degree sound field. Just as the split-screen cinematography captures the multiple perspectives of Ulahi's song, the 7.1 surround sound palette adds depth and directionality to the sonic experience of the film.I had the great fortune to view Voices of the Rainforest in 7.1 format at Feld's presentation of it at the Harvard Art Museum in the fall of 2019. As the film opens with “From Inside Night to Morning Night to Real Morning,” the listener/viewer is engulfed on all sides by a rich cloud of sound that is utterly captivating. I was particularly overcome by the sensation that the sound descended from above and encircled me. It was as if I was suddenly under the canopy of the rainforest amid the rich natural sounds that pervade everyday life in Bosavi. As “Making Sago” opened, it suddenly became obvious that the music of the Kaluli could only have been created in rich call-and-response to this continual sonic accompaniment of animals, water, wind, and, through bird song, the voices of departed ancestors. The “lift-up-over sounding” aesthetic that I had studied in Feld's writings gained new visceral immediacy. As I watched in 2019, without the benefit of liner notes, the familiarity of the 1991 CD soundtrack anchored me as the newness of the photography, the drone cinematography of Jeremiah Ra Richards, and the original fieldwork photos from the 1970s added depth and visual memory. For ethnomusicologists trained with Steven Feld's writings, as most of us were, the sounds and images invoke memories not only of Sound and Sentiment but also of the classic Feld articles about the Kaluli, “‘Flow Like a Waterfall’” (1981), “Sound Structure as Social Structure” (1984), “Aesthetics as an Iconicity of Style” (1988), and “Waterfalls of Sound” (1996). In this way, the film synthesizes in sensory modalities Feld's career-defining work on the Kaluli, as well as that of his collaborators, Bambi Schieffelin and Edward Schieffelin. There are no voice-overs or academic explanations; instead, Voices of the Rainforest is simultaneously a sensory ode to the Bosavi people, a summary of Feld's extraordinary career in ethnomusicology, and a testament to what high-quality cinema and surround sound can offer our field. A sequel documentary, called New Voices of the Rainforest, based on interviews and collaboration with the current generation of Bosavi people, is planned for next year.Some viewers may find Voices of the Rainforest too nostalgic or too caught up in presenting a pristine image of a small forest-dwelling society. When Feld toured the film in advance of release, he did get questions about the portrait of the Bosavi as relatively isolated from the modern world and about whether he should have included the sounds of airplanes, guitars, and missionary hymns to reflect the incursion of missionization and oil extraction in Papua New Guinea. The Bosavi disagreed; they wanted the larger world to hear and see not what Westerners had brought but rather what their own culture had created. When Feld and Bambi Schieffelin returned in December 2019 and January 2020 to show the film to the Bosavi, they responded with exuberance and joy at seeing their culture portrayed and with sadness from seeing photographs of people who were no longer living. As Feld and Schieffelin have noted, the most important thing about showing the film in Bosavi was not the content but the social relations it ratified. They made good on their promise to make a film and return it to the source. Voices of the Rainforest demonstrates a forty-year commitment to the Bosavi people and, through the Bosavi People's Fund (to which all proceeds of the film are dedicated), a commitment to their future.