Natasha Barrett: Toxic Colour
Navel-Gazers #68 is an interview with Natasha Barrett who is going to talk to us about Toxic Colour. I’ve got my best headphones on for this one - after reading that its source sounds were recorded on 3D ambisonic microphones, I knew it needed an especially careful listen and only a few minutes in, as the breadth and subtlety of the compositions has begun to unfold, it’s certainly got my undivided attention. There’s a narrative flow to ‘Toxic Colour’, or something like one. Each piece resembles a sequence of aural events whose correlation to reality might be discernible only through some sort of cognitive reverse-engineering. Perhaps it’s analogous to our external reality itself, in terms of correlation to nature…. I’m imagining, given the extent of processing and treatment undertaken here - and in Natasha’s framing of these works as stories “…of human-made dystopias” - that she’s not looking to convey something strictly realistic, let alone natural, with this music. Yet for me, those moments which do hearken to everyday reality are what punctuate the narrative at each step along the way, holding it all together. It’s a sound-language I recognise from Natasha’s previous work… maybe using this - her latest album - for reference, we too can become fluent!
AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! Firstly could you briefly tell us about your background? I’m looking at a bio which describes your career trajectory from Norwich to Norway - how would you describe it?
Natasha Barrett: My background and career trajectory are really two different things. There’s no professional music in my family, which often makes me the odd one out compared to my friends and colleagues, but my parents were supportive.
I always wanted to work with music in some form. I originally wanted to be a classical guitar performer, as that was my main instrument. I suppose it was a natural idea before I discovered alternatives. When it was time to choose a university, I think I was lucky. My school education followed the A-level system, and in the exams I earned top marks in maths and economics, but I failed music and fine art! Nevertheless, I was still offered a place at my university of choice: City University in London. This was in 1990.
It was a cool course - a BSc, in fact, rather than a BA in music. It came at a time of crossover into digital technology, so we studied digital audio, acoustics, the science of sound, sound recording... but also orchestration, harmony and counterpoint, music history from the medieval period to the modern day, ethnomusicology, and improvisation. It was a great deal to take in, and perhaps much of it went over my head at the time. Only later did I realise that it had both naturally and completely changed my perception of what music was about.
At that time, City University also had an agreement with the Guildhall School of Music for instrumental lessons. That’s where the bomb dropped: I realised I simply wasn’t going to be good enough as a classical guitarist, no matter how many hours I practised. In a way, it no longer mattered because I was becoming bored with the repertoire and had discovered other aspects of music that I found more exciting. I wanted to compose. And for me, composition was about sound, not just notes on a page, and more than what acoustic instruments alone could produce.
AC: So how’d you end up in Norway?
Natasha Barrett: I progressed directly from my Bachelor's degree to a Master's degree in 1994, and then to a PhD. The fast track into the PhD was a necessity after winning an Arts Council grant to help cover costs. When I completed the PhD in 1998, there were few job opportunities in the UK, and post-doctoral research in the arts didn’t exist. The only real option was a junior lectureship, which would have left little time for composing.
Looking sideways, I happened upon a grant program between Norway and the UK and was awarded a one-year post-doctoral research position. It wasn’t like the post-docs you find now: it was just enough money to live on, but I was free to pursue whatever I wanted. I was based at Notam, which at the time was the Norwegian Network for Technology and Music and part of Oslo University. I didn’t know much about Norway, except that it was next to Sweden, which has a rich history of electroacoustic music. Around 2002, the climate in the UK changed. There was a massive cash injection, and humanities research finally became viable. I was tempted to return home, but I felt a kind of inertia.
AC: I know that feeling!
‘Toxic Colour’ - at the time of this discussion - is your latest album. Where and how did this project originate? Did you have the whole idea and then get to work, or did it develop incrementally?
Natasha Barrett: For the past few years, I’ve been developing artistic concepts based on the idea of “tipping points.” These are often discussed today in relation to climate and ecosystems, but they can also be considered in the context of social, cultural, and political systems. As humans, we have a complex personal relationship with these global ideas. The pieces on Toxic Colour zoom in on this project.
Toxic Colour - the piece - is about how some things can appear superficially beautiful, interesting, or intriguing, even though the original has been damaged or destroyed. Glass Eye also deals with a kind of destruction, but in this case, it’s about surveillance and control. Venice 3 offers a perspective on Venice as a sinking city, while also drawing inspiration from the ideas of the great artists and writers of history.
The Swifts Of Pesaro was a break from these somewhat dystopian themes. I just needed something beautiful - maybe easier and simpler, both for listener and for me the composer. It’s the outlier, but I felt the collection needed contrast. Of course, everyone listens differently, and it’s interesting that you mentioned it has a different impact on you. That’s part of the personal narrative each listener creates through music, though I can try to steer that narrative using certain sounds I know people will most likely recognise.
AC: Yeah who knows? Perhaps I was contextualising that piece with everything else I was hearing.
Natasha Barrett: Right.
‘Swifts Of Pesaro’ and also Ghosts Of The Children both came about in the same period, but ’Ghosts Of The Children’ took forever to make. You could think of this piece as moving on from ‘Swifts Of Pesaro’ and trying to find some beauty in remembrance, in melancholy.
Natasha Barrett: The order of the pieces create a listening journey through the whole album, ending with the latest and most violent piece 'Toxic Colour'. ‘Swifts Of Pesaro’ created a break from the other pieces which are quite intense.
AC: This is a highly immersive, hyper-spatialised sound world. What are you primarily using to achieve that? For those of us without much technical knowledge (including myself here), what’s a 3D ambisonic microphone, and where are we hearing these microphones at work, versus the composition - the layering, panning etc.?
Natasha Barrett: I’m approaching each piece in a different way, but all the works on this album have one thing in common: all the sounds are recorded using what we call higher-order 3D ambisonic microphones. This type of microphone captures spatial information in 360 degrees at high spatial resolution. In other words, it provides a clear angular location of the sound sources that make up the complete environment.
That changes things, because what I bring home is a 360-degree sound recording with excellent directional information. It closely resembles our own spatial hearing, without the angular “blur” you get from first-order ambisonic microphones, like the Røde NT-SF1. This means I can analyse the spatial sound field and extract spatial data that represents the direction of each source in the soundscape, all happening simultaneously. Simply put, I decompose the sound field into its component sources and log the spatial location of each one. The result is several mono audio tracks, each with spatial data describing where the sound is in space and how it moves.
AC: Are you able to visualise that?
Natasha Barrett: You can visualise it, but I don’t normally bother, because visual information can be misleading. There can be a disconnect between what you see and what you're actually hearing.
Natasha Barrett: What’s exciting is that, from these high-resolution spatial recordings, I can isolate and track the spatial behavior of a sound. The spatial data is useful because it can be used to control sound processing and spatialization - both of the original sound and of other, unrelated sounds. For example, I can track the movement of a bird and then use that spatial data to make another sound behave spatially like the bird. Apply this to the full sound field, and you can essentially transfer the spatial “fingerprint” of a real scene onto a fictional one.
AC: Oh wow.
Natasha Barrett: Venice 3 is a good example. In the beginning, you hear real sounds from Venice, but there’s a twist: I extract, enhance, and create a kind of hyper-real soundscape. There are also other sounds in the piece that aren’t from the original recordings, but they behave like the original sounds.
AC: Right, so I know on the Venice piece, for example there are some… doors opening and shutting, shuffling and things like that. Are you saying that you can take the trajectory of the bird from another recording and sort of “chuck” the door-closing into that, and have it fly by like the bird?
Natasha Barrett: Exactly.
AC: Wow, I’m astonished that’s possible. Or, I never thought about it before.
The only exception is again The Swifts of Pesaro. When I made the source recordings for that piece, I happened to have a lower-order ambisonic microphone with me - the Soundfield SPS200 - which isn’t spatially accurate enough for this process. So the piece took a different direction, and that’s one of the reasons it ended up more ambient.
AC: ‘Glass Eye’ caught my ear as an especially riveting piece. I wonder if we could pick apart some of the sounds on this one.
First of all there are a lot of voices, whose voices are they? …then partway into the track, it sounds like there are people playing… basketball? You tell me. Then at 5:30, there’s a crowd chanting “shame on you”, I’m curious what that is?
Natasha Barrett: I could start by maybe talking about the sound sources.
There are two source recordings used in this piece. One is the sound of a protest that took place in Oslo. Recording something like a protest can capture the energy of the people, but I don’t want listeners to hear specific words. As soon as you start hearing what the crowd is chanting, you anchor the piece to a specific time and place. The only words I allow to be clearly heard are “shame on you”, which is a phrase used so often it loses connection to a specific context. The other recording is of some boys kicking a ball around in the backstreets of Paris.
So why these two recordings? Well, since Glass Eye is about surveillance, I thought the juxtaposition of these two sounds was interesting. You can just about recognise the ball, but it’s clearly distinct from the crowd.
There’s a sense of play and lightness. By putting these things together, I’m probing the world of surveillance. Does it mean you can’t even play football in the street anymore, just in case you’re identified as doing something suspicious? It’s about questioning where we draw the line and what is allowed. That football recording eventually becomes so lightweight that it borders on meaningless. Then I take the crowd sounds and morph them into the football sounds, underscoring the idea that in a surveillance state, even protest becomes meaningless.
The piece is maybe asking questions, and hopefully the listener finds their own path through it.
AC: The “shame on you”, what is the strange treatment of that material later in the piece? It’s sent through some sort of filter which is not quite like anything I’ve ever heard before.
Natasha Barrett: It’s a resonant filter, but the trick lies in the frequencies you choose. When I analyse sound materials, I’m not just looking at spatial information - I also look at frequency cues. In the sound’s spectrum, I identify what we call the spectral centroid, or the spectral centre of gravity.
Sometimes, when you hear a sound in isolation, it doesn’t seem to have a pitch. But if you contrast it with something noisier, it can instead sound pitched. What you’re picking up on is often the spectral centroid that fluctuates as the sound evolves. This frequency can then be used to control the tuning of a feedback filter, which resonates with the original sound. That enhances its inherent centroid and makes it sound strikingly pitched. I use the same technique for all of the resonances in The Swifts of Pesaro as well.
AC: I notice how the dystopian framing of this album’s title/s and in the short description shifts some of my assumptions about source sounds I’m hearing.
For example on ‘Impossible Moments…” and on the title track, there are sounds I’d ordinarily assume are water but here, I visualise a toxic fluid.
Natasha Barrett: Yeah there’s a lot of water in ‘Impossible Moments’, after all there’s a lot of water in Venice. It’s funny you say you visualise a toxic fluid, because some of the canals are really polluted.
AC: Oh so maybe I was actually hearing a toxic fluid!
Natasha Barrett: Right, it’s the context.
AC: Yes and then the birds on ‘The Swifts of Pesaro’, they initially sound almost sickly to me - I can’t discern whether it’s context or framing which has caused me to think that, or subtle processing? Notably by the end, they’re heavily processed, like some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy!
Natasha Barrett: Again, because of the context, you hear the birds differently than you would if they were isolated. I wonder if it’s because they’re contrasted with the other sounds on the album, which are quite noisy. You know, if I inserted a Debussy piece into the middle of the album, it might end up sounding kind of sickly too.
AC: “Lethargic” is maybe the word.
Natasha Barrett: I can relate more to that. The recordings were made late in the evening in Pesaro (Italy), in warm and lazy evenings, inside an atrium where the acoustics colour the sounds.
AC: From your perspective, are you using specific techniques to illustrate the album’s themes? So you’ve got this dystopian theme on ‘Toxic Colour’ on all the pieces, with the way that you work, do you say: I’m going to do some dystopian stuff now, so I’ll use these techniques?
Natasha Barrett: Not at all. The techniques I use aren’t determined by the theme—they’re tools to arrive at the theme. I have a huge library of techniques I’ve built up over the years, and I’m constantly experimenting and combining them until I find a musical direction. I think if you try to use specific techniques to express a fixed theme, you risk creating clichés. At some point I arrive closer musically to what I have in my mind.
AC: Right, so you’ve got a whole lexicon of techniques piling up over years and years. Then you’ve got some themes you want to explore…
Natasha Barrett: Exactly. Then I experiment and see where it takes me. It’s a feedback process of testing, improvising, and refining, until I find materials and structures that resonate musically. That was very much the case with Toxic Colour (the piece). I had no idea it would start the way it does. I explored a local building site with some microphones, and when I got home, I started analysing the recordings using the techniques I’ve described.
I didn’t want to represent the building site literally, but I wanted to capture its energy and essence. I ended up using a massive additive synthesis process, spatialised in 360-degree ambisonics. From that, new sounds began to emerge, and then I actively pushed them in a particular direction.
AC: I saw a performance of yours at Iklectik in London a couple of years ago. It was essentially an acousmatic listening experience although you were there, up to something behind a desk, projecting an existing piece through a multi-channel speaker array. It was incredible! I listened to ‘Toxic Colour’ through headphones - how is it designed to be heard? With these kinds of fixed media productions, do you tend to forego conventional instrumental performance elements?
Natasha Barrett: My pieces are meant to be heard in concert. I’m always thinking about how they’ll sound over a large multichannel loudspeaker system. Producing these highly spatial works in stereo is often tricky and there are many compromises. All the albums I’ve released recently are in stereo, which works for both loudspeakers and headphones, but I also have binaural masters made specifically for headphone listening. I can’t release those easily though, because for technical reasons they don’t sound right when played over loudspeakers. Since I can’t control how people listen, standard stereo is safer for public release. But for me, concert presentation is absolutely the best listening experience.
AC: And have you done that for these pieces yet?
Natasha Barrett: Yes, they’ve all been performed quite a few times. Venice 3 was the first piece I finished, and it’s been played in many countries over large loudspeaker arrays. For the Oslo release concert, I performed the entire album using a 24-loudspeaker array. Setting up the decoding system is the most time-consuming part, but during the concert, I’m doing much more than just pressing play. I’m constantly working with the dynamic range and EQ to bring out the best in each piece, tailoring the sound to the particular loudspeaker array and room acoustics. The audience itself makes a big acoustic difference too—and that can’t really be predicted in advance.
Natasha Barrett: Yes, exactly.
AC: So you still think of it as a piece of fixed media, but you’ve got to get it sounding optimally in the room.
Natasha Barrett: Yes, it’s fixed media in the sense that I’m not adding or removing materials from the piece. But in reality, I don’t think anything is truly “fixed” in a concert situation, because you still have to perform the piece in a way that suits the space, equipment, audience, and moment.
AC: You’re making me wonder… so are you always trying to get it to sound the same in all the different spaces?
Natasha Barrett: No. I’m trying to make the most of each space, because every one has its own acoustic character. If it’s a large, reverberant hall, I’ll play the piece differently than I would in a smaller, drier space like Iklectik.
AC: So if you take any of these five pieces for example, is there a time when you’ve performed it - or even just played it back for yourself - that was the optimal time, which sounded the way you most wanted the piece to sound?
Natasha Barrett: No.
AC: Do you not think of it that way?
AC: So that must have been pretty thrilling for you then to work on a piece like ‘Toxic Colour’, first hearing it in the studio, but then it’s only later - after you’ve finished it - that you hear it in the space where it was meant to be heard.
Natasha Barrett: Yes indeed!
AC: What are you up to next? Any current or upcoming projects you’d like to mention?
Natasha Barrett: I’ve got three projects on the go at the moment.
The most immediate is an outdoor sound installation called Talking Trees: A Nature-Responsive Grove. There’s a computer hanging in the trees with a motion sensor, and when the wind blows, it affects how the sound is transformed and mixed, played back over four loudspeakers also in the trees. This work is part of the Momentum Biennale in Moss, which is about 30 mins east of Oslo. It needs to survive outdoors in all weather from 13th June to the 14th October this year.
Then I have a commission for the Mixtur Festival in Barcelona this October. That’s going to be an acousmatic piece. After working with the installation, I’m excited to return to a purely acousmatic format again.
The biggest and longest project is Lie Detector. It’s a multimedia work with 3D sound, lasers, video, and theatrical elements. Lie Detector is an entity that explores how everyday technology maps, manipulates, and commodifies our senses and thoughts. The manipulative power of the information feed means that the search for truth is not only difficult—it can expose a reality we’d rather ignore. Part of the piece deals with how the idea of “suspension of disbelief,” usually a device for enjoying fiction, has become part of our everyday experience.
I’ll present a concert version at ZKM in September, then in Norway in October. Next year I’ll develop an installation version, and hopefully also a full-length theatre version.
AC: I like to hear how ambitious these projects are. It sounds like you have your hands full!
Thanks for talking to me.
Natasha Barrett: Thank you.
Images
All images by Natasha Barrett/uncredited except where indicated.
0) 'Toxic Colour' cover image (Matthew Young / Louise Mason).
1) Photo by Jan Erik Breimo.
3) Photo by Philippe Barbosa.
9) Photo by Gundrun Semons.
