Susie Dureau’s Soundscape series translates the sounds of the landscape into vibrant visual celebrations of the earth and its creatures. Each piece is constructed with several digital layers of spectrographs – scientific graphs that convert recorded sound data into visual maps indicating frequency. The recordings have been made in and around the Sydney coastline.

In this piece, Australian Raven, NSW, the sound of a raven calling is recorded and layered over other landscape sounds. The vertical striations across the artwork evidence the range of frequencies in the drawn-out wail. The Australian raven was called wugan by the local Eora and Darug inhabitants of the Sydney Basin. It has also been called the Southern Crow and the Kelly (after Ned).

The Soundscapes are composed via digital collage, layering spectrogram data from different days across the year to form compositions that encapsulate cycles of time and events in the coastal landscape. Neither abstract nor representational, the sound forms act as landscape motifs in the compositions. A landscape narrative emerges in each composition, partly by chance, partly due to aesthetic choices that reference painting conventions such as atmospheric perspective, horizon line and colour fields.

Susie Dureau was awarded a Creativity Grant by the Northern Beaches Council in 2022 for the development of these Soundscape artworks.

Photos: Kayapa Creative Studio @kayapacs