Wyoming’s Creative Economy and Innovation with Audio Engineer John Wilhelm

00:00:03

             

Welcome to Winds of Change. I’m your host, Emy DiGrappa. Winds of change is brought to you by Wyoming Humanities Council. In this podcast, we focus on the history, people and places of Wyoming. And today, my special guest is John Wilhelm.         

00:00:20

             

John Wilhelm is a sound artist, musician, audio engineer, and sound designer from Laramie, Wyoming. John is a winner of the 2024 Wyoming Innovation Partnership ArtsWork investing in Wyoming’s creative economies. John is the founder of the Audio Library of the West, an online library of western field sound recordings and a hub for audio-based art. Welcome, John. Hi.         

00:00:50

             

Thank you. That was a mouthful, but I’m so excited to talk to you because not just about the award you received for your work as a creative artist, but also really learning about your journey and how music, becoming a sound engineer became your passion, or an audio engineer is what you called it. Yeah, I think those terms are interchangeable. But what seems like a very obvious through line to me, that is probably not that clear from the outside. That’s true.         

00:01:23

             

But when you talk about audio engineering, what exactly does that mean? At the simplest state, audio engineer is anyone who deals with processing sound. I think we have this somewhat pejorative term of sound guy, which often describes someone standing at the back of a theater adjusting the level of microphones. That is a thing that I do. We can also imagine the people who are editing this podcast as sound engineers or the people who record and produce albums and songs you listen to on the radio, those are also sound engineers.         

00:02:02

             

My work specifically has its roots in theatrical sound design. So creating sound cues and soundscapes for live stage theater and as a musician. So the thing I’ve done the longest consistently, creatively in my life is play the guitar. That started, I think I received a guitar for my 13th birthday. That was over 20 years ago now.         

00:02:27

             

And that has been the constant through line for me is trying, you know, the mastery of trying to play that instrument. So are you an acoustic or electric? I do both of those pretty consistently. In college, I went to college to study music, which is a formal classical training. So I played nylon string classical guitar.         

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You read off of sheet music, you do scale exercises. And then I also played in both large and small group jazz ensembles there, which that’s almost always electric guitar, but still very, you know, very traditional. Didn’t really have a ton of influences past the 1970s that were taught or expressed there. So after college, I put acoustic instruments largely away and played in rock and roll bands and was really interested in the. The noisier and the more avant garde end of what would be still considered rock and roll.         

00:03:36

             

Bands like Sonic Youth were my heroes when I was younger and still are today. People with really broad tonal palettes are what I kind of tend to gravitate towards. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And then recently in the last two or three years, I’ve kind of circled back towards being much more interested in acoustic based music.         

00:04:00

             

When I was just starting out as a musician, there were some small regional bluegrass festivals in Wyoming. Douglas, Wyoming hosted one every summer. That’s the first one I can think of. And that was some of my first experience of a lot of people playing live music with each other. And that’s an extremely traditional art form that has a lot of kind of rigid rules about what you’re expected to do.         

00:04:28

             

I’ve recently also started playing classical guitar ensembles again. Two years ago, I helped found a classical guitar quartet that works out of Laramie. We’re called the Garrett Quartet, and we play 90% nylon string classical instruments in our performances. So a quartet, there’s four guitarists that work and play together? Yes, that’s correct.         

00:04:53

             

It’s myself, Leland Wallace, Aaron Asher, and then our former teacher. We were all former students of a man named Kevin S. Hart, not to be confused with the stand up comedian who taught all of us when we were in college. He’s now retired and coincidentally the four of us all work out of office space on the third floor of the Laramie Plains Civic center here in Laramie. And we have started playing that nylon string classical ensemble music together.         

00:05:29

             

So it’s chamber music for guitar. Well, I have to give you a shout out when I launch your podcast. Your idea that you won the Creative Economy Startup challenge for the online library of western field sound recordings. What exactly does that mean? How do you describe that?         

00:05:53

             

Sure, I think the first place to start is to talk about what field recording is. Which is any audio recording that is made outside of a traditional studio typically entails using mobile equipment. The equipment I use is all battery powered recorders. Some of them are quite small and I go either out into the natural world or around man made structure to record audio that I find interesting. Originally, this was a tool.         

00:06:26

             

As I mentioned, I have a long standing working relationship with in live theater. This was a tool to create sound cues for theater. So if you need. If the script for a play calls for a loud car door slam to happen offstage, one way you can reproduce that in the theater is to record the action in real life, edit it and replay it through speakers in the theater. So that’s a process that I Started doing through there and then discovered that there’s an entire world of people who treat this not just as a means to an end for a different creative pursuit, but also as an art form in and of itself that really should deserve its own attention.         

00:07:11

             

And that’s what I try to do at what’s. What I want to do with the audio library of the west is create a space that allows people to really listen to the world around them and examine, just through our ears, how our environment can shape and change us. That’s so interesting. But how do you make it about the West, Quote, unquote? Well, let me.         

00:07:36

             

Let me explain that this way. So these libraries for recordings, many of them exist and they’re largely geared towards content creators, people who work in film, people who work in digital video media, that kind of stuff. And they are generally interested in having the widest breadth of content available. So you want sounds from all over the world and every possible permutation of rain falling. Let’s say you want to be as extensive as possible.         

00:08:08

             

But those projects aren’t really. Those projects are interesting commercially. They’re commercially viable to a certain degree, but they aren’t interesting as a demonstration of place, demonstration of geographic space and identity, because that’s not their goal. But I’m deeply interested in that question. What makes a particular part of the country, particular part of geography, unique to itself?         

00:08:39

             

And truth be told, setting parameters for what constitutes the west in this project is an ever moving target for me. You know, I don’t have a strong geographic definition of what the west is, because I think the thing that is the most interesting about the way we mythologize this part of the country is the fact that its notion of what it constitutes is ever changing. Frontier has a certain limit geographically. You eventually run into the Pacific Ocean. But in our collective imagination as a country, as citizens of a country, that’s almost immaterial to these much more deeply held notions of abstract things like freedom and possibility.         

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And I think there is so much interesting little gritty nuance to tease out of that question that I’m pretty open to imagining the west in a whole different, you know, in a multitude of different contexts. If you were to walk up to someone on the street, let’s say, and just ask them, if you were to think of one sound that identifies our Western culture, what would that sound be? If you heard that sound, you would. You would say, that’s Western. That’s.         

00:10:20

             

That’s Wyoming. That’s what I deeply want to say is the wind. I was Thinking that too. In. In media, we have a lot of auditory shorthands to explain a place you can think of, like famous needle drops for.         

00:10:39

             

For time and place. Wyoming Humanities Council will always sound like Americans fighting in Vietnam because it has been used so many times in that exact context. You know, the most cliche, I think shorthand for the American west is spurs, you know, is jangling. Spurs is that whole scene of swinging saloon doors, walk, jangle spur, jangle spur, jangle spur. And then maybe to a lesser degree, like the tack key piano, you know, to me, absolutely the sonic imprint of Wyoming is wind unencumbered by anything else in terrain.         

00:11:22

             

That is what would be the. The most present distinction. It’s the thing that when it’s gone, when it’s missing is so quickly apparent, I think to most people. Right. I do too.         

00:11:36

             

Or in the. In the autumn, the wind and the leaves are making a lot of noise.         

00:11:43

             

I think that, you know, this conversation like that we’re having right now is, I think, what I hope this library allows people to think about, to really examine deeply what our own personal environments sound like. There’s a rich tradition in this kind of artwork that’s tied to environmental and ecological activism. Lots of projects trying to preserve, quote, unquote, natural habitats, preserve their sonic characteristics. I think this kind of conversation is sort of why I’m so deeply interested in this question. Another part of your project, of course, is not just collecting.         

00:12:29

             

And maybe there’s no. I mean, I can see there’s a beginning, you know, but like you were saying, there’s really no end, because it’s just up to your creative imagination and how you’ll go out into the field to collect these sound recordings. How will you distribute it? How will people will become a place where, you know, you have, like, a membership, and so then people pay a membership to collect, download, or use any of the things that you’ve collected. What.         

00:13:03

             

How does that work? Yeah, that is the experiment I’m endeavoring on. My absolute dream is that it could really be treated like a library. We would have the same relationship that you would have with your public library. The Internet as a place of commerce has taken a different trajectory than the notion of the public library.         

00:13:25

             

There are obvious exceptions, right? But like, by and large, if you’re trying to make money to sustain a project, you. You sell digital goods. So Audio Library of the west Dot com, for example, might look a lot more like, say, a music. Music retail platform similar to, say, Bandcamp, which is largely utilized by independent musicians, than as a clearinghouse for, you know, just come and kind of take anything you would like.         

00:14:01

             

But that actual interface will have some materials that people can listen to. So sort of like a streaming space and then a portal to purchase the high quality digital download. If you choose to either keep it for your own enjoyment or more likely want to license that and use those sounds in your own endeavors. Say if it’s someone like myself who is making theater, someone who is looking for audio for commercial video, that kind of stuff. So going from that to your field sound recordings, what is audio based art?         

00:14:41

             

So you. Do you consider these field sound recordings as audio based art? Are they one in the same? Yeah, I mean, that question of what is art? Beguiles people all the time, right?         

00:14:53

             

Yep. Yeah, I. I am kind of of the belief that the thing that makes something a piece of artwork is the intention that an artist imbues into it. So I could say exhibit a recording that I have made in a manner that it would constitute as art. The work I prefer to do isn’t quite as simple as exhibiting existing recordings.         

00:15:27

             

I tend to think of the field recordings as the raw materials. Field recordings are sort of like the paint still in the tube for a painter. Those are the raw materials. It’s the unformed clay of what a piece of sound art would be, which you then change, manipulate, juxtapose multiple sounds together and display them for public. Display them for the public for public consumption.         

00:15:56

             

That I think, to me is what I mean when I talk about. When I talk about sound art. Okay, that makes a lot of sense now, and I couldn’t agree more. I love the way you described it that what you’re going to collect as out in the field as this collection of different sounds, it’s what people take and do with the sound that creates the piece of art that they’re going to use it for in. In whatever way.         

00:16:23

             

Yeah, absolutely. Like this American Life or different podcasts that I’ve listened to, they do that exact. They take the noise on the street or whatever they’re talking about or talking to. They put you in the place where they’re talking to that person. And I think that’s so cool.         

00:16:47

             

Absolutely. You know, that’s. That’s a term, you know, that’s a tremendously prescient example of, you know, sound design that I, I think, can feel so transparent to the average, to the average listener. You know, at any point you mentioned this, this American Life, a fantastic example, a show that has really immaculate levels of production. There’s so much attention paid to every moment of every episode of that program.         

00:17:21

             

I think often in the service that that all kind of melts away into the background and you’re paying attention to a story. That’s their real goal. You know, the art and the craft in sound design, I think is often designed to feel kind of seamless to its, to its end users, to its end audience. Right. It’s the, it’s because what they’re doing is they’re creating the experience that you’re having this experience as you’re listening, like they’re, they’re bringing you in to someone’s life.         

00:17:58

             

And that’s such a great way to think about sound design is how it is taking you from where you are into a place or a situation or an experience that someone else is having. Yeah, I mean, that’s the goal. I think that’s the goal. We’re all kind of, I say we like creative people, artists in general are attempting to do is to create a little more space where we give people permission to just exist one thing at a time. With maybe just that piece of artwork at least that’s been a kind of recurring thought in, in my creative practice.         

00:18:53

             

I think it’s so amazing. I’m, I’m so happy that you, well, that you’re really experimenting with it and you have an open mind about, you know, what. And, and that’s part of, you know, being a creative is that you’re always creating, you’re always thinking about how, how can you make it better, what is it, what is it going to, what is that final product going to look like? And such a, such a great thing that you’ve, that you’re developing. I’m really excited to talk to you, John.         

00:19:26

             

I want to know, how can people find out more about you? How can they find out more about your library? When will you basically do the launch? Let people know it’s live, it’s out there, you know, whatever. What’s the next steps?         

00:19:42

             

The library launch will be in the fall of this year. So that’s quite a few months away. This award that I received from this, participating in this competition runs on a one year cycle. And it started at the beginning of what would be quarter four of 2024. So somewhere in the vicinity of October, that project, that funding will be wrapping up.         

00:20:15

             

It is my goal to have presentable in an online database, the Audio Library of the West. Around that time. It could be in beta; it could be a very minimal version. But the idea is that this is a long running project that will be added to gradually and gradually and gradually over time. My immediate next steps are amassing some portable recording equipment and sending it around to people in the state or around the greater American west and let those folks record things that pique their interest or excite them.         

00:20:58

             

I’ll be launching a few initial collections that I think can really hone in what our mission is going to be. The largest amount of work I have currently cataloged in this project is actually Sounds of the Union Pacific Railroad because I participated in a huge collaborative moving public art project called High Iron, which is going to be based in Laramie through this spring. And then we’ll be moving to Rollins in the fall. It’s a monument to the history of labor of the transcontinental railroad and the people who built the railroad. And that’s a multi year project that’s moving to many places along the UP mainline in Wyoming.         

00:21:48

             

That’s a very cool project that I am just a tiny participant of, but that project should get shouted out right now. High Iron, I believe their website’s highiron.org they do a really cool thing. So I’m planning to build together some of these collections. We want to have perhaps sounds of labor or sounds of work. Sounds related to energy and then perhaps sounds related to emptiness, sounds related to moving.         

00:22:22

             

These are very intentionally broad categories that I hope could be a little more thought provoking to people. A thing I didn’t. A thing I wanted from the very beginning was not to just put together a collection of 50 recordings of bison. Tell you, this is my great big bison library. Someone wants that.         

00:22:46

             

Someone needs that. There’s certainly. Those things can certainly exist in our program. But I want the process of using this library to be a little more explorative for people than so simply cut and dry. That’s excellent.         

00:23:05

             

I think those are important too, because it is the West. We have the largest migration of animals in the lower 48. So Wyoming is very well known for their wildlife. And it’s super, I don’t know, beautiful and interesting and just magical. When you can hear a pack of wolves howling, it’s like, whoa.         

00:23:32

             

Yeah, that might be another. Another top contender for that. Your earlier question about what’s a singular sound signature? Right. That’s another top.         

00:23:46

             

Yeah. Coyote howling. Wolves howling. Cowboys walking across the saloon hall. If your spur is still on, those are probably.         

00:23:58

             

Yeah, there’s some unusual ones that I discovered in my own life. We had a little fox den in a cabin next to ours. And if you’ve ever heard they kind of like bark. Yeah, foxes make crazy sounds yeah. What is that?         

00:24:21

             

So, anyway, John, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you. Do you have any social media channels you want to share with people right now? Yeah. So, you can come find Audio Library of the west on Instagram, that’s currently our social media outlet, and future news about the project will appear there. Thank you so much for your time.         

00:24:51

Absolutely. Thank you.         

00:24:58

Thank you for listening. I’m executive producer Emmy De Grappa. Winds of Change is brought to you by Wyoming Humanities Council, our co-hosts, and all the people who generously share their stories and their time. For more information, go to thinkwy.org subscribe and never miss a show.