Name: Ben Richter
Occupation: Composer, accordionist, director at Ghost Ensemble
Nationality: American
Current Release: Ben Richter's upcoming full-length album Aurogeny is out December 22nd 2023.
Recommendations on the topic of sound:
Books: Pauline Oliveros — Sounding the Margins, Software for People; Éliane Radigue — Intermediary Spaces; Ernest Rossi — Creating Consciousness; James Tenney — From Scratch; Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words (Bianchi & Manzo, eds.); David Rothenberg’s various writings on interspecies music
Glorious permanent browser tabs: mynoise.net; plainsound.org; casparjohanneswalter.de/research/chord_player;
Other sources of sonic education: improvising with strangers, playing with children and animals, just wandering around and listening to the world

If you enjoyed this Ben Richter interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram.



When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

When I listen to music, my body receives vibrations! I love to be reminded that the whole body listens, though the ear is particularly sensitive to sound.

Depending on the situation, I like to listen in different modes, but I definitely like to close my eyes to reduce the input from other senses. I don’t know of any particular visuals that recur when doing so, except in the hypnagogic state, the beginnings of sleep, when I often conflate senses as well as musical and interpersonal interactions — musical voices become people, or vice versa, and interact with one another.

It’s fascinating to experience harmony, melody, and personal relationships this way, but it’s hard to remember what happens ...

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

The wail of the loon is one of the saddest sounds in the world. The mourning dove reminds me of my childhood backyard and bedroom where I often heard it. The purring of a tiger or lion is one of the most hair-raising combinations of power and gentleness. Those animal melodies are also uncannily similar to, but unique and distinct from, the sounds humans might make in moments of intense emotion, which I think makes them so compelling. A lot of my favorite music, especially klezmer, treats melody this way.

In terms of less obviously melodic sounds, the enveloping drama of a thunderstorm — I can stop what I’m doing and sit in the doorway for an hour. All of these help bring me into full experience of the present moment, the way the best music does. All very animal and reaching some ancient subconscious core, perhaps.

Then there are the more obvious emotional responses because they more directly carry human meaning — the voices of loved ones, certain harmonic progressions, etc.

There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

Gladly: Environmental sounds like wind, rain, crackling fire; gentle drones whether static or slowly moving / changing. If I’m at home working on a project, I’ll often put on some combination of recorded environmental sounds and a droning overtone chord for hours.

But when I’m somewhere human sounds are minimal — like now that I live in this little studio in the forest, where I recorded "Portent of Laramidia" this past summer — I just like to be outdoors or open all the windows and hear the trees sway in the wind. To be surrounded by the nonhuman world here feels calming and centering, most of the time; the occasional midnight jamboree of the foxes and barred owls will keep me awake.

Irritating: I want to be a good Deep Listener and receive the entire universe of fluctuating sounds in all its infinite beauty without judgment. But as I am only human, I admit that some things get to me: incessant repetitive clicking such as loud clocks; multiple people talking over one another at the same time; or — having lived in cities for a long time until I moved here to the woods — the thumping subwoofer bass lines of distant neighbors partying at 3 or 4 or 5am when I’m trying to sleep.

Are there everyday places, spaces, or devices which intrigue you by the way they sound? Which are these?

Sinks — the different acoustics they can have for water-running and dish-clinking sounds. Roadways — the many drones of the various cars and trucks. The different aircraft that fly overhead here. Swishing leaves in the autumn forest.

The surprising acoustics of certain spaces, especially when you stand somewhere and you suddenly hear something that feels close but is reflected from far away.

Do music and sound feel “material” to you? Does working with sound feel like you're sculpting or shaping something?

Yes, absolutely! Music / sound is a beautiful complex system of vibration patterns. One metaphor I find useful for how I conceive of music intuitively is that of n-dimensional sculpture. A lot of the works on this album, especially the Aurogeny string quartet, came together in this way.

Any piece is effectively one shape, with its parameters as dimensions — pitch, timbre, dynamics, and time — a morphing sculpture — and one can incorporate more dimensions (especially in recording: stereo locus, acoustics of the space, various parameters of fidelity, etc.) as well as the sub-parameters within each dimension (pitch: intonation, density, register, vibrato width and rate, noise color, etc.; timbre: instrumentation, noise/pitch ratio, etc.) and rates of change along gradients in each, which can interact and correspond with one another in various ways.

There’s a lot there, but there’s always one full, multi-dimensional shape that everything adds up to. Composing is trying to find that one full beautiful shape with clarity. Tough spots in the process are like areas of the shape that are blurry and haven’t revealed themselves yet with clarity. Improvisation is discovering and exploring a sound entity in real time.

“Aurogeny” and “Tethyscape” are both pieces in which I tried to make this sculptural concept a little more conscious or directly auralized, by keeping some parameters within very narrow bands — there are evident huge gradual arcs in dynamic (Tethyscape) and pitch (both) over the course of the entire piece.

Some of the accordion works, like “Qualia” and “Plasmodial,” were conceived in a similar way, as was my Ghost Ensemble composition “Wind People.”



How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health?

It’s immensely important, and I think since before our lifetimes the world has changed utterly for the worse in this regard. The soundscape of an environment will tell you a lot about who lives there and thus who is able to live there, and even when humans aren’t actively exterminating the living beings who populate an ecosystem, if they are obliterating its communication networks through noise pollution, they are obliterating its life. An especially awful example is undersea sound from militaries.

But lots of people are doing beautiful music and sound work in the area of preserving and advocating for natural soundscapes to be preserved from this kind of harm, too.

Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

Éliane Radigue’s Occam series, which brings the vast, patient gradual processes of her electronic compositions to acoustic instruments and zooms in on the infinitesimal, unpredictable, usually incidental grains and burls and whorls of the organic sounds of those instruments — a kindred approach to works like Archaeon.



Phill Niblock’s entire body of work, which creates an enveloping physical sound experience focused on microtonal interferences and timbre, with gradually shifting harmony unfolding over a longer timescale as a subliminal or sculptural aspect — also an influence on tracks like “Plasmodial.”



Julian Koster / The Music Tapes’ cornucopia of historical recording techniques and instruments that orient the power of these timbral aspects of sound toward activating meaningful memories and creating hypnotic layers of storytelling.



A lot of artists who seem to discover endless streams of mesmerizing soundscapes: Oophoi, The Necks, Sunn O))), Paysage d’Hiver, Ashley Bellouin, Stephan Mathieu, just to span a few genres that all focus on timbre and gradual process.

[Read our Tony Buck of The Necks interview]

Budowitz and Veretski Pass capture the old-style klezmer sound in a way nobody else quite does for me. Annea Lockwood, David Dunn, Dawn Scarfe, Francisco Lopez, Gordon Hempton, Cheryl Leonard, and Leah Barclay are all doing really interesting environmental work.

[Read our Francisco Lopez interview]

Oh, and I have had the great luck and pleasure of making music with some wonderful friends on the Ghost Ensemble albums, and I’m quite happy with their sound!

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

We are already surrounded with sound at all moments. Perhaps the ultimate delight is just to be able to listen and enjoy all of the sounds all of the time.

I like Glenn Gould. I don’t suppose that’s what he meant, but that might be Pauline Oliveros’s ideal with Deep Listening.

Sometimes our surroundings are fairly quiet, but silence is an important and fascinating idea that we will never experience. I like the concept of silence for how it helps me listen to everything.

[Read our Pauline Oliveros interview]

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds?

Often the simplest ones, those that illuminate the gentleness, fragility, and calm of the nonhuman world.

The vulnerability of every living thing in the world can be anxiety-provoking, but when you surround yourself with the breeze and the waves and the voices of plants and animals, the fragile and temporary sounds are some of the most comforting.

They remind me of the way everything is interconnected; the way events repeat for ages in slightly different forms, perhaps in different lifeforms; and how the small-scale mirrors the large, on into distant orders of magnitude.

I think humans need more of that, or at least I do.

Many animals communicate through sound. Based either on experience or intuition, do you feel as though interspecies communication is possible and important? Is there a creative element to it, would you say?  

It is certainly possible, it happens all the time, and it’s incredibly important. One of the most important things in the world, I think, is for humans to listen more and understand more what it might be like to be other kinds of beings. A lot of what I’m trying to do in my music is to try to imagine beyond-human timescales and perspectives.

Of course, interspecies communication is commonplace when people communicate with dogs or horses or other nonhuman animals in various ways, sonic and otherwise. There’s amazing research being done that goes deep into whale, elephant, prairie dog, bird, and other animals’ communication through sound.

And as far as the creative element is concerned, I’ve had wonderful experiences making interspecies music with, among others, David Rothenberg and nonhuman friends, and there are a lot of other great humans making interspecies music with dogs and birds and insects and others — from Cicada Dream Band to Caninus.

[Read our David Rothenberg interview]

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses, including vision. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

Listening entails receptivity, patience, and connection with the world around us. I think listening, and thus music, has the power to build and transform communities, and hopefully help foster a less violent and more cooperative world.

We know that listening and perceiving sounds, especially novel sounds, can transform our neural pathways. Ernest Rossi, among others, has a fascinating body of research on how novel artistic experiences function on a biological level to foster neurogenesis and psycho/neurological transformation and healing. Music has a particularly profound potential for this due to its capacity to employ change over time to elicit altered states of consciousness.

Then there are a lot of psychoacoustic effects that can combine with this. Some of my earlier works, like “Wind People,” made direct use of neural entrainment, with the muted bass drum gradually slowing from high alpha to delta frequencies over the course of that piece.

Some of the works on this album do, too — it feels like a little bit of a spoiler to get specific, but the accordion is particularly well suited to this since it has naturally strong difference tones and its traditional sound emphasizes the near-unison beating frequencies just below the pitch/rhythm threshold, which is also the range of alpha and theta waves.