Name: Cat Hope
Nationality: Australian
Occupation: Composer, bassist, flute player
Current release: Cat Hope's ensemble Decibel teams up with Lionel Marchetti for their second collaboration, Inland Lake (Le lac intérieur), out via Lawrence English's Room40.

[Read our Lionel Marchetti interview about Sound and his Artistic Practise]
[Read our Lionel Marchetti interview about Technology and Tools of Expression]
[Read our Lawrence English interview]
[Read our Lawrence English interview about sound]

If you enjoyed this Cat Hope interview and would like to know more about her music, visit the official homepage of Decibel or her personal homepage. She is also on bandcamp, and twitter.  



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound? What were early experiences which sparked it?

My interest in sound began as a fascination with low sound. Even when following scores to classical music at high school, I would choose the bass parts to follow.

Living on Mount Etna in Sicily much later I became fascinated with the regular sounds of the volcano, and from there I became interested in sound as a visceral force.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using sound in an unusual or remarkable way captured your imagination in the beginning?

As for low sound in notated music - Sofia Gubaidulina and Iancu Dumitrescu where major discoveries for me, their focus on low instruments, and in the case of Dumitrescu, low  frequency noise on acoustic instruments - in works such as ‘Medium II’ for double bass (1878-79).

Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi for lots of different reasons – improvising as a starting point for composition, and an example of where common music notation struggles to represent certain ideas. Seeing the notation for his work made me realise I wasn’t the first person to be struggling to get it to work for me.

The first graphic score I ever saw was ‘Volumina’ (1962) for organ, by Gyorg Ligeti – and at that point I realised there was another way! The sound generated in that piece is all consuming, all encompassing – and free of pulse and predetermined harmonies.



My understanding of composition as a more conceptual pursuit however, began with studying the work of Alvin Lucier, who really opened my eyes to what could be possible. Decibel did an album of his music, available here – his work ‘Hands’ (1994) for organ is a favourite on there. Maryanne Amacher, and Yoko Ono were also important – Ono’s book of text scores, ‘Grapefruit ‘(the second edition, 1970, Simon and Schuster), is something I return to often.



Then moving into sound art - Tetsuo Tsunada ‘Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay’ (2007) was a formative album for me, as was John Duncan’s 'Infrasound-Tidal' (2003) album. These got me thinking about low frequency sound and audibility – the difference between hearing and listening. Film music, in particular the early exploratory Ennio Morricone work, seemed to traverse new timbres in unique, cross genre ways - with guitars and strings, wordless singing and a range of unusual instruments and sound worlds that fascinated me for years.

Fausto Romitelli’s video opera with Paolo Pachini, ‘Index of Metals’ (2004) was for me was the first successful rock meets art music piece, I poured over that score to understand what seemed to be non- notated sounds in that work – what the electronics were doing in relation to the acoustic instruments. There is something fantastical in that work that I wanted to capture.



Song writing has been important to me as it was the long way around that I got back into composition seriously. Scott Walker would be my favourite songmaker – I really do think he was one of the most innovative songwriters of his generation - a friend made a mix tape of his music for me in the early 2000s, which I hated at first – but then came around to his ideas, lyrics, arrangements and voice.

Which leads me to my favourite band of all time, Low – which I have listened to consistently since 1997 when I discovered their first album ‘I Could Live in Hope’ (1994). I know they have influenced all my work ever since, with their pace, arrangements, colour, lyrics, performance style, even if it is a different genre to most music I make these days. A key member passed away last year and I am saddened that there will be no more Low albums to influence me into the future (I wrote something about my relationship to Low here).



One of the ways I have tried to get a deeper understanding of many of these artists was to perform / revive / adapt their music in Decibel concerts. We have done ‘covers’ of Scott Walker (‘Clara’ (2006)), Morricone /Joan Baez (‘Here’s To You’ from the film ‘Sacco and Vanzetti’(1976)), Low (‘Do You Know How to Waltz? (1994))’, a concert of Lucier’s music, and many others.

What's your take on how your upbringing and cultural surrounding have influenced your sonic preferences?

I don’t see any link – whilst both my grandmothers played organ in the church, my immediate family was not interested in music very much. Though they did own that famous early electronic album, ‘Popcorn’.

Working predominantly with field recordings and sound can be an incisive step / transition. Aside from musical considerations, there can also be personal motivations for looking for alternatives. Was this the case for you, and if so, in which way?

My incisive step was combing my interests in both electronic and acoustic sound to create music that features both.

That is the focus of the repertoire I choose for Decibel,  and curating with that focus has led me to some incredible music and ways to share it. Decibel often perform works that feature field recordings alongside acoustic instruments, for example. My own Wanderlust (2018) is a work that gets the performer to make and incorporate a field recording of them walking to the venue time they play it.



Lindsay Vickery makes works that feature spectrograms of field recordings as notation for the acoustic instruments, such as njookenbooro [2018], and we commissioned Amber Fresh’s Torndirrup (2012) which uses a field recording of birds in Albany, WA as a kind of score and a playback part- something similar to the way Lionel Marchetti’s pieces for Decibel work.



How would you describe the shift of moving towards music which places the focus foremost on sound, both from your perspective as a listener and a creator?

I have always been interested in timbre – the quality of sounds in music. For me it has much more interest than melody, rhythm, or harmony. And electronics offer an infinite range of possibility for timbre it seems.

I have been experimenting with different ways of making and describing this focus – through improvisation, composition, installation, performance, notation, and different research projects. It has always been at the centre of my listening and at the core of all the music I chose for Decibel.

Curating music for Decibel has always been an extension of my own musical interests.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and working with sound? Do you see yourself as part of a tradition or historic lineage when it comes to your way of working with sound?

I was trained in the Western Art music tradition, and as much as I have pushed back against that in different ways, for example by engaging in noise music (such as the Fetish solo bass noise series, Abe Sada, Lux Mammoth), installation (e.g Voyuerages (2004), Sounds of Decay (2013), pop music (Gata Negra, Mice Vice), free improvisation etc, it has been impossible to 'un learn' everything, it is in my body after years of days of hours listening and practicing it. For this reason, I see myself as part of that tradition.



As for the key ideas behind my approach – investigating timbre, low sound and new conceptual ideas for music seem to the things I keep pursuing.

What are the sounds that you find yourself most drawn to?  Are there sounds you reject – if so, for what reasons?

There are many instruments that produce sounds I really don't like. Soprano saxophone is one, piccolo is another. I hate the sound of large groups of people.

But I love all low sounds, and am drawn to drones – in machinery and electronic music in particular.

As creative goals and technical abilities change, so does the need for different tools of expression, from instruments via software tools and recording equipment. Can you describe this path for you personally starting from your first studio/first instruments and equipment? What motivated some of the choices you made in terms of instruments/tools/equipment over the years?

I always wanted to play a bass instrument, but when I started playing music, I don't remember having a choice, and flute it was. So I later picked up bass guitar. My first band was an Italian combo called the Quartered Shadows, based in Berlin in the early 1990s. Computers and electronics were expensive and hard to find back then.



My first guitar pedals were purchased for flute effects, that failed - so I started using them on bass. I have landed on old sine tone generators and a.m. radios as my favourite electronic instruments to play and use in compositions. So my focus is across electric bass guitar noise, and bass flute these days.

But the technology that has influenced my practice as a sound maker the most, would have to be the development of the Decibel ScorePlayer – software to facilitate reading graphic notation, developed within Decibel. That changed everything for me – I had suddenly found a way to make score drawings playable in coordinated groups of musicians.

From the point of view of your creative process, how do you work with sounds? Can you take me through your process on the basis of a project or album that's particularly dear to you?

I have been working on a series of compositions for acoustic instruments and subtones. Subtones are what I call sine tones below150hz. I make these on the computer, or old tone generators. l love exploring what happens when I combine them with each other and acoustic sounds.

For example, Shadow of Mill (2018) is for cello and sub tone - the tone lives in the digital graphic score so is the same each performance. Other pieces, such as Sogno 102, (2012) samples instruments and turn them into subtones in real-time, that are then manipulated live, interacting with a small ensemble of acoustic instruments.



I have recently been working to emulate these clean subtones on bass guitar in different ways, as a performer.

The possibilities of modern production tools have allowed artists to realise ever more refined or extreme sounds. Is there a sound you would personally like to create but haven't been able to yet?

The perfect subtone.

How do you see the relationship between sound, space and composition?

Composition is arranging sounds in space. Space is full of sounds to compose with, and shows us ways to consider sound.

The idea of acoustic ecology has drawn a lot of attention to the question of how much we are affected by the sound surrounding us. What's your take on this and on acoustic ecology as a movement in general?

Listening is the next key evolutionary mode of understanding the world. I think it is more sophisticated than visual understanding.

We can listen to a pop song or open our window and simply take in the noises of the environment. Without going into the semantics of 'music vs field recordings', in which way are these experiences different and / or connected, do you feel?

Music is what each of us decide it to be. It is a way of experiencing sound.

From the concept of Nada Brahma to "In the Beginning was the Word", many spiritual traditions have regarded sound as the basis of the world. Regardless of whether you're taking a scientific or spiritual angle, what is your own take on the idea of a harmony of the spheres and sound as the foundational element of existence?

I think symmetry is over rated, and our obsession with it hasn’t really led to anything good. As an extension of that, harmony is also overrated.

As for sound as a foundational element of existence, the world is sounding – but there are many aspects of sound that we still don’t comprehend.

For interested readers, what are books, websites, articles or other sources of information you recommend for them to educate themselves on the topic?

My list of favourite books evolves constantly but here is some of what I love right now, that relates to some of what we have discussed above:  

Thor Magnusson’s ‘Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions’ (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) is a wonderful exploration of the history of why and how people make scores.

Elena Biserna’s ‘Walking From Scores’ (Les Presses Du Reels, 2022) is a beautifully presented collection of text and graphic scores for walking;

‘Maryann Amacher – Selected Writing and Interviews’, edited by Amy Cimini and Bill Dietz (Blank Forms 2021) provides new insights into this incredible thinker and composer of genius who was so far ahead of her time;

Joanna Demmers ‘Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Music’ (Oxford Academic, 2010) was so important to me when it came out, it was one of the first books to try and articulate noise and drone music beyond political and cultural tropes, and is a great all round explainer for so much experimental music.

And Robin James’s ‘Resilience and Melancholy: Pop Music, Feminism and Neoliberalism’ (Zero Books, 2015)  for a vivid way of writing about music and politics that makes you want to listen, and listen differently.