Finding Art in the Sound of Maine: Dianne Ballon

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching our video podcast Radio Maine, where we celebrate creativity and the human spirit. And we are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today I have with me sound artist Dianne Ballon, who I'm really fascinated to learn more about and so glad that you reached out to come join us today. Thank you for being here.

Dianne Ballon: Thank you for having me.

Lisa Belisle: So Dianne, you started out, well, first of all, let me ask you, what is a sound artist, for those who may not be familiar?

Dianne Ballon: Each artist has their own particular media, and I did actually start out as a visual artist many years back and was very intrigued by National Public Radio's All Things Considered and how every now and then there would be a sound piece that wasn't a reporter reporting, and it would stop me in my tracks. Literally, I was just so moved by that. And so at one point I said, I really want to do this, and so I started learning about the equipment technically. The other thing also about NPR is the broadcast quality. So I also wanted to have that kind of sound quality. I don't know if I actually answered that question as to what is the sound artist, but at the time it was kind of a new field when I got into it. I've been doing this for over 35 years, and there were video artists also coming out. So now it's not as unusual as back then.

Lisa Belisle: How did you decide that you wanted to move toward being an artist more generally, as a visual artist? Was there some point in your growing years where you said, I think that's what I would like to do?

Dianne Ballon: All my life as a kid, I was doing paintings. I have memories of our family. We would go to the Franconia Notch in the fall to look at the leaves and I would bring my little canvas and sit on a log and do these little paintings. So I was always very moved by that. And also, I think which works into the sound experience, is that kind of solitary feeling of being out there in nature. And at that time as a kid painting, and now being out there and listening to sound.

Lisa Belisle: Are you originally from Maine?

Dianne Ballon: I grew up in Massachusetts. I do have to say that I've been in Maine for, I'm not sure if it's 40 years or more, so I feel like I'm from Maine now.

Lisa Belisle: What was the decision point where you said, okay, I'm going to go live in Maine for the rest of my life?

Dianne Ballon: At the time I was married and we absolutely loved New Hampshire and Maine, and we both went to art school together. And so we said, where do we want to live? And we chose Maine. We actually first lived in a little cabin on Little Deer Isle for a while.

Lisa Belisle: Being an artist, part of that experience seems to be for many people doing a lot of teaching. And that is something that you've also done a lot of, and you've done a lot of teaching in a lot of different areas, is my understanding. So that is in juxtaposition to being more in the solitary space and doing the sound recordings. So talk to me about that. What is that like to kind of have both aspects of your personality engaged?

Dianne Ballon: That's a beautiful question, because it is the artist's life. And when we were in art school, I went to Mass College of Art. We all knew if we majored in fine arts that we would never get a job in our fields. And so the folks who majored in art education would at least be teaching and then on the side could do their work. But I remember a bunch of us saying, no, we really want to have all our credits and all our hours be spent in the studio. And so that's what I chose, and that's what I knew was the path that I took, which would be very difficult in terms of being able to find work. So you always hear about theater folks waiting on tables and whatever, and that was the route I took, and it was really the passion for my art at that time, visual art and then sound. I would just keep doing it, in other words, with whatever job I needed to get by.

Lisa Belisle: And at some point it looks like you started to move toward the teaching, despite having initially early on not moving in that direction. So what caused you to make that decision?

Dianne Ballon: Well actually at UMA, there's an incredible audio recording studio, and I was working in the media department with the Education Network who broadcast classes around the state, and that was the first time that I got a job in my field. I did that for about 15 years, and across the hallway was this incredible recording studio. And so I met the director of the studio and professor of music, Bill Mosley, who's retired now. And it's interesting, I can remember we sat in the control room at the studio with a mixing board, I don't know if it was 34 tracks or whatever, and I told him that I had my pieces aired on National Public Radio. And he said, well, why don't you come at the end of the semester and listen to the students' audio work from the audio class. So I showed up and I was so moved by the quality of their sound versus my sound, and I just said, I have to take this class, I have to get to that higher a level. And at that time we were using reel-to-reel recording, 16 track and 8 track. And so I sort of grew up with them from reel-to-reel to digital recorders at that time. And so Bill said to me, he did a radio theater class with the music students because he wanted them to also be able to record voices, not vocalists, spoken word, and create sound effects. And also it was a way for the students to really know and learn the mixer. We had all these tracks. So he said, would you be interested in teaching that class? It was just amazing. I said, yes, thank you. So while I was working this other job, I did an article on it called See You at Midnight, because the class was from seven to ten, but we never would finish. So I would always get home around midnight. It was a crash course really in radio theater. And that took off for me in terms of teaching. And also what that led to, which was amazing, was the National Audio Theatre Festivals, which are still going right now. And it's a national, that used to be one whole week. It was like radio camp, and we produced radio theater that was actually performed live and broadcast live initially. I knew about it for a long time, but I couldn't afford to be a participant. So I wrote a little grant, I got the grant, and I went to this and I was just amazed by it because they had all engineers from National Public Radio, WGBH, WNYC, and they also had classes where radio theater mostly for acting. So all the participants really wanted to do the acting, and the participants could choose what they wanted to be part of. And so I chose the tech staff and hung out with the engineers and helped produce the show. And then the second year they asked me to be on staff. And so I did that for 12 summers, which was amazing. But I did take the audio recording class, and I remember going up to the library at UMA, this is very audio nerd, but going up to the library and they had Mix magazine, and I could open the magazine and I could actually read it and understand it. And I thought, this is like audio heaven. I don't know if I answered your question, but that's sort of the teaching. So then Bill asked me to teach an independent study in audio for the students, and that's kind of how I got into the teaching.

Lisa Belisle: The whole audio world I think is so interesting, because there's so much more that is part of producing something from an audio standpoint than I think many people realize. And especially now that we have digital recorders, people are like, oh, you just press a button, people start talking, press a button, it's done. But it's not like that at all. And that's just voice. There's so many things to consider when we're talking about producing something that has high quality audio.

Dianne Ballon: And I do teach now at Maine College of Art and Design, and I do an audio basics class, and I really want to snag the already podcast producers who are out there producing audio. There's a lot of podcasts out there that are not good quality. And so I try to, even though I call it a beginner's class, and technically it's learning about your microphone, learning about your recorder and doing assignments, but I really like to snag those folks and get them to have a love for good quality audio and wanting to produce good quality audio.

Lisa Belisle: This is bringing me back to one of the original people who did the audio work for what was then called the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and podcast. And he was a musician and audio was so important to him, and I learned so much just sitting in the studio and being the one in front of the microphone, about dialogue and when to start talking, when to stop talking, how much things that maybe wouldn't bother other people, like a sound in the parking lot, how much that would actually come through on a recording. And in sitting with somebody, I didn't absorb even a tiny percentage of what he knew, but sitting with John over the years, it was so powerful, because I think that we don't always tune into different aspects of sound that can be really meaningful. And particularly when you're talking about a podcast, it can really shift your experience of that podcast or a performance. I'm preaching to the choir here.

Dianne Ballon: You are, but thank you for actually bringing that up, because it is true. Our ears out in the world, our brain is really good at filtering out other sounds, but the microphone is not. So if you're on a busy street and you're talking to someone, you can hear that person and be fully engaged even though there is so much other sound around you. But the microphone cannot filter that out. And so that also, I go to great lengths actually to get pristine audio, and that means that I always record at the crack of dawn when it's very quiet and there's not people in cars. And still, it's amazing how difficult it is, particularly in field recording, to get that kind of sound. And also with the classes, I recommend that you interview the person in an adequate location and then interview them out in the field, because when you're out in the field, you're actually stuck with whatever sounds are happening over or under the person that you're speaking to, whose voice. And sometimes I call it a live mix. Sometimes it's hard to avoid that. But if the students bring somebody into a studio or quiet location, then you can use that voice track over that field sound and have much more clarity and also have the person be on mic, as we say.

Lisa Belisle: To me, I'm thinking about the times that I've been in situations and I've been distracted by sounds that it doesn't seem like anybody else hears, but for me it's right there. I can't filter these things very well. And I wonder, there are different levels of sensitivity to sound, part one. Part two is, if you are someone who isn't as sensitive to sound, can you actually become more mindful so that you are hearing sounds with more sensitivity?

Dianne Ballon: I definitely think you can, and what I'm hoping with the work that I do, and I do presentations of, play sounds, talk about the stories behind the sounds, that people will open their ears to sound. Because we're so busy, particularly now with cell phones and being able to take photographs, a million photographs. So even if you're at Portland Head Light, I feel like a lot of the folks aren't really there because they're taking the snapshots that then they go home and say, there I am. And so they're missing out on really being able to be there fully. And that includes listening to the sound.

Lisa Belisle: On your website, you have different recordings and I had a chance to go through many of them and really enjoyable, just to give you a lot of credit for that. One of them was, I think it was something like challenges of field work, where you're out and it sounds very kind of idyllic and it's just nature sounds, and then all of a sudden, I think it was a plane or something that went overhead, and that was so relatable and I thought, here you are, you think that you've got this place to yourself, but then we've got the modern world infringing upon the experience. I'm guessing that that's not an irregular experience for you.

Dianne Ballon: Not at all. And that piece is actually titled The Difficulties of Field Recording, and I did a birding sound installation, and for that recording I searched a 30 mile radius from where I was living to find the most remote location in order to record the red-winged blackbirds, which are the first to return in the spring, and usually you find them in a bog. I was out there at 5:36 in the morning and it was actually under a little bridge, but the road was so rural, a car drove through my recording, and it was then that I decided to include that recording in the sound installation as a way to tell you the listener about the difficulties of field recording.

Lisa Belisle: The beauty of it really is just understanding that this truly is an art form, and yet many things that are done in nature you can only control for so much. You and I were talking before we came on the air about the work that you do with nautical sounds, with recording boats and going to South Freeport and recording the boats in South Freeport. What is it about the sounds of the boats at docks that you find so appealing, and that you think that many people probably can relate to as being an emotionally drawing in experience?

Dianne Ballon: It's the creaking, it's very rhythmic, and then it becomes very musical in a wonderfully surprising way when the wind really picks up and the ropes are banging on the mast and there's sort of like a tinkling type sound. I do have a beautiful recording, actually I did finally record it at South Freeport Harbor. I've been listening to South Freeport Harbor for years on end, and I do bird watch there all the time. And in fact, I have my binoculars and I will stop by there on the way back. But finally one September I said, okay, I am going to go down and see what I get. And I think, similar to what you just said, sound is very elusive, and so I usually scout an area, which I could say I've been scouting South Freeport for years, so I know it really well. But I usually go to an area first and kind of see what I'm up against in terms of unwanted sound and then bring my recording equipment. So when I arrived it was almost a gale wind, and the wind is my nemesis, but I do need the wind to rock the boats as well. And I do have a wind screen on the mic, which works most of the time. I also sit on the dock with boats as a wind block. And when I'm on the coast at coastal rocks, I sit in a little almost rock cave if the wind is really hard. So with that recording, it just was amazing. I've never gotten that much from one location in terms of usable sound or final mix, because everything changes so wonderfully. I mean that's also the magic of doing sound recording. There's one piece that I think you're going to, can I tell them about the exhibit?

Lisa Belisle: Yes, please.

Dianne Ballon: Okay. So right now I have an exhibition, it's called Lost and Found: Sounds of the Maine Coast by Dianne Ballon. It's at the Maine Maritime Museum. And one of the recordings in the exhibit is from Schoodic Point. And I spent a week up at Acadia and did a scouting trip through all of the peninsulas and actually mapped out all of the bell buoys and whistle buoys, those locations. And so at Schoodic there was a whistle buoy, and when I got there it was blowing beautifully loud and clear, and a whistle buoy, by the way, sounds exactly like the low moan of a foghorn. And so I waited a couple days and then I went back with my recording equipment to record. And when I got there, the wind was hard, it was strong, but I couldn't hear the whistle buoy. And so I said, okay, I'm all the way out here. I had a couple other locations I was going to go back to. I said, I'm going to set up by the water. I'm just going to sit here and I'll wait maybe for an hour, I wasn't sure. And the tide was coming in right at my feet and the sound of the water, it was so delicious sounding that I made that recording, which I titled Incoming Tide at Schoodic Point. And so that is also the magic of sound recording where I go for one sound, but then another sound comes at that moment in time.

Lisa Belisle: There's a couple different things that are coming up for me as I'm hearing what you're saying. One of them is this idea of birds and listening to birds, and you've brought up the fact that you're a birder. And one of my favorite apps is, I think it's from Cornell and it's bird sounds. So you can, please tell me if I'm not correct in this, you can get this app, you can listen to the bird with this app and it'll tell you what the bird is if they have that information. For me, that changes the way that the landscape around me feels, because it's just not just a random bird. It's like, oh, there's this bird and there's this bird and there's another bird and there's this bird over here. And they're having a whole conversation all around us. And in this time of year, as the birds are starting to come back, it really just reminds me, oh, there's a seasonality that we're all experiencing. And I'm wondering if your experience with birding has kind of contributed to your interest in the sound art that you do.

Dianne Ballon: Thank you for asking that. I always say that bird watchers, and I include myself in that category, listen to the world the way that I listen to the world. And that is with our ears wide open. So open that any faint scratch in the leaves has us looking for a white-throated sparrow. That is where you would find the white-throated sparrow. I love that about bird watchers. And for the migrations I'll usually see friends on the trail and we all speak the same language in terms of sound. My challenge for the folks who do use the Merlin app, which is from Cornell, which is absolutely amazing, is to, instead of, or along with using the Merlin app, write down what you heard and then go home and listen to a recording of that bird so that maybe the next time you can actually identify that sound yourself without the interruption of, oh, I have to know what the sound is. Birding by ear is just absolutely wonderful. I know all the easy ones, and I'm sort of at a plateau where the more difficult ones, every year I try to learn a new bird song by ear. So when I go out, I don't take the Merlin app, though I do have other birder friends who will go out and when we can't figure out what it is, then someone will turn on the Merlin app. But I think that it reminds me a little bit of everybody taking a photo at Portland Head Light. So the camera, the iPhone separates you from the entire experience of being out there. And always, this sounds very cliche, but I'm always astounded that all of that beauty is out there always, all the time, for us to receive, to be part of. And so every now and then when I go out, and I do go out every day, it'll strike me that these sounds, this landscape, this coast is there always for us to experience.

Lisa Belisle: And I do take your challenge, and I understand that as somebody who doesn't know that much about birds, for me it's like being in preschool, and to me that was just a noise of a bird and I'm not at the level that you're at. So I'll take your challenge and I'll try to start learning more about birds.

Dianne Ballon: But also if I could say that I love that that's how you experience the Merlin app, because that plants a seed really for you to learn more, to hear more, to know more.

Lisa Belisle: And that's sort of the way that I think about art. For example, one of the reasons, and you and I were talking before we came on about the fact that I've been doing this work and doing podcasting for more than a decade at this point, and the last two, three years have been focused a lot on art. I don't have as much of a vocabulary around art. So for me, I'm looking even at visual arts as somewhat of a beginner, this is figurative, this is landscape, this is abstract. And for me that rich layering is something that I think will probably continue all my life. So when you talk about sound art, it just opens up all these other possibilities. So now we've got visual and now we've got sound. There's so many different ways of thinking about existing in the world that I think is really interesting. So this brings me back to another thing that I don't know if you know this or not, but in Chinese medicine where there are five phases, or they call them five elements, different people have different constitutions, and one of the ways that they diagnose a person's constitution or an imbalance is actually by the noises that they make, by the sounds that come out of their bodies, and I mean out of their mouths. So they actually have the groaning sound and the sighing sound and the crying sound. Is that something that you've ever heard before?

Dianne Ballon: I have never heard that before, no.

Lisa Belisle: It's fascinating to me because, again, as a longtime physician, we're trained in a very specific way of doing diagnosis. I have in no way scratched the surface when it comes to learning about sound related diagnosis in human beings. And yet this is something who, if you're a Chinese medicine practitioner for hundreds of years, probably thousands of years at this point, they used a way of understanding humans that has to do with something that most of us are not even aware existed. So for you, I know you've done visual art, you are doing audio art, sound art, you teach, you have installations. It sounds like as an artist, you're somebody who's continually evolving yourself. Do you have a sense of where you want things to go next?

Dianne Ballon: Well, I do have an exhibition that I'm hoping to launch. It is called Musical Instrument Dreams. And it's related to the repeated dreams that I've had for over 35 years of walking into a secondhand shop and searching for musical instruments, picking them up and trying to play them. And I did create this, and there is an example on my website. I did create this beautiful rich piece that will be a sound installation with visuals also. So I have a collection of musical instruments in the dreams. They're all beat up and the strings are missing or whatever, broken. And so the viewer, the listener, will come into a gallery and sit before the instruments and other objects that I love, which will look like stepping into one of my dreams, and hear the essence of Musical Instrument Dreams. So that's something that I've been working on. I've actually been holding out on not having it be in a little hole in the wall gallery, and I really think it deserves a bigger place. So that piece is actually finished, but that is kind of what I'll be working on with this exhibit under my belt.

Lisa Belisle: You're dreaming big is what you're doing. You'd like a larger space because you want your dreams to fill this larger space for your Musical Instrument Dreams. Do you play musical instruments?

Dianne Ballon: Interestingly, I am a terrible player. I can't read music. I have a mountain dulcimer, and there's some really good stories behind that piece. I've presented it as a presentation with playing excerpts. And one is that over the years I had written out the dreams. So when it came time for me to say, okay, I really want to concentrate on creating this, I took all the dreams and looked at them and chose, and there was over 30 dreams I think, and chose particular ones. And then I needed a narrative voice to read the dreams. And my voice is not the smooth NPR voice that I wanted. So I auditioned folks in a producer's group that I'm in to read the dreams, and I actually got Lisa Mullins, who was the host of The World, and also she's now at WBUR, to read the dream. She just did a beautiful job. But for the dreams, I wanted a sound signature for when the listener enters the dream state. And initially I thought I would work with the musician together to get the sound that I wanted. And I went to, one of the recordings was at UMA, I wanted to record the grand piano in the auditorium. And when I got there, the heat was on and it was blowing right on the piano. So I said, okay, I have to wait until the heat clicks off. So I sat at the piano and I plucked out a melody. I said, this sounds really nice. I'm going to record this melody. So I actually created the sound signature for the dreams and added other sounds, I recorded violin players giving me sounds and such, and that works really beautifully. It's very introspective. The piece is very introspective. And then I wanted to pair that with going into a musical instrument shop and people who repair musical instruments to sort of almost tell me about what I'm seeing in my dreams. And so I have the dream will fade into a voice saying, this is my shop and we're going down the stairs and I have a hundred violins here, or whatever. And so the whole piece is a really big collage. And I didn't really want it to be journalistic, so I had to say to the folks that I interviewed, I'm not really going to have you say, my name is so-and-so, and I'm from the whatever. I just want a voice coming out. So that's how that evolved.

Lisa Belisle: So it's something for us to look forward to. I've learned a lot today about the work that you do, and I encourage people to go to the Maine Maritime Museum to hear your work, and also where else can they find the work that you do, Dianne?

Dianne Ballon: Definitely on my website, which is dianneballonsound.com, that pretty much is where things are right now. And also, just a note that the exhibit goes through November 30th of this year, so there's plenty of time. And the museum did a beautiful job of historically listing and exploring how nautical sounds and the sound environment on the coast, that goes beautifully with the sound work.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I hope people do take the opportunity to learn more about your work and to visit the Maine Maritime Museum so that they can really get the full sound experience. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You have been listening to or watching Radio Maine today with sound artist Dianne Ballon. And I encourage you to learn more about her pieces, whether at the Maine Maritime Museum or the website that she has mentioned, as I think there's different ways to inhabit the world and different types of art that we all can enjoy. And today we've been exploring and celebrating creativity and the human spirit on Radio Maine, which is sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine, with Dianne Ballon. Thanks so much for coming in today.

Dianne Ballon: Thank you for having me.