Maile Colbert

NOTE: On papers published on Sounding Out!, please follow the url. these are papers with embedded media. Feel free to print a copy there for reference if you would like. Thank you!

A Conversation Article in Chat with  Irene Lusztig, Director of The Motherhood Archives and Sound Designer Maile Colbert

In 2011 filmmaker Irene Lusztig contacted me about designing sound and composing for her film project, The Motherhood Archives.

Irene had spent several years buying discarded educational films on eBay and working in historical archives to amass an unusual and fascinating collection of  archival films aimed at teaching women how to be pregnant, give birth, and look after babies. The Motherhood Archives uses this extraordinary archival treasure trove to form a lyrical essay film excavating hidden histories of childbirth in the twentieth century, illuminating our changing narratives of maternal success and failure, and raising questions about our social and historical constructions of motherhood.

I was immediately intrigued by her concept and construction process as well as her desire to work with sound design in a very collaborative manner at an earlier stage in the project than most filmmakers would. Geographically distant, Irene and I mostly worked by “satellite,” using email, chat, Skype, phone, and file sharing software to communicate and send files.  We did manage to have a few production weeks in New York and Santa Cruz, but the majority of the work was woven back and forth across an ocean and continent…California to Lisbon, Portugal, West Coast to West Coast. Rather than hindering, this method lent itself to an exquisite corpse nature to the work. In the creation of this article we followed much the same process, using an initial Gmail chat.

NOTE: On papers published on Sounding Out!, please follow the url. these are papers with embedded media. Feel free to print a copy there for reference if you would like. Thank you!

I was a child obsessed with time travel. Beyond favorites such as A Wrinkle in Time and Time Bandits, I perpetually daydreamed of the ability to pause, reverse, and fast-forward my life. I had a book on the “olden days” and it amazed me that my great-grandparents, whom I had the fortune to know, had lived them. I wanted to fast forward and see myself their current age, telling stories to the next generations of a good life lived. I used to entertain the thought that if I let my breath go and let myself sink to the bottom of a body of water, I could pause time, or at least slow it down, as the sound of the fluid world around me seemed to suggest. Whenever my family moved, I made a time capsule, and I always scanned the ocean for long lost bottled messages. These were the beginnings of my future in time-based media–both image and sound–my love for found footage, and my recent research and writing on sound back in time.

Now as a new mother, I am beginning to think about the future in a way I hadn’t before. I see my mother in my daughter, and I see her mother, and my partner’s mother. I recognize my grandfather’s eyebrow when furrowed, and her grandfather’s nose. My mouth when smiling, my partner’s mouth when in concentration.

And our ears. . .our very sensitive hearing, almost like a punch line. Our daughter is truly the daughter of sound artists. In this first post of a two part series on humans’ earliest interactions with sound, I document our work sounding and listening together, which began in a future-oriented past I am still learning about.

NOTE: On papers published on Sounding Out!, please follow the url. these are papers with embedded media. Feel free to print a copy there for reference if you would like. Thank you!

Even the surrounding hills were hushed, as if brought low by language. –from Grendel by John Gardner

NOTE: On papers published on Sounding Out!, please follow the url. these are papers with embedded media. Feel free to print a copy there for reference if you would like. Thank you!

“It devolves on us now to invent a subject we might call acoustic design, an interdiscipline in which musicians, acousticians, psychologists, sociologists, and others would study the world soundscape together in order to make intelligent recommendations for its improvement.”

–R. Murray Schafer in The Soundscape, Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World


With those words, and with that book, Canadian composer, writer, educator, and environmentalist R. Murray Schafer introduced the concept of the soundscape…a sound, or combination of sounds, that forms or arises from an immersive environment. What follows is an exploration of how several key field recordists define and explore the notion of soundscape.

What do you do?
What can that tell us?

Two years ago I found myself in a location and situation that brought to mind the connections between sound and memory, which lead to considerations about sound and history. Upon thought and research, then experiments within my own practice, I have since been exploring what can come from recreating or creating sound from back in time. I have been excited about what this research has meant to my own work, as well as exploring the work of others who I meet of other disciplines engaged in similar lines of practice.