From my research thus far it seems that exploring the relationship between these three practices is central to elaborating viable extensions for the current sound map model. The three exist within a continuum of acoustic ecology/environmental orientated sound map practices, they are all essentially related and their is considerable overlap between them on both a level of method and concept.
My previous posts regarding Hildegard Westerkamp's work are a case in point, as here work involves various combinations of soundwalk type practice and soundscape composition.
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For the purposes of this study it would serve to isolate the three practices in ideal form...
A) Soundwalk practice - as exemplified by Max Neuhaus with his ardent refusel to document his soundwalks (and other installations) in any form. In this modality the emphasis is on immediacy and site-specifity, the only mediating factors (aside from the physiological) are the cue's provided by the artist/director. In this modality schizophonia is avoided entirely by the emphasis on site-specificity and immediacy which see's the subject engage the sound environment in the field.
B) Soundscape composition - Westerkamp's work will provide the working example of this method, whereby recorded elements are processed, and compiled via various means to create a particular listening/constructed representation of a sound environment/s, whereby affective transformations are facilitated in the listener and the space of listening. In this instance schizophonia is overcome through schismogenesis.
C) Soundmap practice - exemplified by the online examples previously dealt with, in which audio recordings (typically without the creative synthesis of soundscape composition) are tagged to a cartographic rendering of the environment from whence they came. The user is left to engage the resulting body of recordings as the will, but as aforementioned with the current model, a schizophonic effect seems to dominate.
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The idea then is that in drawing from the strategies used to overcome (or avoid emtirely) schizophonia within the other primary modalities, that the sound map can be extended accordingly, to make it more viable towards the aim of the overall discipline - that of facilitating and cultivating listening and awareness if the sound environment that we inhabit.
Monday 12 March 2012
Schizophonia & Schismogenesis (pt II): Schismogenesis
-An image of Bateson & Mead painted by a Balinese artist-
Feld's borrows the term Schismogenesis from the Anthropologist & Cyberneticist Gregory Bateson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis) in an attempt to described the generative/productive process that is often illicited through initial schism or dislocation. Feld's usage pertains to world music specifically, but given his contrast of the term with Schafer's Schizophonia it nevertheless falls well within the scope of this inquiry.
The specific relevance here in, is the use of these two terms to explain the shift from the schizophonic effect - as embodied in the majority of sound-map recordings... to the schismogenic effect illustrated in the work of Westerkamp who works creatively with dislocation & difference to suggest something more (detailed below - http://wellingtonsoundmap.blogspot.co.nz/2012/02/soundwalk-pt-ii-hildegard-westerkamp.html). These two modalities effectively can either be understood as two distinct responses to the inherent schism produced through recording a sound environment or (possibly) more usefully one could look at productive schismogenesis as being the next step or extension of schizophonia, where as Labelle details in his article; "place paradoxically comes to life by being somewhat alien, other, and separate, removed and dislocated, rather than being thoroughy mimetically real." (1)
1) Labelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum, New York, NY, 2006, pg 206
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