Current Thesis Outline

1) Introduction

 1.1 The Sound Environment – Brief introduction to the notion of the sound environment

Opening our Ears

                        1.2 - The Eye and the Ear; sense-ratios and the dominance of visuality 

                        1.3 - Opening our Ears; Sound and the Arts

                        1.4 - Acoustic Ecology; in theory and practice…

2) The Soundmap & Acoustic Ecology

The Soundmap; Introduction and Critique

                        2.1 – Overview of existing soundmap form  

                        2.2 – Critique

Schizophonia

                        2.3 - Schafer's Schizophonia

                        2.4 - Schizophonia and the Soundmap

                        

3) Related Practices within Acoustic Ecology…

 The Soundwalk

                        3.1 - Max Neuhaus & the Soundwalk

                        3.2 - Emphasis on Site-listening 

  

Soundscape Composition 

                        3.3 - Soundscape composition and creative engagement with the soundscape and technology in the work of Hildegard Westerkamp

4) Sound Map: Extensions & Developments

 Soundmap Extensions 

                        4.1 – Focus on progressive examples – Urban Remix etc…

5) Development of a Wellington Regional Soundmap

Main points of development;

Site Listening and AR

                        5.1 - Site Listening; presence and difference

                        5.2 – AR & site listening 

                        5.3 – Reduced Listening & Site Listening

Interface, Narrative & Intertextuality 

                        5.4 – Narrative intertextuality and the social/semiotic dimension of sound

                        5.5 – Multi-media & , multiple - senses

                        5.7 – Cartography and the visual                                          

                                 representation of sound

                                

       

6) Conclusions

Opening our Ears; Silence and Pan-aurality

“Visuality overwhelms aurality in the cultural balance of the senses. The light that sparks the presence of objects and environments seems to be instantaneously everywhere and thus assumes a state of being that has proved to be particularly attractive to Western culture, whereas the actions that produce sounds appear scattered in space and time, tied to events that merely take place within a larger state of being. John Cage set out to tilt the balance in favor of the ear, and many people hear the world differently because of his efforts.”[1]

John Cage, the grandfather of the sonic-arts, and contemporary experimental music in general, spent his career attempting to open peoples ears to silence, as he termed it; “silence is all the sound we don’t intend. There is no such thing as absolute silence.” [2] His method’s ranged, from his early experiments with percussion and the use of noise in his compositions, to his famous silent work 4’ 33”, “which entailed rejecting the importance of whether a musical sound was present or absent within a composition and, in the process, extending the field or artistic materiality to all nonintentional sounds surrounding the performance – that is, by shifting the production of music from the site of utterance to the site of audition. This musicalization was then extended to all sounds, inside and outside the performance space, since the ability and willingness to listen were only requirements, and these abilities in turn were extended, with the aid of amplification and other technological devices, to small sounds and inaudible sounds.” [3]

With this piece Cage thrust open the doors of the concert hall, ushering in a whole world of sound. Opening the ears of those who were willing to listen, to sounds that had previously lay latent, ignored, as largely irrelevant or secondary to their visual correlates. Whilst 4’33” was performed within the context of the highly codified tradition of western classical music, and part of is significance is specific to that particular context (establishing the whole world of sound as material to be appropriated within a musical register) it also took on a broader conceptual significance, heralding a call to listen; “Silence is about listening, listening to small sounds, tiny sounds, quiet and loud sounds out of any context, music, visual, or otherwise.”[4]

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[1] Kahn, Douglas, Noise Water Meat, MIT press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2001, pg 158

[2] Ibid, 163

[3] Ibid, 158

[4] Voegelin, Salome, Listening to Silence and Noise, Continuum, New York , 2010, pg 81

Sense Ratios, Mediation, and the Primacy of the Visual

The world of sound that surrounds us, often seems to remain somewhat obscured, veiled not so much due to any inherent lack of physiological auditory acuity, but (as many scholars would suggest - ref) rather by the dominance of the visual apparatus (and the technologies that extend it) as our governing sensory logic. Much has been written about the primacy of the visual in modernity (reference/s needed), highlighting it’s significance, yet only more recently have questions of the role and relevance of auditory perception, and concern and critique of its somewhat marginalized epistemological position come to the fore.

One of the first figures to shed discursive light on this relationship, was the pre-imminent Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan; whose notions of aural/oral and visual/typographical culture explored and exposed this question regarding sensory-ratios and mediation.

“We, who live in the world of reflected light, in visual space, may also be said to be in a state of hypnosis. Ever since the collapse of the oral tradition in early Greece, before the age of Parmenidas, Western civilization has been mesmerized by a picture of the universe as a limited container in which all things are arranged according to a vanishing point, in linear geometric order. The intensity of this conception is such that it actually leads to abnormal suppression of hearing and touch in some individuals. (We like to call them “bookworms.”) Most of the information we rely upon comes through our eyes; our technology is arranged to heighten that effect.”[1]

McLuhan goes on to elaborate a dialectic sensory logic whereby cultures tend to primarily be governed by aural perception and hence occupy acoustic space which he associates with oral or non/pre-literate culture, or by visual perception and thereby occupy visual space which he associates with literate/written cultures[2], particular those stemming from Greek phonetic script. In his view this sensory basis is primary to how we interact in and understand the world, furthermore the technological forms that a given culture will elaborate, “extensions” as McLuhan termed them embody this bias, even entrenching it further.

He offers these definitions for each mode of perception/sensory space respectively;

“Visual space structure is an artifact of Western civilization created by Greek phonetic literacy. It is a space perceived by the eyes when separated or abstracted from all other senses. As a construct of the mind, it is continuous, which is to say that is infinite, divisible, extensible, and featureless – what the early Greek geometers referred to as physis. It is also connected (abstract figures with fixed boundaries, linked logically and sequentially but having no visible grounds), homogenous (uniform everywhere), and static (qualitatively unchangeable). It is like the “mind’s eye” or visual imagination which dominates the thinking of literate Western people, some of whom demand ocular proof of existence itself.” [3]

“Acoustic space structure is the natural space of nature-in-the-raw inhabited by non-literate people. It is like the “mind’s ear” or acoustic imagination that dominates the thinking of pre-literate and post-literate humans alike (rock video has as much acoustic power as a Watusi mating dance). It is both discontinuous and nonhomogeneous. Its resonant and interpenetrating processes are simultaneously related with centers everywhere and boundaries nowhere.  Like music, as communications engineer Barrington Nevitt puts it, acoustic space required neither proof nor explanation but is made manifest through cultural content.”[4]

Whilst McLuhan’s notion’s of sensory ratio’s are not without their problematic and reductive aspects, they serve to flag the basic inequity of the senses that predominates culturally, and highlight the relationship of this perceptual bias to our dominant modes of knowledge (epistemolgical frameworks), and the technological extensions of a given culture. This relationship between the senses, modes of knowledge, and technological mediation is of central importance here,  as these three concerns and their relationship are key to this enquiry.

McLuhan, in contrast to another Canadian figure of central importance in this study, R Murray Schafer, evidently was optimistic about the role technology might play in correcting this relationship toward developing a more balanced sensory-gestalt. As quoted above, in his eyes; “rock video has as much acoustic power as a Watusi mating dance”[5]

The  French film theorist Christian Metz exposes a similar line of thought regarding the primacy of vision in contemporary western culture, in which vision and touch take on primary significance among the sense faculties, with hearing, taste, smell etc, playing a secondary role. He differs from McLuhan in the sense that his point of emphasis is ontological/epistemological focused rather than McLuhan’s socio-technological emphasis;

“There is a kind of primitive substantialism which is profoundly rooted in our culture (and without a doubt in other cultures as well, though not necessarily in all cultures) which distinguishes fairly rigidly the primary qualities that determine the list of objects (substances) and the secondary qualities which correspond to attributes applicable to these objects. This conception is reflected in the entire Western philosophic tradition beginning with notions put forth by Descartes and Spinoza. It is also clear that this "world view" has something to do with the subject-predicate structure particularly prevalent in Indo-European languages. For us, the primary qualities are in general visual and tactile. Tactile, because touch is traditionally the very criteria of materiality. Visual because the identification processes necessary to present-day life and to production techniques rely on the eye above all the other senses (it is only in language that the auditory order is "rehabilitated", as if by compensation). The subject is too vast for this study. Nevertheless, it is possible to begin to discern certain qualities which seem to be "secondary": sounds, (evoked above), olfactory qualities (a "scent" is barely an object), and even certain sub-dimensions of the visual order such as color.”[6]

This critique of the primacy of the visual put forward by theorists such as McLuhan and Metz, has by un-large fallen on deaf ears. Though various artists/composers primarily with the Classical Avant-Guard and the Sonic Arts frame –individuals obviously somewhat more sensitive to these concerns-, have made significant attempts to correct or in the least raise awareness of this imbalance. It is this process (within the nascent discipline of sonic arts), an opening of the ears so to speak, with which we will now concern ourselves.

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[1] McLuhan, Marshall, Visual and Acoustic Space excerpt from Audio Culture, eds. Christopher Cox and David Warner, Continuum, New York, 2006, pg 68

[2] Ibid, pg 68

[3] Ibid, pg 69

[4] Ibid, pg 69

[5] Ibid, pg 71

[6] Metz, Christian, and Gurrieri, Georgia, Aural Objects, excerpt Yale French Studies, No. 60, Cinema/Sound, 1980, pg  68-69 

Soundmaps, Soundscape Compositions, and Soundwalks - thoughts on their relationship -

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.

--

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.

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

Schizophonia & Schismogenesis (pt I): Schizophonia

Stephen Feld's appropriation & juxtaposition of Schafer's notion of Schizophonia with Gregory Bateson's notion of Schismogenesis is a useful point of reference here, in terms of articulating the inherent dislocation present in environmental recordings, and the success of artists such as Westerkamp etc, in terms of using this dislocation or schism productively.

Schizophonia:


"The Greek prefix schizo means split, seperated, and phone is Greek for voice. Schizophonia refers to the split between an original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction." - R. Murray Schafer (1)


Schafer (who is in a sense the father of the acoustic ecology movement) in his foundational text The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World seems to hold an almost fundamental distrust for modern technology, and the process of psychological and sociological fragmentation that he attributes to it. This sort of bias against industrial/post-industrial society and technology seems to inhabit much of his work, implicit in such notions of "hi-fi" and "lo-fi" (2) environments, and his dismissal of the acoustic milieu of urban space as mere "noise", as well as the aforementioned notion of schizophonia.

"Since the invention of electroacoustical equipment, for the transmission and storage of sound, any sound, no matter how tiny, can be blown up and shot around the world, or packaged on tape or record for the generations of the future. We have split the sound from the maker of the amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape. In the same instant it may issue from millions, of holes in millions of public and private places around the world, or it may be stored to be reproduced at a later date, perhaps eventually hundreds of years after it was originally uttered. A record or tape collection may contain items from widely diverse cultures and historical periods in what would seem to a person from any century but our own, a meaningless and surrealistic juxtaposition." (3)

Schafer's concern is not only the schism, and resulting "meaningless juxtaposition" that is created, but also the role of the "synthetic soundscape" that is produced through this process, as a further element of obscuration of the natural "hi-fi" sound world. While Schafer's inherent biases make much of work useless here-in as anything other but a point of critique and contrast, the above notion of schizophonia does serve as a useful descriptive term, when it comes to articulating the sense of dislocation that seems implicit in environmental recordings (i.e within the current sound map frame). While the emphasis in Schafer's work is very much negative,  Feld's juxtaposition and extension of the concept vis a vis the notion of schizmogenesis provides something useful here, in that it articulates the sought of productive engagement with the space made by the dislocation/schism as seen in the work of such artists as Westerkamp etc. In part II of this blog-entry we will explore Feld's use of schizmogenesis, it's relationship to & embodiment in the work of Hildegard Westerkamp, and look at what can be drawn from this in terms of sound map practice.

1) Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape; the tuning of the world, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 1977, pg 90
2) Ibid, pg 43
3) Ibid, pg 90

The Sound Walk (pt III) - Conclusions

The sound walk is in many ways the dialectical opposite to the sound map; it is spatially situated, rather than removed/abstracted and tagged to a cartographic rendering of space/place and it is typically highly narrative orientated rather than primarily based around documentation, as so many sound maps and the archives of recordings they host tend to be. From another perspective though they can be seen to occupy poles on a continuum of acoustic ecology practice/s; as all such practices bleed into and support each other. As within a single work (or an extending body of work) from an artists such as Hilderkamp etc one will see soundwalk techniques, field recording, soundscape composition, sound mapping etc combined in various ways to create a particular listening/revealing of a particular sound enviroment.

Much of the sound work within the sound walk frame though, does seem much more highly developed and elaborated than the current fair one see's within the explicit sound map frame (Although there are various more progressive examples which we will look at in upcoming posts.)Two of the primary developments within the sound walk frame, (which as aforementioned  are explicitly embodied in Westerkamp's work) are the productive use of narrative, and a creative engagement with the inherent dislocation that seems implicit in the process of field recording. Both of which could be appropriated to sound map practice as possible extensions.

Narrative: The use of narrative here-in allows for a greater revealing of context, and relationship as present in the sound environment, when it is employed successfully. Which is something significantly lacking from the mere documentation, point and click approach to recording that seems to populated sound map projects. It also can be used to highlight the participatory relationship of the listener to the environment, and the constructed perspective implicit via the representation/mediation of the recording process. The main limitation here is that the use of narrative constructs a privileged position (i.e the artist/composer) whereby a singular primary narrative/logic is imposed on the listener-environment relationship, whilst at the same time reducing the listener to a degree of second rate participation in the experience, as a audience member, rather than truly a listener-composer oneself.

It seems to me that the employment of narrative techniques within the sound map frame pose one of the primary avenues whereby sound map practice could begin to go beyond the mode of mere documentation that has thus far dominated it's history. It is my hypothesis that the architecture of the soundmap interface/platform can be designed to facilitate inter-textual multi-media narrative/s as a way of extending the basic field recording and listening practices that form the basis of the platform. Furthermore the aforementioned limitation of the authorial voice/privileged position of the artist/composer would be limited by the inherently participatory nature of the sound map, as it's recordings are constructed by myriad artists/users, who themselves continually switch between the logic of composer/audience member within their engagement with the platform, it's archive of recordings, and other users.

Dislocation: The aforementioned dislocation is similarly present within sound map practice (as it is inherent within field recording to some degree) though one would hope that through narrative-emphasis and site-listening integration the dislocation could become productive as it often is within sound walk practice rather than limiting. The emphasis here being to find a way to use the dislocation to produce difference, and transformation rather the just disassociation.

The Soundwalk (pt II) - Hildegard Westerkamp; narrative, transformation, and dislocation

Kit's Beach - Hildegard Westerkamp from Vicky Carr on Vimeo.

Hildegard Westerkamp is a German/Canadian composer who was involved with R Murray Schafer etc in the 1970s as part of the original team of people that founded the acoustic ecology movement, and the World Soundscape project.

Westerkamp's work continues to center around environmentally orientated sound practice; employing a range of techniques/methods ranging from soundwalks & field-recordings; to sound-scape orientated composition and installation work. Her work occupies a liminal territory between categories; field recording and soundscape composition, documentation and docudrama, empiricism and poeisis, are blended together to create something more, to offer an entrance point to a living experience of a sound environment. In her own words she: "transforms sound in order to highlight it's original contours and meanings"(1). "Such original contours and meanings are to be found not strictly within the acoustic shape and dimension of the sound object, but in the contextual location of its origin"(2).

In such a way her work is highly narrative based, and compositional, but uses fiction in a functional manner, to suggest or elude to something that lies beyond. Rather than attempting or presuming to be able to document the sound-environment and somehow capture it's essence via merely technological means, she employs a wide ranging methodology; that is as creative & poetic as it is empirical, to try and reveal something that the microphone itself seems unable to pick up; the living breathing sound-environment, not as a mere objective plane, but as a intersubjective experience, as subjective and social as empirical or objective.

Another interesting aspect of Westerkamp's work is how she plays on the inherent dislocation present in environmental recordings (which I have previously touched on), engaging it creatively and productively rather than trying to escape it. "For Westerkamp (and others) dislocation seems to posit the possibility of finding place: to bring the alien back home. Such tension, I would propose, is at the heart of Transformations and other related works, and further, functions as the potential of environmental recording itself: that is, to offer up difference"(3). Through this dislocation an opening is created, whereby a new relationship to the sound-world can emerge in the listener as they follow the traces or lines of flight offered up by Westerkamp.

1) Westerkamp, Hildegard, from the liner notes of her CD Transformations (Montreal, Empreintes Digitales, 1996), p. 20
2) Labelle, Brandon, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum, New York, NY, 2006, pg 206
3) Ibid, pg 211

The Soundwalk (pt I) - Introduction

The soundwalk is an interesting point of reference in relationship to the soundmap, as in many ways both are representative of the same overall process/movement within the sonic-arts; that of environmentally orientated sound practice (I will use the term acoustic ecology here as a working term), and both have inherently similar goals that center around trying to foster a greater awareness, and engagement with the sound environment that we all inhabit. 


It seems that the soundwalk though is the more developed/elaborated of that two, in that numerous artists from Max Neuhaus, too Hildegard Westerkamp and Janet Cardiff, have through their own practice (and experimentation within the overarching model) furthered the soundwalk as a acoustic ecology practice considerably.


In Westerkamp's words;


"A soundwalk is any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are. We may be at home, we may be walking across a downtown street, through a park, along the beach; we may be sitting in a doctor's office, in a hotel lobby, in a bank; we may be shopping in a supermarket, a department store, or a Chinese grocery store; we may be standing at the airport, the train station, the bus-stop. Wherever we go we will give our ears priority. They have been neglected by us for a long time and, as a result, we have done little to develop an acoustic environment of good quality." (Autumn Leaves, Sound and the Environment in Artistic Practice, Ed. Angus Carlyle, Double Entendre, Paris, 2007, p. 49 - http://www.sfu.ca/~westerka/writings%20page/articles%20pages/soundwalking.html)


In it's basic form the soundwalk tries to facilitate engagement with the sound environment in the field, through active/close listening, typically guided by oral/textual instructions/cues from a director, or from an audio recording listened to via headphones. 


An example from the same text as the above; 


"Start by listening to the sounds of your body while moving. They are closest to you and establish the first dialogue between you and the environment. If you can hear even the quietest of these sounds you are moving through an environment which is scaled on human proportions. In other words, with your voice or your footsteps for instance, you are "talking" to your environment which then in turn responds by giving your sounds a specific acoustic quality.

Try to move
Without making any sound.
Is it possible?

Which is
the quietest sound of your body?

(If, however, you cannot hear the sounds you yourself produce,
you experience a soundscape out of balance. Human proportions have
no meaning here. Not only are your voice and footsteps inaudible but also
your ear is dealing with an overload of sound).

Lead your ears away from your own sounds and
listen to the sounds nearby.

What do you hear? (Make a list)

What else do you hear?
Other people
Nature sounds..."

In such a way the engagement is prescribed through some sought of instruction or narrative construct, which tries to facilitate a heightened listening experience in the subject.


(Part II will focus on the soundwalk practice Hildegard Westerkamp before I will look to draw some conclusions and look for possible points of integration between soundwalk and soundmap practice in Part III) 

The Sound Map: extensions

Based on the aforementioned critique in which two key issues with the standard sound map model were outlined I'm looking at possible avenues to resolve these issues and extend the overall functionality of the sound map...


These issues centered around two key points:

• A discontinuity between recordings and between users; which I hypothesize is a issue of the interface/collaborative architecture of the current sound map model. In such a way I will be looking into ways of creating a interface/collaborative architecture more suited to allowing connections/associations between recording and between users to occur. I am also looking at ways of developing a means of allowing for inter-textual narratives to emerge through the use of textual and visual support material etc.
• The inherently disembodied and spatially disassociated aspect of the sound map, due to the experiential limitations of engaging a body of sound recordings in a spatially dislocated manner, via digital abstract cartographic rendering of a environment. A possible avenue here that I am investigating - which borrows from the related practice of the sound walk, a practice I will explore in my next post - is the use of Augmented Reality technology as a extension of the sound map that would allow for site-listening. The idea here being that this would overcome the spatial dislocation caused by listening to the recording an isolated environment, and allow the user/listening to engage with the sound environment the recording serving as a revealing of a certain listening/experience of that particularly sonic space, an invitation to listen if you will. 

These possible extensions will be explored further in upcoming posts... 

The Sound Map; overview & critique of the current model/s

Spanish sound map; one of the few to offer the ability
to upload visual support material

The established design-model used in most sound-maps seems to involve a body of recordings produced by discrete users tagged to an online map; typically an embedded goggle map with modified API. They create a platform for users to upload recordings, facilitating a basic documentation of the sound environment, and provide a body of sonic reference material to the interested listener.


The experience of interacting with such a map/body of recordings provides a somewhat disassociated  listening experience; as the listener is presented with a mass of discrete/disembodied sound bytes of the sound-environment of the region in question tagged to a map. The recordings are typically linked/associated often only by technical specifics of the content; time, date, recording medium etc. Some sound-maps offer more involved means of creating/elaborating narratives from the recorded material; textual and visual support material etc, and creating associative connections between recordings by means of tags, but still the aforementioned issue is predominant. In such a way the current model, seems to only go as far as -at best- allowing a basic representation/documentation of the sound-environment. The living, breathing, sound-world though remains largely obscured.


The nature of an online map in itself provides another inherent issue; that of disembodiment. The user's experience of the sound-environment in such a model is entirely disembodied and disassociated from the environment from whence the recordings came. On one level this can facilitate a closer listening of the soundscape/sound-objects of the given environment, as they are stripped of the visual referents to which they would often be reduced, but in the same sense it creates a total spatio-temporal displacement/disassociation that is problematic, the recordings tagged merely to a abstract cartographic rendering of a living place/space. 


(The soundwalk provides an interesting contrast here in that they create a temporal but not spatial disassociation; something I will explore in an upcoming post) 


This displacement limits the understanding/engagement with the inherently participatory nature of the sound-environment as the user/listener in such a context is left to interact with a series of disembodied collection of recordings without any understand of the nuances and specifics of the space from whence the recording came, and without any required engagement/participation in the spatial dynamics of the place.


Critique: 

• The current sound-map model seems to produce a body of discrete recordings, made by discrete users. In doing so it fails to reveal the living breathing sound-environment on a level beyond basic representation/documentation. In such a way the human element is largely left out, and the inherently participatory aspect of the experience of listening are largely ignored. 
• Secondarily, the complete spatio-temporal displacement that is engendered by the interface in question (the online embedded-map) creates a disassociation from the actual environment that I think further obscures a participatory and embodied engagement with the sound environment that is key to cultivating aural/acoustic awareness. 

Examples:

• Barcelona Sound Map
• Spanish Sound Map; one of the few to offer the ability to offer visual support material.
• London Sound Survery; distinct grid based geotagging system, also offers a wide variety of recordings, content etc.
• Montreal Sound Map

From the Personal to the Collaborative

The initial compositional idea outlined in my proposal was essentially a personalized representation/engagement with the local sound-environment. Stemming from my understanding that the sound-world is on some level inherently participatory/collaborative; both in terms of it production and it’s revealing/exposition in the experience of listening, it seemed appropriate to rather than create a more personalized work, construct a collaborative platform to facilitate participation and engagement with the local sound environment.

From here the sound-map presented itself as a interesting referent point.

Excerpts from Initial Proposal

Overview:

The world we inhabit is abound with sound, from the ghostly rustling of leaves in the wind, to the mechanical throb of a passing car’s engine, to the high pitch staccato hum of the cicada. The sonic life-world is rich with timbres & textures waiting to be apprehended by the willing ear.

The proposed project draws on the notion that the listening experience, and by extension the experience of the sonic life-world is de-emphasized in our current cultural-context, playing second fiddle to vision as our dominant mode of sensory engagement with the world. Drawing upon the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Marleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, various strains of film (Metz) and media-theory (McLuhan), psycho-acoustic research, and Salome Voegelin’s study of the philosophy of sound/sonic arts (alongside various other texts dealing with the sonic-arts in specific) my project will endeavor to chart and explore this relationship.

Using this theoretical basis as a point of departure, I will endeavor to employ a design-methodology derived from various strains of the sonic-arts in an attempt to construct an interactive sonic-art piece that can temporarily invert this relationship in the participant-listener, and lead the listener back into an immediate, immanent engagement with the sonic life-world.

Aims and Objectives:

Building on the work of Salome Voegelin, I will explore/outline the existing discourses present in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory that deal with sense perception, epistemology and mediation, and endeavor to identify correlations between this material and the results of current psycho-acoustic research. Construct a methodology drawing on various strains of sonic-arts praxis; from the Acousmatic Research of Pierre Schaeffer, the Field-Recording and Site-Specific Listening of artists such as Lawrence English and Akio Suzuki, and the Sound Walk & Listening practices espoused by the likes of The World Listening Project. Drawing on these aesthetic, theoretic, and practical foundations, compose a sonic-art piece that can successfully facilitate an immanent, engaging experience of the sonic life world in the participant-listener.

Research Benefits/Significance:

Central to this project is the idea that the listening experience, and by extension the sonic-life world, are de-emphasized aspects of our experience both on a subjective/personal level and on a wider social level. This neglect limits our ability to experience and understand many of the subtleties and nuances of the world we inhabit, reducing our ability to engage and apprehend the world to certain sensory channels, and by extension to the certain layers of ontological strata, to which these sensory modalities allow access. Cultivating listening as a means of engagement with the world, and the greater appreciation and understanding of the sonic life-world that such listening facilitates has a range of positive implications both subjectivity and socially.

Indeed it is this process that Voegelin identifies as central to the praxis of sonic-arts, and it is within this context that this project should be considered; as part of an on-going attempt to promote listening as a means of engagement with the world and the validity and importance of the experience of the sonic life-world in and of its own right. This wider initiative of which this project is apart has many implications and benefits in diverse cultural fields, from aesthetics, to environmental ethics.