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.
Showing posts with label The Soundwalk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Soundwalk. Show all posts
Monday, 12 March 2012
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
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.
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
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)
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