Title ideas: Interventionism of the Soundwalk, Efficacy of the Soundwalk
‘The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below,” below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk-an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of the urban “text” they write without being able to read it.’ (pp. 93)
‘In the framework of enunciation, the walker constitutes, in relation to his position, both a near and a far, a here and a there. To the fact that the adverbs here and there are the indicators of a locutionary seat in verbal communication – a coincidence that reinforces the parallelism between linguistic and pedestrian enunciation – we must add that this location (here-there) (necessarily implied by walking and indicative of a present appropriation of space by an “I”) also has the function of introducing an other in relation to this “I” and of thus establishing a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places.’ (pp. 99)
‘Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories of it “speaks.” All the modalities sing a part in this chorus, changing from step to step, stepping in through proportions, sequences, and intensities which vary according to the time, the path taken and the walker. These enunciatory operations are of an unlimited diversity. They therefore cannot be reduced to their graphic trail.’ (pp. 99)
‘What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is currently lacking in one’s own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and condensations. As a corollary, one can measure the importance of these signifying practices (to tell oneself legends) as practices that invent spaces.’ (pp. 107)
DeCerteau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/reader.action?docID=922939&ppg=4
‘Discourses of fear are maps of a social reality perceived as problematic in moments when we are unsure what direction to take: whether to fight or flee, where and how to live, where to invest. The reality of city fear is always mediated by these discourses or representations of it.’ (pp. 231)
Sandercock, L. (2005) ‘Difference, Fear and Habitus: A Political Economy of Urban Fears’, in J. Hillier and E. Rooksby (eds.) Habitus: A Sense of Place. New York: Routledge.
‘Many people and many processes are involved in producing place qualities. These qualities are both material, in terms of the conjunction of built and natural forms into landscapes through which people and other life forms move as we go about in our lives. They are also mental constructs, ‘imaginaries’, created as we infuse particular places and their qualities with meaning and memory. In this way, we come to recognise places and realise why we care about them.’ (pp. 106)
Healey, P. (2015) ‘Civic Capacity, Place Governance and Progressive Localism’, in S. Davoudi and A. Madanipour (eds.) Reconsidering Localism. New York: Routledge.
“I like this image of a mirror. From the very beginning I’ve known that the work is first of all a mirror of our mind: depending on our mood, our perception of the work is altered. That’s incredible. There was one point when I was completely rejecting everything and at the beginning I got angry and I started to destroy things, which was silly. Because when I looked for some kind of shape it was there. Now, i’d rather go for a walk and let the work exist. And I know it’s exactly the same for the listener, depending on their mood.” – Eliane Radigue https://www.soundportraits.info/eliane-radigue/
Thoughts to pursue: Alisa Oleva – ‘A walk to the edge’, cassettes thrown from car windows
‘Researchers in the World Soundscape Project, founded in the early 1970s at Simon Fraser University in Canada by composer R. Murray Schafer, engaged in listening walks, which were often undertaken for orientation purposes during initial visits to places where the group intended to document and study the soundscape… Public soundwalks were led by acoustic ecologists to sensitize people to the sounds of the environment.’ (pp. 39)
‘More recently, soundwalking has taken on an explicitly artistic dimension. Viv Corringham records her conversations with a person who takes her on a “special walk”; later, she retraces the walk while recording her own improvised vocal responses to it. Andrea Polli traced repeating neighborhood soundwalks with GPS, the thickness of traced lines underlining her habitual walking patterns. A focus on environmental interaction in these walks is shared with other kinds of walking art, such as electrical walks (Christina Kubisch), audio walks (Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller), micro-radio walks (Michael Waterman; Kathy Kennedy), and walking performance (Christopher Long)… In this way artists and sound-walkers becomes cocreators, improvising with their environments.’ (pp. 39)
‘…to hear how it is being shaped by the space, weather conditions, and the sounds that are heard there at the moment; and by thinking about relationships between sonic moments. Sometimes in planned walks, that feeling of discovery is gone because the experience has become predictable, the route set… The risk of such preplanning is that the soundwalk becomes a spectacle, the walkers more like an appreciative audience than active participants.’ (pp. 42)
‘For me the answer lies in thinking about listening in soundwalks as a form of creative improvising. Ellen Waterman (2008b) defines creative improvising as “an intersubjective and dialogic practice in which past histories and future aspirations are conjoined in the immediacy of musical creation.” She goes on to say that “while it is almost impossible to pin down stylistically, creative improvisation by definition demands a reciprocal exchange among all participants… improvisation’s potential to model new social relations is dependent on the degree to which it disrupts discourse while maintaining fluid and unfixed” (2). I want to find a way of making soundwalks that encourage this kind of listening Waterman describes here, “intersubjective and dialogic,” where the focus is less on sensitizing numbed listeners to the sound environment and more on exploring the multiple ways people listen and how those ways of listening are conjoined, during the silence of the walk and the flow of the conversation after it, in reciprocal exchange.’ (pp. 42)
McCartney, A. (2016) ‘How Am I to Listen to You? Soundwalking, Intimacy and Improvised Listening’, in G. Siddall and E. Waterman (eds) Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound and Subjectivity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 39-42
‘Peter Cusack, a London-based sound artist, sees a number of problems with the “world as human composition” analogy common to soundscape work. He believes it places too much emphasis on preconceived ideas about what might make up a “good” composition based on “natural” sounds, distinct and in balance with one another, instead of embracing the aural complexity and creativity inherent to chaotic urban soundscapes. Cusack asks: “Should we really try to hear the acoustic environment as a musical composition when it clearly isn’t?”‘ (pp. 58)
Caines, R. (2016) ‘Community Sound [e]Scapes: Improvising Bodies and Site/Space/Place in New Media Audio Art’, in G. Siddall and E. Waterman (eds) Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound and Subjectivity. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 58
‘All silences are uncanny, because we have become estranged from absences of sound. An uncanny silence falls when it overlaps ‘
‘US-based sound artist and vocalist Viv Corringham also revoices other people’s words. In her longstanding series Shadow walks she invites local people to take her on a walk that is special or meaningful for them in some way. Apart from being a good way of engaging with the geography, history and culture of an unknown place, this methodology is a shortcut to intimate exchanges with relative strangers as, in the course of the walk, they divulge aspects of their lives, thoughts and feelings to Corringham.’ (pp. 210)
Lane, C. (2020) Encouragements, Self-Portraits, and Shadow Walks: Gender, Intimacy, and Voices in Sound Art.
‘This duration was answered by a stillness and passive receptivity of the audience, which included a new awareness of everyday life taking place around the performance. Furthermore, the performance created an awareness of the social and political situation of the site, its past and futures, and the awkward situation of being reminded of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ – a situation created through the awareness of being an audience to an existing reality when the inhabitants walked by, and a situation created in the sound performance when LaBelle in the second part addressed an ‘I’ and a ‘you’.’ (pp. 107)
Krogh Groth, S. and Samson, K. (2017) ‘Sound Art Situations’, Organised Sound, 22(1), pp. 107
‘Cut loose, specialized Homo economicus could move around in society, exploiting possessions and skills as the market offered, but at a price. Moving around freely diminishes sensory awareness, arousal by places or the people in those places. Any strong visceral connection to the environment threatens to tie the individual down. This was the premonition expressed at the end of The Merchant of Venice: to move freely, you can’t feel too much.’ (pp. 256)
Sennett, R. (1994) Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.