In an effort to consciously bind the process of the work’s making to its inspiration, walking, I taped a contact mic to my shoe and walked my familiar footpath. What drew me to this idea was the rhythm and momentum it could provide; knowing the actual recordings would be abrasively unlistenable, using it as an impulse for sidechain compression affecting another aspect of the composition appealed to me. An invisible, unpredictable motion through the work. Hollowed out, yet the key driving force within it. This way, I could thread a walk through the work, hang it from its footfalls, tie it directly to its thematic and literal stimulus.
The setup: Old trainer, contact mic taped to it. Hosa adapter and Zoom F3
I used a Zoom F3 for ergonomic reasons, with the simple contact mic we made in our first year so I wouldn’t damage the higher quality JrF contact mic I own. Taped simply to the heel, knowing that I tend to stomp unconsciously when I walk, I thought would be the most effective place to record clear, transient-heavy steps instead of staticky, consistent tones. I tested it by walking around the garden first, examining its responses to varying surfaces, testing its durability. Surprisingly, grassy, hard-packed earth seemed to be the loudest, rather than stone or tarmac. Because I could only record one ‘leg’ at a time, I decided to record a left foot pass and then transfer the contact to the other shoe, recording a right foot pass. How, and whether, they would align was a total mystery at this stage.
Idiot artist testing foolish contraption
I then walked the path, taking a series of recordings approximately five minutes each; a left and a right. Holding the Zoom, wire trailing around my legs, made me think of an insulin pump. Carrying necessary equipment with you everywhere, its perceived burdensomeness. I felt grateful to be able to walk uninhibited, and also more comfortable than I expected. As my gait started stiff and tentative, unwilling to let the input clip and distort, I eventually settled into my normal walking gait and pace. Representing it wholly honestly, I thought. However, as I glanced at the readout on the screen, it became apparent that my right side recordings were consistently louder than my left. I tried changing the mic’s placement, walking with more emphasis on my left, but nothing notably changed. I suspected at the time this was because I must heavily favour my right side, walking somewhat lopsided, years of bad posture bearing its weight. I still place credence in this observation, I physiologically learned about the nature of my own walking in this project, understanding sound art’s potential for useful knowledge production. I also think the mic was simply dying.
The destroyed mic, giving in at last
Bringing these recordings into Logic, I realised the initial idea inspiring me to try this: Panning the left foot left and the right foot right, the aural simulation of walking started to take shape. It sounded familiar, but would require extensive editing to make it usable. I wasn’t concerned about the peaking or clipping, as they would ultimately be muted to serve the sidechain compression, but the stereo balance badly favoured the right, reflecting my steps. Presented with the ethical compositional challenge of leaving the recordings untouched as the truest reflection of my walked condition, or ‘fixing’ the imbalance because it made for uncomfortable listening. Walking (haha) this line between audio professionalism and field recording ethics as detailed by Mark Peter Wright is a continual struggle. I settled on duplicating the right channel footsteps and shifting them to the left channel, ensuring that it was impossible to tell that they were repeating. If much of the rest of the composition was going to rest on the transients these recorded provided, it needed to be balanced.
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.
The principal work the Sensingsite collective showed was an in-progress audio-visual patchwork titled ‘In the Westfield’, concerning the Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford, its “economy of distraction” and occupation of the hyper-capitalist landscape. Through their methodologies developed through working with site, they question the meaning of landscape, the field, collective work and field recording as terms and practices.
The “scrappy and awkward” presentation, arbitrarily shuffled, echoed the impermanence of the fetishised, ever-shifting neoliberal consumer landscape. I understand the upending of traditional, bucolic interpretations of ‘landscape’. Yet, as artists or passersby, none of us can be outside the economy of extraction, consumption and exploitation. The “recordist is not unbiased”.
I actually ran the gauntlet of Korea’s Shinsegae Centum City* flagship store a few times, the largest mall in the world. Nightmarish experiences, needless to say. Korean hyper-consumerism is a different beast. But I understand the primal, anthropological substrate that they are exploring. Perhaps nowhere am I more out of place than when dragged through luxury goods, grass-stained, hair mussed, slack-jawed and tight-fisted.
I just felt this another pretty flawless example of my frustration with research-forward projects; where the ideas are thick, the artwork is thin. Am I seeing this everywhere unwarranted, proposing we suggest nothing? What is wrong with me? Riled continually, why do I idiotically bat for the apparent reduction of language?
What is it that I want, if not this? I think transformation of stimulus into art piece or composition demonstrated in Dorothee Schabert’s guest lecture resonates more with me than this nominative, memetic pointing at things. That perceptual experience isn’t simply reiterated, it’s reshaped.
They key expression they brought up, is that art is a “host” for research and theoretic resonances. Interestingly, Sensingsite stated that they had reached an evolved freedom from theory by having “disaffiliated” from institutional models. For an emphatically non-institutional collective, Sensingsite sure moved like one. Couching works in these unsubstantial terms of place, space and site is a convention so deeply attached to the ontological landscape of the art institution, as I see it.
Maybe that’s why I involuntarily roll my eyes and grumble watching a member of Sensingsite walk purposefully past Vodafone and JD Sports, vocalising above the hum, drawing curious reactions. I felt a connection to my reading of Peter Cusack, his problematisation of artists’ use of the “world as human composition” in soundscape works. Examining these aural and visual “thresholds” of perception, through the insertion of the artist as public performer, creates a sense of othering in regards to the shoppers around them. It struck me as a mild, facile kind of provocation.
Transparently, or tellingly, in discussing the ethical and semantic concerns of ‘In the Westfield’, the collective noted a tension in the ratio between “memetic recording exercise” and participatory performance. Instinctually, I felt the former coursing through the work more, yet perhaps they are symbiotic. In Sensingsite’s agenda-less, unintentional method of recording, memetic recording is a conduit for repercussive, perceptual discoveries as a group.
“Times are tough.” The unnamed ghouls of war and politics circle the room again. During the second Presidential Debate in September 2024, Trump infamously said “I have concepts of a plan.” Risible as it was, and continues to be, I think it somewhat apt in relation to these densely researched, ‘social-science-but-not’ projects that we often engage with.
The themes interrogating notions of landscape that Sensingsite brought up align with a curious lineage of recent lectures and self-directed research that I have attended. I am certain that pursuing this field will prove inspirational in this project.
*Note: THAT’S a place/space/site/landscape/hellscape that I would interested in a study of. It’s like the spaceship from Wall-E.
In my initial thinking about a theme to examine, I want to continue my focus on sociopolitically discursive work, with a predication for the earthy. Previously, construction, decolonisation, religion and physical labour were major themes I explored.
I wished I had had the opportunity to go deeper discussing the ethical, political and social relations that I mined in construction, with sound as the operative, transliterating tool. But, also I’m concerned about repeating myself too much, digging over old ground. I’ve consciously sensed a recurring interest not in harnessing properties of sound itself, but in external cultural themes or issues, then coming to sound to comment, replicate or transfigure. My audio paper, for instance, acted as a critical bridge between Christian colonisation and the church organ. Without being (too) snarky, I’ve been wanting to avoid the ‘science fair’ vibes that sound art can stray into, in my subjective view. Physically manifesting aural phenomena in that engineered way has yet to capture me. I wonder why?
A blog post I wrote for Element 1 of Specialising & Exhibiting resurfaced, striking me as a potential avenue for exploration. In it, I detailed walking 13 miles home from an abortive train journey. Walking is something I find deep meaning and purpose in, a physically-engaged practice, drawing connection between the feared “other” places and home, reaching beyond inhibition and exhaustion.
I think walking can create a healthy balance between physically-inhabited work that I am stimulated by, and the practice-based research approach required by this unit. Projects heavily weighted in the favour of practice-based research also place higher stakes on the veracity of the artwork produced. There’s been many lectures where the clouds of references, conceptual ideas and assertions part to reveal “experiment with beer can”, forty stark minutes of a can rattling around, bald and amateurishly recorded. I’m being facetious, and more than a little hyperbolic, but I can’t be the only person to cringe reading samey Eraserhead analyses. The institutional expectation of an evidentiary dossier that comes with an artwork, designed to quantify it, I find both practically realistic and spiritually perverse.
By chance, I read a new Tim Hecker (2025) interview that struck a similar chord: ‘But I was always against even someone like Brian Eno. In his new work, the question is, like, “what art does?” It’s such a British empiricist, pragmatic question. I’m not interested in the function that art’s serving in our society. I’m more interested in how it overflows and can’t be explained by pragmatism, empiricism and scientism. I don’t know if I’m a mystic, but I go against a lot of that stuff.’
I think I have half the brain of a mystic, and the other half a ‘British empiricist’. They seem to be in constant conflict. This dully myopic view of art, maybe humanity’s only ineffable, transcendental pursuit, to have literate, binary function is depressing. Reflexively bending it back on itself just to talk about human systems and structures, implying verifiable conclusions.
Maybe I’m taking the wrong tack. Research is the undeniable web within which we locate and align ourselves, it’s unavoidable and normal. Critical debate has certainly made me more articulate and dimensional in my thinking, plus it’s fun! Contradictions, everywhere. Yet, perhaps practice-based research attempts to annihilate contradiction, to even out ambiguity. I also don’t wish to assume an anti-intellectualist posture here, I do like research, and thinking I like even more. But I softly reject the institutional turning-over of the mystery at the centre of artmaking, and then do it myself anyway. What a mess, artmaking is a mess. In the spirit of Polyani (2009, pp. 4), ‘I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell.’
Hecker, T. (2025) ‘Tim Hecker Isn’t Afraid To Slow Down’. Interviewed by Ted Davis for Stereogum, 20 February. Available at: https://www.stereogum.com/2297752/tim-hecker-shards/interviews/ (Accessed: 22 February 2025).
Polyani, M. (2009) ‘The Tacit Dimension’. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
