Tag: Contemporary Issues in Sound Art

Utilising the footstep like a kick drum, I created two bus channels for the left and right sides of the stereo field. With the mangled, glitching pad that I had created with Reaktor I recorded a long sustained note.

Using Valhalla DSP’s ÜberMod plugin, I designed a reverb and delay that would smooth the most frantic aspects of the raw drone. Bringing to the fore its most prominent melodic aspects enabled me to discern where sonic events could take place that surrounded and complemented it. A compressor the sidechain effect I had imagined, binding it to my footsteps. This formed the core of the composition.

Beyond Reaktor, by far the most useful recording process was the Radial X-Amp, through which I could re-amp sound files through pedals and a Marshall amplifier, in order to distress them a little. Break them from the entirely digital realm.

I felt that the composition, while repetitive by design, or operating in a droning, flowing state, could use a fixed event. I recorded and re-amped a passage of electric guitar chords, cymbals and the Reaktor drone through a ProCo Turbo Rat pedal, intended as a moment where something comes into view; be it a mountain, moor or thought, before the mind returns to scouring the ground.

Picking out some remaining lower frequency events in the Reaktor drone, I added a bass tone to accentuate its harmonic content, using a Behringer K-2 analogue synthesizer.

With Ableton, I experimented with re-sampling the electric guitar passages, trying to create a recurrent motif. Using Simpler and slicing, I was able to form new, swinging melodic sequences. I abandoned these in their rawest form, feeling that I was moving too far from the walking stimulus, doing too much. I fed some portions through the ÜberMod and compressor bus I had set up, but the pitch differential between the Ableton sample and the Reaktor drone was too jarring.

Instead what I chose to do, taking the initial MIDI harmonic conversion I had made in Ableton, I transcribed significant chords that could harmonise with the Reaktor drone. Finally using the JV-1080 and re-amping the resultant recordings, I added additional drones of synth pad and guitar tones, to better complement the ending, meditative section of the piece.

---

Much of the lecture material demonstrates the increased need for academic study or collaborative work in order to access streams of funding. I almost want to push back on the idea that this is a necessity, it seems to speak to London-centric institutional culture; like credible art doesn’t exist without money’s influence. I understand the want to pursue it, I dream of it.

I think the outcome of the Gallery 46 show instilled a desire to introduce more of my fine art practice into sound art. It seems sounding sculptures are a popular means of physically showing pieces. While I feel a real resistance to conforming out of insecurity, I have been dreaming of working with large-scale resin pieces for the final degree show, wondering how to make them sound. As far as future career goals go, I hold no illusions as to the difficulty in making an artistic practice financially viable, especially with how slow-moving and reclusive my own practice can be.

Again, I return to instinct as the most powerful motivator. I have produced a composition far louder, more effusive and dramatic than I perhaps intended. Perhaps even obscuring for the general listener the concept at its heart. Often I’m second guessing myself, imposing some rising and falling dynamics because I’m somewhat petrified of the work landing with a dull thud. This facet of my instinct is one to push hard against, I feel, moving forward. I didn’t want to give myself the situational advantage of field recordings in this piece; working around walking, the least interesting experiments involved simply recording walking. Field recordings of that nature seemed like an empirical short cut.

I do worry that by remaining in the romantic, often musical compositional artmaking tradition whereby ‘x represents z because I say so’, I am staying in the kiddie pool. Braver, more brazen artists than myself drape a single recording over the listener and all manner of discourse seems to unfurl from it. And yet, I was not drawn to similar approaches making this work. It’s interesting, I came into this course utterly confused as to where music’s place in sound art was, why it was seemingly discouraged, and indignantly pursuing it anyway. Now I feel hampered by music, choked by an inability to academically express why it should represent ‘z’ at all. It feels both right and wrong to be in this zone. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say there’s an intimidating, very elusive expectation to conform to whatever sound art is, and maybe that’s why ‘experimental music’ is potentially being added to the degree’s title. If it is, then I’m in the ballpark! If it’s plain old ‘sound art’, I can’t say I know where I am. I’ll keep my face stony and maintain my story. Tell my truth.

My composition, ‘Walking’, is a sublime, bracing march through the landscape, the inner world somatically carrying the piece. External factors, shoes on the ground, birdsong, wind, are filtered out as the listener joins the walk at the transportive point where the walker retreats inside themselves, tiring as the mind scatters. Sluggish in the body, yet euphoric and fast-moving in the mind. The peculiar, repetitive sifting of input experience and memory, talking to yourself, incoherent and content to keep moving.

---

A soundwalking artist I discovered that resonated with the core themes of my creative project and research paper, Alisa Oleva’s walking art works provided much inner debate.

These 32 women discuss their concepts of home, safety, the city of Istanbul, culture and womanhood. Oleva walked simultaneously with her conversation partner via video call from London, prompting discussion with a series of questions: “If I ask you to walk me home, where would you take me?”, “Does home mean feeling safe?”, “What makes you feel at home?”, “Is it where you live now or a different place?”, “Or is it not even a place?”.

As I listen, I wonder to myself the value of conversation. Many of life’s most significant conversations, sharing of ideas and experiences, take place during walks. Aesthetically, this work goes against almost everything I seek out for stimulation from art. As much as we think when we walk, our speech can dull with exertion

It is important to explore the stories and experiences of diasporic women, their observations are unique in their perspective. Yet, I feel unsure how to comment on it as an artwork beyond that. The intimacy that walking, or soundwalking, with a companion discussing home, an intimate subject, affords very personal discussion full of wisdom, yet the recording quality obfuscates it a great deal. Is fidelity and discernibility important on a recorded soundwalk such as this? I believe it could aid its messaging, perhaps. When an artwork is totally uninterested in the trappings of aesthetics, it’s very hard to feel out, for me. The subjectivity in a work is greatly foregrounded in these conversational soundwalk pieces, requiring truly empathetic listening.

---

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.

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.

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.

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.

---

For the longest time, and unusually, I struggled to form a creative response to the soundwalking, or walking, stimulus that compelled me. I selected soundwalking as a written subject because I was troubled by it, the search for knowledge from the world, the thought of making my own soundwalk never particularly excited me. I often find field recordings bald and motiveless without apparent, messy human intervention, and soundwalking demands I produce some knowledge. At least, I felt the burden of having to create a composition that meant something beyond my own determinism. My head was swimming with theory and philosophical debate, and carrying a similar air into my creative practice felt needlessly peremptory. I chose walking because I was seeking a somatic, embodied escape, walking helps process things, it’s purposeful and strident.

Shamefully, I trace my initial thoughts about this creative project to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. A remaster of the game was rumoured, then released, pushing it back into the collective conscious. I say shamefully, because sound art seems to have little truck for entertainment, and yet, banal popular culture does inform my practice a great deal. Video games are not things I profess to understand or necessarily enjoy,

A decidedly campy high fantasy role playing game, Oblivion‘s memorable story about prophecy and demonic invasion is less important to me than its world. It takes place in luscious Cyrodiil, a forested, medieval western Europe, Tolkienian pastiche, depicted charmingly and beautifully, even for 2006. I would take night walks listening to Jeremy Soule’s soundtrack, in particular this piece, on loop:

I enjoy the blurring of the real and imagined, allowing myself to pretend I was a solitary adventurer, wandering alone through the dells and woods. Sonically, allowing the music to meld with the pheasants and owls. I think it strange that virtual walking ultimately sparked inspiration over real walking, as I had intended.

I have been pursuing much YouTube media about Oblivion, and came upon the conceptual term of the ‘overworld’; the central, open map which the player traverses. In particular, the ‘overworld theme’, music designed for roaming. I thought it was an unusual, neutral state to inhabit

that I felt truly represented in the descriptive wandering of forests and fields, it always feels like home. Not in a nostalgic sense, but in reality. Long walks filled with small observations, clouds of thought accompanying.

Early in the formative processes of this project, I knew I wanted to make a work that concerned embodiment. So much of our expected working is spent sat at the computer, so I wanted to pursue a creative response surrounding something I was truly interested in, and perform daily.

Returning to these memories, alongside renewed interest in the game because of its recently released remaster, I consumed a lot of media related to it. One particular YouTube rabbit hole I had fallen down concerned speculative soundtrack pieces made in GarageBand by Emmett LaFave.

The videos brought up the idea of an overworld theme, a ubiquitous piece of music designed to fill a passive, exploratory state of mind. I thought that, in many ways, that’s how we listen to music as we walk. Coupled with this were Tolkien’s walking songs,

I began by making a brief, simplistic composition in GarageBand, an imagined piece for roaming on foot. I employed a simple, orchestral palette of harp, strings, choir, upright bass, percussion and tuba.

Taking this composition, intended to loop, I brought it into a grain sampler in Native Instruments Reaktor 6. I chose to invest in a new tool for digital signal processing as, though I am very much enamoured with the analog chainsaw carving that is pedal processing, I wanted to explore the fractal, abstract possibilities of the paradigm and challenge myself.

Within Logic Pro, I experimented with modifying Reaktor’s Grain Sampler. Granular Synthesis has a cascading, sculptural quality that I have always been drawn to, yet never fully engaged with. I suppose I have often found myself intimidated by the

This is a tool which I wish to grasp deeply, which will take sustained time experimenting with it.

I then used Ableton to convert the harmonic content of the piece to MIDI, with a view to experimenting with it with the Roland JV-1080.

---

Footpath NIN/22/1

I realised that perhaps I couldn’t fully engage with walking as a subject matter without examining Footpath NIN/22/1. Without doxing myself, I walk this particular local path twice a day, most days. I’ve known it to be called ‘Dead Man’s Gullet’ from my mother, only within the last two years hearing of the name ‘The Cutting’ from a neighbour. I have no idea why it earned the former name, beyond “that’s what it was always called.” The latter makes more sense, as this path is a 237 metre shortcut to the lane on the other side.

Throughout the summer of 2024, the subsidence became really apparent. The passage seemed to close day by day, choked with its new density. The path also developed sudden rises and falls, I was startled by how radically it changed, and continually. Even along the first hundred metres, I would forget the path, lose it and have to squat-push through thick ivy drapes, eyes scratched. The land was sliding downhill and distorting the path with it.

Soon enough it was closed for the first time. I would sneak in, jumping fences to see what the county council workers assigned to this were up to. Leaving for Korea again for four weeks, I hoped it would be restored by the time I got back. The absurdity of these landscapers working on a path only I probably used, and I peered from the undergrowth. Obsessed. Generations of people walking a slow motion mudslide. I thought about this temporality, a long change in the wait suddenly speeding up, radically transforming the ecology of the landscape. And all in so small a strip of land. How to explore this temporality in a compositional medium?

I came home, the path was fixed, albeit badly. With the first heavy rain, it all sloshed away again. New voids opened up and swallowed the dinky, “that’ll do” path they made. But what could they do? These natural processes warranted more resource and effort than was afforded, in order to actually stop them. Stubbornly, I kept walking it. Thick mud and exposed roots

Finally, (very much the wrong word in this constant churning, settling and resettling and upending of things) a second crew came, fully cleared the path of all trees, (bar the prow of a headless birch, the figurehead on this mud ship) tracked in the slope with excavators, without closing the path. I don’t expect it to remain, however, as it looks much the same as the first crew’s attempt.

In these pictures I include here, I attempt to illustrate some of the changes this path has undergone within the last year, and yet they don’t convey just how dramatic the shifting has been. It was a functional footpath with a bridge, then a jungle-like web of dense trunks, then this new, excoriated temporary solution to a natural problem. If it can be considered a problem. I examined the varieties of walked experience this path provided me in recent times, translating it into thematic material for an artwork. Much like the surfacing detritus, exhumed from the clay tide, a case study took focus.

---

Frown at my insistence on artless interests!

Only when I start to flag on a long walk, I resort to music or a podcast. I hold off for as long as possible, the awareness of surrounding sounds being enough, in a Cage-like fashion. Walking is the most appropriate time to indulge in media avoidance, the temptation to go to my phone ringing in my brain. I shouldn’t need additional entertainment. However.

I listened to Craig Reynold’s interview with Emperor’s Ihsahn on The Downbeat Podcast in the dim dark, which led me to his synthesizer-driven, musical works.

In my own work as of late, I have been writing more MIDI than previously. Investing in a Roland SR-JV80-02 Orchestral Expansion Card had been seesawing in my mind, so I finally caved and got one. I had been using Spitfire Audio’s free BBC Symphony Orchestra VST here and there, never very satisfied.

I have been keenly interested in Ihsahn’s orchestral versions of his metal works, repeatedly digesting ‘Opus a Satana’, his JV-1080 iteration of Emperor’s ‘Inno a Satana’, from their 1997 Reverence EP. How can I interpret this? I like metal and its associated worlds as a nascent, blocky, modern-day envisioning of an indistinct, ancient, earth-belonging. There’s raw, human poetry to it, the shiny veneer of ice atop the murk of the deep lake. I keep coming back to it.

A modern day creation, analogous in my mind to wood carving or yodelling, I struggle to talk about metal, mostly because I don’t feel as if I ever make anything truly resembling it. As much as I would love to. I somewhat fear a certain tackiness in bringing it up in a sound arts, especially popular, well-established bands as major influences. The perceived music and sound divide arises again. I can foresee some big-picture differences, in form, structure and culture. I am pursuing this tonal palette as an expressive form to explore my walking subject matter.

On an entirely different note. In a similar vein to Jan Terri, Kyle M has made sweet, charming, yet intentional, ironically bad music. Songs are shallow, banal, stylistic riffs on The Beach Boys, Beatles, 90’s West Coast R&B. It’s a tour of obvious genres, school play vibes. As if you released your first songs you ever wrote and treated them seriously.

On my walks I’ve chewed over what the sound art version of this joke is. In my most cynical, mean-spirited moments, I don’t think you could make this joke without people not seeing it as parody. Fantasising about presenting a ‘sound art composition joke’ straight-faced, seeing who cracks. Here is a humiliating voice note, improvising with the theme. My first instinct was extended vocal technique or performance poetry, despite being low hanging fruit. I don’t have any concrete ideas at this time, and I’ve fantasised about presenting it straight-faced, seeing who cracks. I wouldn’t count this as a serious idea to consider pursuing, I’m rarely funny through craft or intention.

---

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.

Dorothee Schabert’s compositional perspective was one I took a lot of inspiration from. While the palette was seemingly austere, but the longer you listened, it resembled the act of walking, to me. Contemplative, existing on the boundary between neutral and emotive. ‘Nachklang I Padjelanta’, a 2023 piece named for a hiking trail in Sweden and performed by Ensemble Resonanz, was particularly striking.

Schabert stated that “Hiking through Lapland sets many inner processes going”, enabling you to “recover the distance gained between body and mind.” In relation to my initial conceptual explorations of walking practices, and the extensive computer-brain time required on this course, I felt this keenly. She encouraged listening to the tone and structure of the landscape, walking step by step. The sound of memory in landscape and being therein.

Quite simply, Schabert summarised “we create our landscape out of what we perceive.” Naturally, we often block out what doesn’t fit into the picture, coloured and modified by our mood and culminating in artworks. I thought it interesting that my essay examines this same tension, a creation of landscape versus the curiously sound studies-specific ethical concerns about representing the environment in an untouched way. In Schabert’s view, perhaps ‘landscape’ can be a construct that we arrange and organise in the artmaking process. That a sonic landscape can be interpreted musically by the artist.

I think in many ways, her thinking aligns with mine. As I have discovered in researching and writing my essay about soundwalking, which has many overlapping concerns surrounding humanity’s place in the landscape, this debate can be bottomless. Schabert’s clarity and simplicity in detailing her position was immensely refreshing, I felt a dawning recognition as her talk progressed. Perhaps, if there is space or time to include it, I could refer to this lecture in the essay. Compositionally, I think her lecture has helped assuage a great deal my own concerns surrounding music in the sound art sphere.

Her unfinished or unreleased piece, The Dying Apple Tree, was very intriguing. While the processing, simple time-stretching, was a little transparent, the way she used field recordings to form a narrative is something I wish to explore in greater detail moving forward.

---

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.