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Acoustic Territoriality and the Politics of Urban Noise
Get PDFWithin recent years studies in urban culture have found inspiration from new paradigms and methods in the field of cultural geography. Instead of just mapping the physical character of the city structure, cultural geographers look closely at the culturally constructed meaning of places in the city. Reflected in such practices is a shift in focus from the mapping and the construction of a symbolic city around the core of historically founded identity, towards the city periphery and the meanings ascribed to the urban fabric through use. The multiple perspectives of everyday culture, mobility and the network city have come to supplement the central perspective of symbolic mapping
Sounding Interiors: Daydream, Imagination, and the Auscultation of Domestic Space
Get PDFAuscultation is the process medical doctors use to listen to the interior spaces of the body with a stethoscope and by knocking and tapping on the body’s exterior. The ambiance of interior domestic spaces is not only determined by surfaces and light, but also by their aural architecture (Blesser & Salter 2007). Each room’s unique configuration of surfaces and objects colours all sounds introduced into the space in a unique way. Acoustic feedback can be used to sonically embody or actualize the normally silent resonant frequencies of any room. Auscultation of my own domestic space was achieved by creating feedback with an amplifier and microphone, and by virtually introducing recordings of music into these spaces using the digital signal processing (DSP) technique of convolution. Recordings of these sounds were the basis of my soundscape composition Resounding Reverie, which embodies and investigates the place of the imagination and reverie within the aural architecture of a domestic space
Open Ears
Get PDFWe have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen. But this does not mean our ears are always open. "The violent and the righteous are hard of hearing," said Günter Grass. In every society it is possible to detect individuals or classes of people whose ears are open and those whose ears are closed. Open to change? Open to obey? Open to criticism? Open to new ideas? Open to messages from God? Or closed to them.
So far as I know, no historian has actually ever listened to history, that is, distinguished between good listeners and bad listeners, in an attempt to deduce what was happening or about to happen as a result of the clairaudience of some and the deafness of others. This is not to imply that listeners have always had an upper hand over non-listeners. Often the situation is reversed, as it seems to be at the present time, when we are increasingly ruled by the deaf. The three questions to ask are these:
1. Who’s listening?2. What are they listening to?3. What are they ignoring or refusing to listen to
Acoustic Ecologists and Environmental Psychologists: Working Toward a Quieter and Healthier Soundscape
Get PDFThe acoustic ecologist and the environmental psychologist have much in common; both are concerned with the role of sound in people’s lives. However, due to different educational backgrounds and experiences, the acoustic ecologist focuses to a greater extent on listening as a way to know and understand the sounds in the environment; the environmental psychologist is more interested in learning how these sounds affect people, especially those that are labeled noise. Despite their differences, acoustic ecologists and environmental psychologists would agree that the sounds around us have grown more unpleasant. Both would also concur that the health and well-being of all people depend on eliminating the harsh and piercing sounds which are dominating our aural environment. Acoustic ecologists and environmental psychologists should join forces in educating people about the dangers of these sounds and the fact that—as a result of noise—so many natural, beautiful and useful sounds have been cast into the background of our perception. This collaboration could go far in fostering a healthier soundscape for all of us. To paraphrase R. Murray Schafer: If the acoustic environment is a musical composition, then it is up to us to create a beautiful one
Aural (re)locations: Listening to place
Get PDFIn recent research, we have sought to understand the reciprocal relationships between music, sound and place, and what this may mean for notions of belonging and community-making. Yet, to investigate this is difficult, because responses to sound – and sound itself – are personal, embodied, transient and difficult to articulate in words. Furthermore, the processes of hearing and listening are understood differently. How to research the sonic qualities of place? And, in our thinking about the interconnections between bodies, place and sound: what is it about the qualities of sound that enables us to inhabit space, to call a place home
Insights into the Global Composition Taken at Three Stricken Places in Japan
Get PDFEarthquakes are the movement of the Earth’s surface, as activated by its sudden vibrations, and the sound of the Earth. In other words, sound is telling us that the Earth itself is an active “living organism” filled with hot magma that may shift to create earthquakes.
Earthquakes are among the natural disasters that occur often in monsoon Asia. In particular, Japan experiences many earthquakes. We who live in Japan have come to recognize this fact, and are more conscious of our land being located on large active faults that run under the ground.
A mega-quake occurred off the coast of Sanriku on March 11, 2011. The resulting tsunami wiped out many cities and communities along the Sanriku coast, with estimates of nearly 19,000 people who disappeared or were killed. The disaster also triggered a nuclear plant accident and subsequent events; consequently we have a renewed awareness that our soundscape is in essence a global composition, a work tuned through the providence of nature. As such we feel the importance of the now nearly-forgotten culture of those who had co-existed with nature, sharing soundscapes within their environment. At the same time, we also feel it is important to carry out research and recordings on our everyday life
A Second Life for Sound: Crossing Sonic Paths in Virtual Worlds
Get PDFI am not the first to discuss the wonders of virtual worlds. A read of Edward Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality (2007) is a good place to start to understand the potential of such environments and fascination with exploring life in technological microcosms. In 2010, I published Second Life, Media and The Other Society, a book that continues Castronova’s discussion, but with a narrower lens directed at one virtual world. A chapter of that book was dedicated to the role of sound in immersive virtual environments
Automatically Updated Soundmaps as a tool for environmental monitoring: Research in progress
Get PDFThe research work presented here is focused on the development of a method for the formation of Automatically Updated Soundmaps (AUSs) aiming to utilize them as a tool for environmental monitoring, regional planning and decision making. The proposed method consists of three steps: Development and deployment of a Wireless Sensor (Microphone) Network – WSN (Step 1), Pattern Recognition of the Environmental Sounds recorded and transmitted by the network (Step 2) and automated Soundmap creation, publishing and update (Step 3). Ongoing research based on encouraging preliminary results obtained within the scope of Steps 2 and 3, (Paraskevas et al., 2009; Rangoussi et al., 2010), currently focuses on Step 1 issues (electronics design, energy awareness and communications aspects of the WSN) as well as on the integration of all three steps into an interoperable application. The novelty of this research, compared to other relevant works (Aspuru et al., 2011), (Lavia et al., 2011), lies in the engineering approach taken towards the development and automated updates of the AUSs, inspired by the similar yet distinct notion of noise maps
Exploring Balance & Focus in Acoustic Ecology
Get PDFThe world at this time is in quite a bit of turmoil – environmentally, politically, socially, economically. Our conference hosts live in the middle of one right now that – I imagine – must have created some extraordinary challenges in their conference preparations. Despite it they kept going, following their passions and interests, working hard and against all odds. That’s why we are all able to gather for this event now. Please let’s acknowledge this and thank them warmly and loudly with a big round of applause.
Applause expresses how an audience feels about a performance or presentation. Is it a supportive sound, enthusiastic, bored, happy, moved, angry, or indifferent? Applause also gives us feedback about the room acoustics: how reverberant or sound absorbent it is; how the space distributes the frequencies, whether the space transmits all frequencies equally, or whether it emphasizes certain parts of the spectrum more than others, and so on.
I had a spectacular applause experience a few years ago when I visited the ancient amphitheatre of Herodeion, built at the base of the Acropolis in Athens. I had gone because I was curious about its acoustics. By chance a concert of Greek folk music was on that evening. The theatre holds 5000 people and was packed that night. Quite apart from the enthusiastic expression in the 5000 claps, the acoustics of this amphitheatre gave the applause a powerful brilliance and transparency. As a result my ears were drawn right inside this sound, into the whole massive texture, while seemingly hearing each little grain, each clap. I found my ears actively moving inside this entire acoustic space, inspired by its clear quality, criss- crossing through the full sound spectrum, and investigating the multiple ever-changing rhythms among the many little clapping grains. Similar to how one can listen to flowing water
Soundscape Models & Compositional Strategies in Acousmatic Music
Get PDFSoundscape recordings of nature may often provide us with a valuable sound-basis as a primary compositional material, offering a rich sound world to transform and develop certain compositional strategies. Soundscapes can also be an inspirational source, offering a number of sound images and sound behaviours to be approached mimetically, and thus to develop a certain type of ‘nature-oriented’ musical language.
The soundscapes recorded on the Greek island of Corfu between 2006 and 2007 during the study of the Lake Antinioti area were captured at different times of day or night and during all seasons of the year. As such they constitute entities of different sound-environments, often demonstrating antithetical relationships regarding the existence of sound sources and sound-behaviours within their boundaries. To define these relationships through listening, one needs to consider a number of characteristics regarding sources and sound-behaviours and the manner in which these co-exist within the recorded soundscape.
Through the application of certain processing techniques, soundscapes may be transformed into different soundscapes or they may be deconstructed to their individual components. In the current research our aim was to create a rich variety of original ‘sound vocabulary’, overcoming basic problems existing in the recorded sound material (noise elimination, presence enhancement, event isolations, enhance- ment of tonality etc.) and further explore the transformational potential of the recorded and created sounds.
From a macro-perspective, and as can be concluded through the research, different ‘models’ of sound environments can be found within an acousmatic musical context. Such environments can be described as ‘real-like’ (or ‘verisimilar’), ‘abstract’, or ‘hybrid’, depending on the degree to which they suggest the real world in which their constituent sources can be recognized, and also on the relationship between sounds and spaces with regard to recognition