Editorial: Recomposing the City: New Directions in Urban Sound Art
(2016)
author(s): Gascia Ouzounian, Sarah Lappin
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In the first year of Recomposing the City we hosted over a dozen public seminars, concerts, exhibitions, and an International Symposium in Belfast. The papers collected in this volume of the Journal of Sonic Studies (JSS) stem from the Recomposing the City International Symposium in 2014, a lively gathering that was followed with an equally stimulating Postgraduate Student Symposium in 2015. However, the papers published in this present volume represent only a small part of the dialogue that Recomposing the City has facilitated. Thus, in this editorial we will reflect on our group’s larger concerns as well as on the insights of those artists and scholars who have generously contributed to this ongoing dialogue.
Sonic Places: In Conversation with Peter Cusack
(2016)
author(s): Sarah Lappin, Gascia Ouzounian
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this interview, Recomposing the City co-directors Sarah Lappin and Gascia Ouzounian talk with Peter Cusack about his recent work, reflecting in particular on relationships between sound, sound art, planning processes, and urban communities. Cusack, a field recordist and sound artist, has been a leading figure in acoustic ecology and soundscape studies for more than two decades. Cusack created one of the earliest collaborative sound mapping projects, Favourite Sounds (1998-), in which he invited people to record, share, and describe positive aspects of their everyday sound environments. Among other things, Favourite Sounds has been influential in inspiring the recent proliferation of online sound maps, establishing a framework for producing collective ideas of soundscape, and suggesting approaches to urban sound that extend beyond noise pollution.
