Urban sonic acupuncture: sonic strategies for the city space
(last edited: 2022)
author(s): Josué Moreno Prieto
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This thesis accompanies the artistic projects I have implemented during my doctoral research as a reflection and summary. My practice ranges from traditional music composition to other forms of music-making, such as electroacoustic music, live electronics, generative art, and sound installations.
Urban Sonic Acupuncture is an artistic practice that intervenes in public, urban spaces with sound composition elements that aim to alter the atmosphere of a place through subtle, almost imperceptible resonances, textures, and other forms of sonic infiltration. The practice consists of applying sonic pressure points on sites that affect the aural awareness and attention thresholds of the listeners. Interestingly, the altered attention thresholds remain effective even after they left the site where the acoustic intervention happens.
Aural Weather exists without the need for an acoustic intervention, as a pre-existing acoustic atmosphere, upon which the urban sonic acupuncture practitioner acts. We can also understand Aural Weather as an organising principle: placing sounds in space rather than time. This principle promotes a listening mindset where the audience takes responsibility for the temporal narrative. The development and implementation of my the different Urban Sonic Acupuncture art-works build on this crucial concept.
Between 2016 and 2021, four artistic projects and several parallel test cases were carried out to explore these notions, illuminating aspects of public and urban spaces through sonic interventions. The first project was an indoor public space sound installation in a winter
garden, the second one took the form of a museum concert promenade and resonance installation, the third project was an outdoor installation inside an underpass tunnel, and the fourth project presented a sonic perception exercise as a radio programme.
Within the processes of making these works, I found that the best results often arose from invisible, non-object-based interventions. Combined with ‘lowercase’ ambiguous sounds that blend with the environment, this approach helped me to achieve non-disruptive ways of infiltrating daily urban life and influencing site perception.
The projects sparked conversations among the general public, passers-by, and the local art scene. This non-disruptive approach to sonic public-space interventions has shown to be effective for infiltrating daily life. Aware of the existing aural weather, the transient audience is invited to a conscious urban sonic dwelling.
Placed Sounds Displaced. Sound as a practice in between Art, Architecture and Design
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Ricardo Atienza Badel
connected to: Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Keywords: Sound Art, Sound-Space, Resonance, Sonic Ambiences, Interdisciplinarity.
This exposition aims at sharing a “cross-border” exploration between sonic and spatial research fields. These are traditionally presented and understood as distinct knowledge areas, e.g. Sound Art, Sound Architecture, Sound Design, etc. However, they are intimately connected in experiential and practice-based terms.
A number of referential sound pieces have been chosen here in order to survey this in-between sound-space territory. Each piece prompts a micro-study that reflects on specific interdisciplinary traits. The purpose is to reveal common components and characteristics, parallel or symmetric processes in sound-space disciplines. To that extent, the micro-studies focus on transversal concepts and methods such as resonance, listening, sonic space, sonic ambiences, graphic scores and the materiality of sound, among others.
These referential cases are presented in dialogue with collective and individual sound-space explorations that the author has performed as a researcher, pedagogue and practitioner. All these materials are presented in a non-linear open form in which the visitor is encouraged to choose different paths and to establish own connections among the exposed cases and examples, including his/her own references and pieces.
An intended contribution of this exposition is to nurture a culture of openness at disciplinary boundaries, promoting fertile contagions among in-friction practice and research areas.