Documenting Sounds in Urban Places: Belfast During Covid-19 Lockdowns 1 and 2
(2023)
author(s): Georgios Varoutsos
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
Government-regulated business closures, social distancing from people, and stay-at-home orders emptied the urban environment of the presence of people. This effectively created new sonic relationships between natural and urbanised sounds within our built society. As Covid-19 instilled a state of abandonment from our urban spaces with each variation of lockdowns, there was an opportunity to document these changes through a sonic-journalistic approach. The research is developed through artistic practice-based creative projects that capture the transitional events of Lockdown 1 and Lockdown 2 between March and October 2020 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Fifteen locations and forty-one audio-photographic files were captured during this period, focusing on perceptions and observations of Covid-19 and the sonic effect on urban spaces. This collection of material acts as a documentation of place through sensory information and has been distributed onto online platforms such as soundmaps (soundwalk apps or browser maps), which allow for revising our understanding and reflecting on changes instilled by the pandemic. The creative projects provide a timeframe of how each lockdown changed our relationship with urban spaces during a global pandemic due to the regulations and distancing from others to combat the virus. This exposition discusses the immediate planning and procedures for capturing material during the events of Covid-19, with a review of certain soundscape compositions based on the sonic relationships of urban spaces.
Using Participatory Visualization of Soundscapes to compare Designers’ and Listeners’ Experiences of Sound Designs
(2018)
author(s): Iain McGregor
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
There are numerous rules and well-established guidelines to help designers with the visual appearance of interactive technologies. In contrast, when it comes to the use of sound, there is a paucity of practical information regarding design for euphony, excepting musical composition. This paper addresses this hiatus by describing a theoretically based, practical method for evaluating the design of the auditory components of interactive technologies and media. Specifically, the method involves eliciting the auditory experiences of users of these technologies and media and comparing them with what the sound designers had intended. The method has been comprehensively tested in trials involving 100 users (listeners), and the results have been described as “useful” and “invaluable” by a group of 10 professional sound designers.
Silencing Urban Exhalations: a case study of student-led soundscape design
(2017)
author(s): Jordan Lacey
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This paper describes a practice-led soundscape studies project in which students created sound interventions to transform the “voice of the city.” A loud exhaust fan outlet dominated the site, and students were asked to create a soundscape intervention in response to an imaginative-artistic question: the exhaust outlet is the voice of the city, speaking; can this voice be deciphered, transformed, augmented? Students responded with live sound-art, musical and electroacoustic performances played through loudspeakers placed adjacent to the exhaust outlet, and physical changes to the environment with interactive sound-making artifacts. The intervention was informed by the acoustic ecology movement’s maxim that acoustic design and the “retrieval of a significant aural culture” is a “task for everyone” (Schafer 1977: 206); thus, students were encouraged to listen and creatively respond to the dominant sound. Students were introduced to a mixture of acoustic ecology listening exercises and structural approaches derived from the Research Centre on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment (CRESSON). The project aimed to demonstrate that with the assistance of educational resources, city dwellers, given the opportunity to creatively interact with city sounds, might revitalize their own city-relationship through participatory soundscape design.
Football Soundscapes of Java
(2016)
author(s): Andy Fuller
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Singing, chanting and the identification of some genres of music with particular clubs is an essential part of football culture. Stadium atmosphere is created through a combination of elements – smoke bombs, crowd densities, lighting, banners, and shouting – but the most intense and focused manner is through the rehearsed and conducted chanting. The range, originality, and loudness of chanting is the lure for fan groups, and an essential element of ultra fandom (Doidge and Lieser 2013; Kytö 2011). The Pasoepati supporter group of Solo, for example, draws on a range of musical styles and supporter chants to create its own soundscape in which their support for Persis Solo is articulated. During Persis Solo games, the Manahan Stadium becomes a site in which a Persis Solo-Pasoepati soundscape is created; rival clubs, such as Persebaya and PSIM, and their respective fan groups, also articulate their own soundscapes. The chanting is a part of global football culture and mediated through local cultural practices and values. This paper explores the sonic rituals –chanting and singing – that create a sense of community, based around a football team and city.
360° Experiments in Deep Canine Topography:
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Darren O'Brien
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Operating at the intersection of fine art walking practice, psychogeography, critical animal studies and ecology, the practice of Deep Canine Topography seeks to reframe the humble act of the ‘walkies’ as a co-authored act of ‘making’ or ‘performing’ together.
As part of the practice based element of my PhD thesis, Deep Canine Topography, this visual and sonic experiment explores both 360° canine POV film making and augmented and super-sensory human-canine soundscapes.
Films can be experienced with a virtual reality headset, or mobile phone and VR headset, via the Vimeo links provided.
The augmented super-sonic soundscape has to be experienced in person, and therefore a document of the practice is presented and a description of equipment needed to carry out your own experiments with your own canine companion.
Clicking on the round MAP circle will take you to the central exposition of my PhD: Deep Canine Topography.