//Unheard_Landscapes - listening | resonating | inhabiting 10th FKL/ENP/AAU_CRESSON International Symposium on Soundscape BLOIS | October 27 -30

Unheard landscapes: this metaphor leaves space to imagination, to the un-thought, to the un-known, to past and future, as well as unexplored sound scenarios. It also reaches the field of auditory perception, the acoustic domain. Sound, through auditive qualities, acoustic phenomena, design practices, artistic creations, and listening experiences, offers an inspiring transversal entry onto landscapes and ambiances. Beyond the discussions on “soundscape”, approaching ordinary environments through sounds increases the awareness of our own capacities to feel, while we inhabit and move across different worlds. From an ecological perspective, resonance appears a key word, too. It puts sound and space together. It implies the idea of a plurality of bodies, things and living beings vibrating all together, sharing common contexts of time and space. The act of listening bypasses the passive meaning it usually receives. It contains in itself a completely unexpressed potential, connoted with «project», «pro-action» and «active decision» by individuals. What will be the sounds of the future and the soundscapes in which we will live, or would like to? How can listening practices evolve, how will we listen or how differently could we listen to the world around us, tomorrow? Inhabiting the world brings to us questions about how we want to manage our being in it. How do we want to inhabit the world sonically? How sound and listening do actually affect our way to inhabit it? Have we lost some of our abilities to resonate with the world? What remains to be heard? Where could the practices of listening and attuning take us to?

Justyna ANDERS-MORAWSKA | PL |

Paper

Complementary stories – participatory site-specific radio art as a narrative of the postindustrial soundscape, and antecedents of co-creative approach to urban sound design

Stare Polesie - a part of Lodz neighbouring downtown on the one side, and newtown on the other side – has retained old fabrics of XIXth century industrial city – with numerous tenant houses, manufactures, and factories. Only recently have new housing investments, as well as small scale revitalization projects, partly driven by local activism been changing the outlook of this place. This paper presents a qualitative inquiry into the process of making and recreating of the soundscape as a representation of place identity by three sound artists during participatory site specific art residencies. Their contributions – three radio dramas broadcasted on “Radio Kapitał” in December 2020 – present at the same time a point of departure for intertextual analysis of past, present and future audiosphere, and a result of attentive, deep listening. Different modes of ausculation - listening apart together, listening collectively, listening separately - provided different insights into the nature of the site and directed aesthetic decisions. This method of knowing by listening revealed what was a norm and what was a deviation from the norm in a particular sonic environment. By documentary value of field recording, by addition of new sounds, by improvisation, by bodily immersion in soundscape – the radio narratives of this area try to transcend the alleged dullness and tiring monotony of the city noise. They are illustrations of the city layers – timelines, polyrythms, and vocal- verbal-musical like motives. This study looks for relations between the qualities narrated by artistis, and personal soundscape narratives of place residents, and other particpants of the project. Based on study carried out among residents, and interviews with local activists, and project participants the paper discusses also the possible directions, objectives, and a toolkit of the collective actions, that could produce a better sound world. This potentially co-created soundscape resonates with four dimensions of public value understood as a relation between subject (audiosphere) and person (residents): moral-ethical, hedonic-esthetic, utilitarian-instrumental, and socio-political.

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