//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?

Sébastien DE PERTAT | FR |

Paper

Se mettre à l’écoute de nos milieux de vie à l’ère de l’anthropocène. Listening to our living environments in the anthropocene era.

Abstract

The socio-ecological upheavals facing human societies today, which some call 'Anthropocene (Bourg, 2013; Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2013), leads us to re-question in-depth the division between human and non-human forms of life, on which a whole relationship to the world has been built. I would like to approach these questions from the angle of the sensitivities of our living environments: how are our sensitivities affected and transformed in the light of these socio-ecological upheavals? What can they teach us about our relationship to our living environments? As part of the research on ambiances, this paper will more particularly discuss the contribution of an approach based on listening to these socio-ecological upheavals: in what way is listening to our environments likely to make the processes of reciprocal transformations of our living environments, and our sensitivities, intelligible? What forms, postures, and practices of listening can be mobilized for this purpose? Through these questions, I make the hypothesis that, on the one hand, listening possesses a heuristic potential that allows us to become aware, through sensitivity, of the interdependent relationships within the living world; on the other hand, that it allows us to shift the frameworks of analysis from the objective and rational approach of the scientific approach, which has partly founded our contemporary relationships to our living environments. Three lines of work will be proposed: 1/ Listening as a way to (re)weave links between human and non-human life forms: hearing enables us to access sensitive worlds that we cannot detect through other senses. 2/ Listening – in so far as it involves the body and the attention of the researcher and the inhabitant – as a change of posture in our way of considering, describing, practicing, and living in our living environments on a daily basis. 3/ The plurality of forms and practices of listening as a means of understanding more precisely what "listening" to our living environment implies. This proposal is based on a doctoral thesis in urban planning and development, entitled "Anthropocene atmospheres. Listening to changes in living environments", which will start in January 2021 within the UMR AAU-Cresson, under the supervision of Rachel Thomas. BONNET François J. (2012), Les mots et les sons, L’éclat, Paris BONNEUIL Christophe, FRESSOZ Jean-Baptiste (2013), L’événement Anthropocène, Le Seuil, Paris. BOURG Dominique (2013), « Anthropocène, apocalypse et parousie ? », Socio-anthropologie [En ligne], 28 | 2013, URL : http://journals.openedition.org/socio-anthropologie/1589 CALAMEL Charles (2015), « Le jazz : une méthodologie de la coopération », CNAM KRAUSE Bernie (2018), Le grand orchestre des animaux : célébrer la symphonie de la nature, Flammarion, Paris TORGUE Henry (2009), « L’imaginaire des sons », La GéoGraphie : Terre des hommes, pp.54-57

Sébastien De Pertat is a PhD student in urban planning and development at the AAU-Cresson laboratory in Grenoble. He completed a master's degree in geography "Innovation and Territory" at Geography Institute in Grenoble. He first focused on improvisation in urban planning, or how a musical practice can contribute to reflections on the action in planning, and then took part in the development of a bone conduction listening device called Losonnante, within the Pacte and AAU-Cresson laboratories. His research today focuses on sensitive approaches to the socio-ecological challenges of the Anthropocene, with particular attention paid to listening and sound ecology.

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