//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?

Charlotte LAFFONT | FR |

Paper

Concevoir le logement de demain par l’expérience des sonorités

Abstract

Let's face it, listening in situ engages reality and the imagination of the listener. How can we imagine a future where listening, between our reality - which we cannot apprehend - and one’s fantasy (which we cannot know either)? It’s hard to say. How can we imagine the world of tomorrow? Is it enough to pay attention to current trends? From the building to the urban plan, optimization is everywhere. Architecture Programmation is more and more complex, interlinked, and shifting. The 5th facade becomes active with urban farms and the ground floor develops a proteiform base of pop-up stores and co-working. The housing is adaptable and evolutionary with co-living and cooperatives of inhabitants. The city, facing its environment, conquers, questions, optimizes. During our mandatory pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic, nature and sociability were highlighted and valued. These two aspects are now part of the reflection on urban density. Tomorrow, the audible world will undoubtedly be more human, less influenced by oil technologies, communication, and robotics. But shouldn't we also look at past utopias to envision it from the point of view of its sociabilities? Whether or not these utopias were achieved, they give perspective and distance from trends of an era. For example, in the rural world, could we hunt using a boomerang rather than a rifle and feed ourselves from individual gardens, as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux advised in the Saline de Chaux? Or could we be disconnected from the ground thanks to a « bâtiment-ville » as la cité radieuse designed by Le Corbusier ? We find here a realized utopia of a multiple programmatic offers that optimizes its site, a model that is running out of steam. At the same time, sustainable and vernacular architectures have conveyed other approaches to utopia. While Yona Friedman evokes the importance of living within the pre-existing spaces, Jérôme Baschet invites us to think about alternatives to the « capitalist » world by considering past unfulfilled utopias that are now capable of succeeding in this context of resilience. The movement of DIY and "faire avec" become the (future) new paradigm. As sound is an expression of temporalities and spaces of our daily lives, it illustrates our relationship to time. This is why the sounds of tomorrow will remain unheard. It is through the analysis of a series of utopian texts that we will engage our listening and our sound imagination. From then, we will be able to draw assumptions of the future. Following this conference, we will search for these sounds and make them heard by the future inhabitants of the ZAC des Gratte-Ciel in Villeurbanne inside the prototype ECHASON. It will be built in the following months to test these assumptions and to implement different interfaces between inside and outside of a dwelling, coupled with sound sources arranged in a scaffolding. This échafaudage sonore - ECHASON - will engage the body in listening to the unheard landscapes of tomorrow.

Charlotte Laffont is an architect (H.M.O.N.P degree) with a master degree in arts and practice of language, music speciality from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She is actually a PhD student with a CIFRE convention in LASA, an acoustic company. Her thesis topic is Housing design through sonic experiments – COLEXSON. 1.1 scale prototype experimentation of cooperative living through listening. She is supported by Olivier Balaÿ (thesis director in CNRS AAU- CRESSON research laboratory from the ENSA Grenoble), Samuel Tochon-Danguy (LASA partner) and "Chaire partenariale d’architecture Habitat du Futur” (a research and development agency focused on the issue of eco-responsible, economic and adaptable based at the GAIA in l’Isle-d’Abeau). This experiment will be part of the study phase of the macro-lot B of ZAC des Gratte-ciel in Villeurbanne (69). This research is supported by all the actors of the project : ANMA office (Nicolas Michelin, chief architect of the ZAC and the macro-lot B in which the experiment will be carried out), the metropolitan developer SERL, the real estate developer Quartus and « Habitat et partage » responsible for the cooperative housings. Various conception tools will be developed by this research work : - Virtual sound models - Sound tracks to illustrate the « city of tomorrow » - Graphics representations and analysis of sound environments - A 1.1 scale constructive prototype

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