//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?

Jean-Paul THIBAUD | FR |

Paper

Une écoute atmosphérique des milieux de vie / An atmospheric attunement to lifeworlds

Abstract

This proposal falls primarily within the scope of Theme 2 "What can we learn from listening to the coming world?" and also potentially of Theme 4 "Different sounds different listenings through forms and rhythms of life". The aim is to explore what could be an atmospheric attunement to lifeworlds. Irreducible to a posture of landscape, environmental or musical listening, atmospheric attunement consists in making oneself sensitive to the resonances and significance, the tonalities and sonorities, the forms of tuning, and modes of the insistence of lifeworlds. It involves listening in the order of floating and distraction and gives existence to the diffuse, precarious, and discreet efficiency of the world of sound. Based on a few sound situations resulting from fieldwork, the aim is to understand how listening maintains a fundamental relationship of vulnerability to the world. In a way, it is a question of experimenting with a new regime of attention that opens up to the powers of life and reveals what really matters. Atmospheric attunement is a proposal that is placed under the sign of the Phonocene.

Jean-Paul Thibaud, sociologist, is CNRS senior researcher at Cresson – Research Center on Sonic Space and the Urban Environment, UMR Ambiances Architectures Urbanités. His field of research covers the theory of urban ambiances, ordinary perception in the urban environment, sensory culture and ethnography of public places, anthropology of sounds, qualitative in situ methodology, and sensitivities to lifeworlds. He has directed the CRESSON research lab and has founded the International Ambiances Network. Jean-Paul Thibaud has published numerous papers on urban ambiances and has co-edited several books on this field of research: https://cv.archives-ouvertes.fr/jean-paul-thibaud. His latest book: En quête d’ambiances. Eprouver la ville en passant (Genève, MétisPresses, 2015).

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