//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?

Federico MARTUSCIELLO | IT |

Soundwork

Studio II: sui silenzi sonori d'Abruzzo

Abstract

Studio I: on the soundscapes of Abruzzo and Studio II: on the sound silences of Abruzzo form a cycle of pieces dedicated to the problems of the representation of the soundscape, to the related ecological issues and to the formulation of compositional and creative practices informed to them. In Studio I I focused on anthropic sounds that do not allow us to perceive the soundscape without noise pollution, in Studio II I focused on issues relating to space and silence. Starting from a preliminary investigation I was able to verify that in certain areas of Abruzzo it is still possible to find what is called silence with respect to anthropogenic sound sources for a selected time interval of at least 5 minutes and for intervals even longer than 15 minutes. The piece is presented as a sequence of environmental extracts of real anthropic silence alternating with pauses of silence in the performance space. Editing allows the listener to enter and exit two different acoustic contexts on the basis of perceptually sensible structural choices. A comparison is determined between listening to the external landscape and the inside of the reproduction room, from the relationship between phonographs of anthropic silence that divides the sequences. In this way, the listener is no longer a "receiver" at the end of a communication channel, but becomes an active determining factor. The recordings were made between August 2019 and March 2020 with continuous cycles between a minimum of twenty minutes and a maximum of two continuous hours, in three different time slots of the day (morning, afternoon, evening) for several days in different climatic conditions, in order to collect as much acoustic data as possible. Each element of the work - such as the selection of the shooting areas in relation to the distance from the residential centers, the strategy of outdoor sound recording that mimics the directionality of the auricles, the organization of the material on the basis of psychoacoustic principles, the timbre choices, the measurement of the pressure value in the field for diffusion, etc. - has been addressed in an attempt to keep coherent and intact contents of auditory experience belonging to the common experience. I have been trying to think of sound not as something that is transmitted from the environment to the listener, but as a mediation or creation of relationships between the listener and the environment through the use of silence and perceptually sensible parameters in an electroacoustically configured diffusion and listening space.

Biography

I began my musical studies at the Conservatory of L'Aquila at the age of eleven. During the first years of high school, I decided to abandon classical education to dedicate myself to the world of electronic music and turntablism. I achieved my high school diploma from scientific high school and then my electronic studies oriented in composition started at the Conservatory. I collaborated several times with the "Collettivo Giallo" of the Academy of arts of L' Aquila offering sound installations and live performances. In 2014 I realized an audiovisual presentation entitled 3:32 and dedicated to the soundscape after the earthquake which hit L'Aquila in 2009. The work was presented during the exhibition Atto Nullo. In 2018 I was a finalist at the XIV Prize of the Arts (Sect. Electronic Music and N.T), category A - original acousmatic works with the piece Reconstruction of environmental sounds and granular processing. Since 2018 I have dedicated myself to the research and census of the places of silence in Abruzzo and I realized the piece Studio I: on the soundscapes of Abruzzo, dedicated to the acoustic pollution present in the National Park of Abruzzo. In 2019 I graduated in Electronic Music under the guidance of M° Agostino Di Scipio with the thesis entitled Studio II: on Abruzzo's sounding silences. In 2019 I participated at the Festival of Arts, a tribute to Beverly Pepper with the installation Embrace the Silence, installed on the work of Land Art Embrace by B. Pepper.

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