Listening to a landscape or feeling it through the skin is a spatial experience that occurs not only in front of our eyes. It is a 360-degree spatial perception, as performer and sound artist Salome Voegelin suggests. In her book Sonic Possible Worlds (second edition, 2021), she observes the landscape as one such possible world—a time-space place—in which the soundscape commingles with the terrain’s visible characteristics. For Voegelin (and in resonance with Doreen Massey’s approach to landscape as an event), listening to a landscape grants us “access to the mobility of its production.”
Salomé Voegelin: “Sonic Possible Worlds“ (sd edition, 2021)
Chapter 1
The landscape as sonic possible world
Fallen leaves
sound the rhythm of my walking as a recurrent surf. Each movement blends into the other. No single footsteps, just waves. I adjust my gait to its sound and deliberately exaggerate the stretched-out continuity. Searching for more pools of leaves I avoid naked pavements exposing my tread, preferring instead to stay in the shadow of my sound. It is a sound of memory and perennial joy at the weather turning cold. It sounds the idea of autumn as an “iconographic” sound: a sonic emblem that sounds its emblematicness through my participation and thus is clearly not an icon at all; eschewing the concept of distance and idolatry. Instead the sonic emblem is subjective and reciprocal. I activate it and hear it sounding us together, as a socio-symbolic relationship that creates the time and place we are in not as an ideal but as a moment of coincidence, until the pavement turns grey and empty and on my footsteps pound the monotone of swept streets.
(SOUNDWORDS.TUMBLR.COM October 08, 2011, 11:34 p.m. )
We are in the acoustic environment, and it is around us all the time, unavoidably and inexhaustibly here it is, and here we are, as in a virtual embrace. Sound forms an extensive and mobile vicinity, fleeting and grasping all at once. We are in sound and simultaneously sound ourselves: we are in the acoustic environment through our listening to that, which we hear. In this way, we complete each other as reciprocal hearers and heard. The acoustic environment is the world in sound and makes a sonic world. This world formlessly does what we think we see as a certain form. It is built continually from sonic relationships of things and subjects thinging a contingent place. This is a timespace place in which we too are temporospatial things thinging intersubjectively with what we hear. We are in its midst, not necessarily at its center, but nevertheless embedded in its ephemeral materiality that shows us our own transitory self. Listening, we are continually made aware of this fleeting subjectivity, and we are reminded also that the world is not only in front of us, the aim of our action, but that we inhabit it as a 360° environment, which sounds the result and consequence of our actions too. In this sense, listening affords us a different sense of the world and of ourselves living in this world; it affords a different relationship to time and space, objects and subjects and the way we live among them.
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The landscape as sonic possible world explores the landscape through its sound, to hear it as an environment, a timespace place that does not present us with a vista but grants us access to the mobility of its own production.
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The suggestion is that the soundscape offers an alternative perspective on the landscape, producing new ideas on how it could be and how we could live in it as in a sonic world, and how therefore we could validate the reality of sound’s invisible formlessness in relation to the visible and formed actuality of the world. Listening allows us to focus on the invisible dynamics that are hidden beneath a visual perception and its linguistic organization. It gives us access to what is there, if we look past the object into the complex plurality of its production; and it shows us the world through relationships and processes, reminding us of the ideological and aesthetic conditioning that determines any sensory engagement.