I - Praxis and Interpretation

Praxis

The performative act of recording a soundscape represents a deliberate choice between inclusion and exclusion. With the concept of “performativity” we refer to indexical actions in space and time that often remain available as documents, scores, or recordings. The sounds of one’s own body are reduced as much as possible and a specific soundscape is sought with the microphone that reproduces or represents something desired (Chion, 1998).

The term soundscape goes back to the World Soundscape Project, which was founded by R. Murray Schafer in the late 1960s and then elaborated upon in his influential book “The Tuning of the World” (Schafer, 1977). Later, in 1993, the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology was founded. It aimed to foster understanding and education about the social, cultural, scientific, and ecological aspects of the sonic environment, contributing to the preservation of existing natural soundscapes as well as designing and creating “healthy and acoustically balanced” sonic environments (WFAE, 2024). (Truax, 2001) elaborated on Schafer’s concept of soundscape as a kind of “sonic landscape” by framing it within a communicational model, in which sound mediates the relationship between listener and environment. This relational understanding of the soundscape is at the center of contemporary critical discourse, as it can be applied beyond its original Western understanding, which culminated in standardization efforts such as ISO 12913-1:2014 (2014) to include the voices and ears of a diverse, global community of living beings.

Building the Workshops

The work of finding, recording, and describing one’s own soundscape were elements of the workshop’s dispositive. The core element was the experimental layout, which took place in the following way: Each workshop lasted for one day. The introduction given in the morning concerning conceptual and technical topics and content was followed by a specific task, wherein two soundscape recordings were produced, each combined with an image which described the recording situation and included a number of keywords. These individual works were then realised locally over the lunch break. All the recordings and images were collected and compiled in an audiovisual presentation. In the afternoon, the presentations and discussions were held without technical interruptions, and the moderator sought to keep the discussion close to the perceptions, descriptions and associations of the listeners. The Timeplan of each workshop was limited to about five hours of online presence with a three-hour lunch break to produce the soundscapes.

The second element was the technical apparatus (Gronemeyer, 1998), the media situation using Zoom for video conferencing, which was familiar to most participants, but often new as a hybrid, shared venue. Each individual workshop included participants from two or three countries and included students, artists, designers, professors, PhD candidates, and lecturers as equal participants. Participation was voluntary. The workshops were held four times in the period 17.4.–17.11.2020. 

The Performative Act of Recording a Soundscape

Schafer's original definition of the term “soundscape” uses the analogy to landscape to assert a (static) spatial situation-com-position (which can also be judged, for example as “positive” or “negative”, “natural” or “artificial”). This is accessible and productive, and contributed to the wide adoption of the term as well as a more sensitive approach to the relevance of sound for our being-in-the-world.

But the concept of a soundscape also tends to reify our sonic environment as com-position, fixed in time and space, for example by means of “soundscape mapping”. Instead, soundscapes can also be understood as an emergent quality of an auditory situation which is always in the making, as a result of sound producing activities and processes by living and non-living, human and more-than-human entities.

What we call “soundscape”, and represent by means of a “soundscape recording”, thus is merely a snapshot of a transient moment in a collective performance, constituting emergent, dynamic, and fragile sonic configurations.

When I first read the aforementioned quote by Ursula Le Guin, it was in French, and it was the epigraph Olivier Remaud (2017) chose for his book “Quand les Montagnes Dansent”, in which he explains the interconnectedness of organic and non-organic matter. 

In the French translation, the sound of the word “danse” seems to be an echo of the fresh, trickling mountain water that Remaud encounters on his long philosophical hikes. In the original English quote, the word “foggy” is reminiscent of Rachel Carson's descriptions of coastal fog, in which the water seems to dissolve in silent drops. 

Both Rachel Carson (1907-1964) and Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018) pioneered what we now understand as eco-solidarity with their lives and work. 

To preserve the chronology of our discussions on the meaning of this quote, we have retained the French translation in the English text. As we read, listen and speak, we exchange inner, but also outer, embodied words that become wordscapes.

Life as a collective pause

We experienced the immediate situation of a collective pause, a moment of intense simultaneity together, which was combined with a surprising openness to listen to each person and their work in a receptive way.

The simple act of listening became something valuable. For example, some soundscapes from the participants include making coffee, cooking, looking outside, dripping water, and outdoor soundscape recordings of day and night. It was not preceded by any expectation, just perhaps the one, something so normal, so familiar, and yet conditioned by COVID-19 as to be recognised with new ears and eyes. Waiting during the pandemic fragmented the known, felt dimension of time; it shifted and reorganized perception around the various soundscapes and their inner care of observation. 

COVID-19 offered itself as a mirror to us. Our collective work was initiated by the urgency of listening to each other across great distances and to respectfully share what we found important, as well what was present in our separate environments. 

A Curious Practice

Today Catherine wonders if the quality of this shift could be related to Vinciane’s Despret method of “curious practice” as described by Donna Haraway a method requiring “the ability to find others actively interesting … of holding open the possibility that … something interesting is about to happen, but only if one cultivates the virtue of letting those … shape what occurs.” (2016, p.127).

Aucun doute là-dessus. 

Pour en découvrir un, peut-être faut-il en avoir perdu un. 

Ou être soi-même perdu. 

La danse du renouveau, celle qui a créé le monde, 

a toujours été dansée ici,

au bord, à la limite, sur la côte embrumée.

(Ursula K. Le Guin, 1989) Danser au bord du monde. Quoted from Remaud (2023)

The world as edge, as brink, as a foggy coast... These words certainly evoke the break that we experienced. We were at home, thrown back on ourselves, and kept in contact with the outside world through media. The soundscape had changed, and we listened. We became connected through very different things like the croaking of bullfrogs in Niigata, Japan, or the clicking of a goods lift in Thessaloniki. 

A Quiet Perception

For Andrea language in the form of literature became very important during that time "I tried to capture or involve inner images or situational thinking in words. They intended to tie in this condition onomatopoeically or verbally. Subsequently, I also included listening to your own body and understanding this through an expanded perception. With the help of interstitial spaces that could house these growing experiences and insights. Where are our thoughts while listening to the soundscape? Where do they roam or where are they deflected or diverted?" 

Retreating to rooms in the rain and listening.

Listening to stories, drinking tea; 

time doesn't matter. 

Building huts out of towels, reading, knitting; 

the noises are calming. 

Let images of memories pass you by. 

Buds on branches bursting open. 

Hearing the grass grow. 

Seeing wet cows standing around. 

Thinking. Gaining clarity. Quietness. 

Exploring in the studio what happens 

when we take a break. 

Internalizing something that cannot be actively achieved consciously. 

Switching off the musculoskeletal system 

to be able to absorb. 

Directing sounds inwards, 

reflecting on our surroundings. 

Preciousness. Happiness. The church bells. Awakening. 

On the Idea of Landscape

The focus on ambient sounds and on the auditory perception of nature deepened the practice of taking a break. “Nature” is an imprecise term. While we often associate it with an “untouched” environment not influenced by humans, we also use the word separately to refer to an aesthetic dimension, a lived sense (being) and an object to be understood (science/assertion), what Alfred North Whitehead termed the “bifurcation of nature” (1920, p.20).

Ambient sounds do not separate, they combine and mix quite different things—resulting in an acoustic idea of landscape. Landscape is characterized by the selection of a sum of individual elements, essentially from nature, which are consciously put together, seen, and understood as a unity (Simmel, 2001). This understanding also resonates with Lucius Burckhardt: "The landscape is thus a trick of our perception, which makes it possible to combine heterogeneous things into one picture and exclude others" (Burckhardt, 2006).Where Simmel still romantically searched for a unity or whole, Burckhardt explored the heterogeneous elements of cultural landscapes with the aim of understanding their own qualities. Simmel described the piecing together of constituent parts into the composition which we call a 'landscape' as a "work of art in statu nascendi " (2001). 

This means that landscape should be understood as a cultural concept that operates as an aid to the understanding or to an identification, a demand, a desire, or an expectation—insights that place us firmly back in the territory of questioning and re-conceptualizing what we mean by “nature”. Landscape remains a combination of being and statement, and thereby a multi-bifurcated understanding of nature, accepting the changes and troubles; a crane, a building site, a crossroad, a motorway entrance.

Preview - The Present as a Glimpse of the Future 

We situate our workshops in the tradition of acoustic ecology. Social practices such as care, craft, design, and art all stand in relationship to such ecologies, which should be understood in turn as resisting global colonialist or exploitative trends on the local level. Inspired by similar artistic movements or engagements, our long-term goal was to imagine a new kind of “connected” worldliness within a larger globality, which, however, is still based upon the agency of local actors and their environments. 

Acoustic ecologies re-place the conventional metaphors and symbols available to us as linguistic subjects with other, more expansive and materialistic “languages” of description. This, in turn, leads to other ways of engaging with and possibly reforming the usual exploitative and colonial practices of identifying and then extracting value from an environment or people. 

II The Consequences – Re-Imaging

Re-placing 

Discovering an animal, an insect, a plant or a fungus aurally is something fantastic. Another world suddenly appears and re-places the previous world. Although I don't understand the language of this world, I can hear it. Understanding comes later, if at all, but when that moment arrives, a whole set of propositions opens. 

Catherine employs two books to explain this. Both are about sudden and violent animal encounters that radically transformed the authors’ thinking and work (Plumwood, 2002; Martin 2022. Both accounts describe knowing and yet not knowing, of the human error of being stronger than everything else, and of humbly observing, of understanding other dimensions through a dramatic moment in time. Both authors interweave the scientific and the personal in their narrative, pointing to new perspectives through emotions, trauma, and healing in order to open up other worlds.  

In the first book, Natassja Martin, a singular voice in current French ethnology, is in search of an animist cosmology she can reconstruct. What she previously described as a scientist—the animistic interweaving of all things—she now experiences directly. The boundaries between the bear and herself, or what was herself, become blurred. 

Similar, and earlier, Val Plumwood writes, in encountering a crocodile 

“Until that moment, I knew that I was food in the same remote, abstract way that I knew I was animal, was mortal. In the moment of truth, abstract knowledge becomes concrete.” Further, “Some events can completely change your life and your work, although sometimes the extent of this change is not evident until much later. They can lead you to see the world in a completely different way, and you can never again see it as you did before.” (Plumwood, 1985, p. 10–11). 

or as Martin writes 

“You have to be able to live afterwards with and in the face of that; just live further away” (Martin, 2019, p. 138) 

These two authors make us aware of the connections between humans, viruses, and animals as intermediate hosts. This awareness brings with it a reorientation of one’s own individuality and relationship to “the idea of a world that could be habitable” (Stengers & Despret, 2014). What we carelessly call “nature” is, in fact, an integral part of us—what does this portend? Can we understand listening as a reciprocally assimilating conversation with nature? 

 This has pedagogical implications, which become particularly palpable when working with soundscapes. As Altman (1992) has pointed out, recordings are a form of representation, not a reproduction, of sound—recording is already an act of interpretation, framing and estrangement. Combined with the seeming (or claimed) “naturalism” and the “immaterial materiality” (Connor, 2004) of sound recording, this generates a dialectic which is pedagogically fruitful, as it forces us to listen closely and critically and question what we consider to be “the nature” of things (Latour, 2005).

Re-visiting

Two years after the workshops, Andrea re-visited a place she had been previously and repeated a soundscape recording there: 

Soundscapes from Sent in the Engadine, Switzerland. 

Water splashes. 

At the same time, 

the metallic sound of the tube resounds. 

A socket made of brass. 

A bright whirring sound 

that changes the environment through its association with water. 

The intervening time has sensitized us 

to match such interventions with our ability to perceive. 

To be able to classify them. 

Where does the water flow from into the fountain basin? 

Who do I see in the middle of the village square, and by whom am I seen?

All the liveliness that was thought lost during the pandemic manifests itself directly in the recorded soundscapes. Birdsong. Being aware that major heat waves and droughts will continue to accompany us globally in terms of climate change. And an awareness of how we can connect together with human and non-human actors to remain permeable beings. An unravelling of image, sound and interpretation. 

All the liveliness that was thought lost during COVID-19 manifests itself directly in the recorded soundscapes. Birdsong. Being aware that major heat waves and droughts will continue to accompany us globally in terms of climate change. And an awareness of how we can connect together with human and non-human actors to remain permeable beings. The soundscapes make tangible such anthropological symmetry and relational networking between actors, which is also summarized very neatly in one of Peter Weibel’s very last interviews about the philosophy of Bruno Latour:  “He famously pleaded for a parliament of things, for meetings where, for example, a river is given a voice, where we include insects or mussels because their behaviour shows whether the river is healthy or sick” (Peter Weibel in Stahl, 2013).

This can be felt in the ecology framed by the soundscapes, which still resounds five years later. The soundscapes open up a sensual field of interrelationship and, in combination with the images, create lively dynamics or rhythms where people can collaborate or encounter one another. The inventive spirit of the participants spurred on this agency of sounds. 

Inter-vening

Looking back, we took on the task of recording soundscapes in a time of uncertainty. By filtering out sound files we inter-vened into the continuum of space and time and then, by adding still images and an index, the files began to develop a life of their own, and this is true whether they are left slumbering on a hard disk or brought out and shown.

In this process of combining specific instructions with aesthetic perceptions, and then analysing the subsequent experiences, we developed a trust in what is “fleeting”. With this we do not conclusively mean that a student has portrayed a kettle as an object—as a kitchen utensil, for instance, or in the investigation of water in its essence as their subject. In soundscapes the relation between use and knowledge remains open and therefore facilitates a resonance between the human being and a thing. Isn’t that why we find it so attractive? We have found that it is by neither under- nor over-estimating such moments in the classroom—the radical turn in which another world or way of thinking is opened to us—that it is, in short, through listening that we can keep the heterogeneity of transformation alive.

Re-cording

The acoustic landscapes re-corded in our workshops have an immediate directness, whether they are tinkling bubbles in a glass of water, or the demolition sounds of a house. They are and remain existential, truly reflecting the term "re-cord" (like the rhythm of the heartbeat). And not to forget what lies in-between: a microphone, a recording device and a human being who tries to connect physical space with his or her own imagination. The act of sound recording is not without its pitfalls, as it can lead to an extractivist, even exploitative gesture in which sounds become the raw material for production, entertainment and "cabinets of curiosities". But it is precisely this curiosity of sounds that can bring us together as we seek to understand and share them, and each other’s ideas. During COVID-19, we had to retreat to private rooms to communicate digitally with one another. By opening up to each other visually and aurally in this trusting way, we not only turned back on ourselves, but at the same time bonded in friendship, even if it may be temporary, as a community of fate.

Un-ravelling

In the analysis of our collected soundscapes and image pairs, we repeatedly divided examples into categories, formed classificatory systems, and made juxtapositions. For future artistic research projects, it is essential not to understand this activity Rigorous separation denies the buzzing, croaking, chirping, and rattling their right to exist. A soundscape is an agent. Not being heard or seen only hinders understanding of the respective context, which is precisely where the different partial manifestations express themselves. As soon as we try to understand we must also learn how to relate as“purifying” in the sense used by Latour (1993) to describe a specific scientific activity of producing knowledge, but as an un-ravelling. 

In this way, new fields of work or art can emerge that refer to textures, connections, or hybridisations. In listening, looking at, un-ravelling, and discussing the manifestations of each “thing”, we will also uncover processes of consensus and cooperation that utilize different ways of seeing and listening.  

Using mobile phones as recording devices and videoconferencing as a medium of communication and transmission, which was to some extent forced by the situation, led to a beneficial demystification of the sound recordings. In their imperfection, they helped us evade the reproduction fallacy described by Altman (1992) and led us to inquire about the first-hand experience hidden behind them. In this way, the recordings evolved a unique and direct quality of density.

III The Process – Re-Placing

As a degree program in processual design, we have been engaged with the emancipatory potentials of the internet age since our founding in 1999. We seek to advance the worldwide exchange of our concerns and ideas in social, cultural, economic, and intellectual life for a more diverse, just and sustainable world. However, in everyday pedagogical life, we experience digitalisation primarily as an increase in efficiency, and emancipatory effects fall by the wayside. 

The immediate resonance of the workshops was obscure to us because it was not redeemed, could not be redeemed, with the attempt to repeat it and make it useful. But as Hartmut Rosa points out on resonance (Rosa, 2021), the central part of this worldly relationship to resonance is one’s own transformation: experiences of resonance change us and confer upon us the very experience of aliveness, while we recognize simultaneously that resonance itself is constitutively unavailable and cannot be forced (Rosa, 2021). 

Hartmut Rosa proposes that there are three different axes of resonance. The horizontal axis concerns resonance between people, the diagonal axis lies between us and things and the vertical axis represents the resonance with and through values as well as “collective singulars” such as nature, aesthetics or religion. Our starting point was the diagonal axis employing the soundscapes as things or mediums that enabled negotiation. They connected the participants from very different physical contexts and created a vertical resonance with aesthetics and nature as well. Although Rosa defines this conceptual achievement of a diagonal link between horizontal and vertical as problematic, he nevertheless justifies it as a typical relational connection between things and values. 

Our practice of listening to and sharing with one another should be understood within the open and transformative paradigm of interrelationality. Once the world of “things” is understood as the interrelation of human and non-human actors the entire field of relation is reconfigured (Bennett, 2009; Haraway, 2016; Ingold, 2018; Ingold, 2021; Mol, 2002; Tsing Lowenhaupt, 2015). This changed relationality, this being-in-connection, leads to a different relationship between bodies and space, as well as in our relationships to one another. Our teaching-experiences face-to-face after COVID-19 appear in a different light. 

IV Discussion and Conclusion – Re-Visioning

Results

We understand the concrete changes in our pedagogical practices during COVID-19 in the following four areas: technology, temporal perception, inter-relationality, and care. 

Technology: We found that the skills and use of audio have now become commonplace. As participants confirm to us, the soundscape recordings removed the students’ fear of technology and encouraged close listening. With only a smartphone and an app, a beginning is already made. 

Temporality:  Our approach to teaching has permanently changed. We developed practices of slowing down, such as walks, spatial interventions in classrooms like changing and moving furniture, shifting traditional roles and perceptual exercises. Situated and flexible action in everyday teaching has become more important. 

Inter-Relationality: We learned to appreciate the qualities of soundscape recordings as tools that produce an ecology of attention (Citton, 2017). The recordings show both sides of the nature of meaning: the aesthetic, mental and affective dimension, and assertions, or objectivity and the factual. Often the first step makes the difference; the effect of experiencing the environment in its diversity through a microphone and headphones.

Care: Our attention has expanded to include the qualities of deceleration and mindfulness. It is only in this way that we can develop a sensitivity to coping with the future and our changing experience of the world. The process was crucial: We listened to, looked at and described different landscapes and soundscapes with their attractions and wounds, and refrained from evaluative interpretations. In this way we got to know and respect each other. Although differences and social inequalities cannot be eliminated through such a practice, we managed to open spaces with respect and acceptance. 

Four Intertwined Pedagogical Reflections

Daniel realized that there is much to be gained in unlearning the reflexes acquired through years of training and experience in the field of recording. The aim is not to extract idealized sounds to process them into consumer products in the form of films, but to find sounds that can serve as a gift to a community, as a way of expressing something of personal relevance and value to a community of listeners. 

Andrea wonders whether the lockdown took us out of our daily routines and brought us into a collective resonance. Did the soundscape enable us to experience a virtual polis that cannot be repeated at will, or did it provide the basis for a new techno-domestic globality? While these questions are open-ended, Andrea believes that the search for such intense, shared moments is absolutely worthwhile.

At their best, Max thought that the workshop’s dissolved the physical and cultural distance between the social actors with very different backgrounds. He is aware that there are and must be clear limits to such claims of commonality, but he is also convinced that we precisely need such spaces as a prerequisite for any understanding and work on necessary changes. 

Catherine senses that, by stepping back and taking the time to listen, the body sinks into a mode of observational curiosity that opens reception to whatever is being recorded. Thanks to this process, it is possible to learn differently, focusing less on what we think we know or can recognize, and more on what we don't know, which makes it possible to have unconventional new conversations. 

Conclusion

It was only sometime after COVID-19 that it became clear to us that a soundscape’s ephemerality isn’t reductive and instead serves a philosophy of care. Such a practice requires an accurate negotiation of the attention economy in curricula or in the design of teaching formats. Taking care work seriously and maintaining it helps to connect perception and sensations in such a way as to establish a creative atmosphere of togetherness, which is also always the negotiation of difference. 

The main demand of our workshops—to take time and to give time to oneself and others is essential. We demand sensitivity in a time when people embark on life-threatening migrations because their livelihoods have been destroyed. Recording soundscapes means taking this into account, discussing it and thus radically exposing oneself to an artistic practice, in addition to the worldliness it presupposes.

Guattari writes that the human condition is characterized by simultaneously living and subjectively observing part of the world (Guattari, 2000). Why is the understanding of perception deeply inscribed in an understanding of change? We are and at the same time we perceive. This can only be understood as a process. 

Any education which seeks to incorporate this insight must deeply reflect on the role that reciprocity plays in the curriculum and in the nature of the relationships between all involved actors. Our focus upon the soundscapes as both an observed and experienced worldview, in combination with the extraordinary situation of the lockdown, led to surprising results and realities. 

Discussion and Outlook

Three terms were combined in the discussion at the 8th Art of Research Conference in Helsinki: Witnessingwas used to name the affective meaning of the simultaneous experience of COVID-19. The participants of the workshops were thus specially connected and social, cultural, and educational hierarchies temporarily receded. We experienced a situation of togetherness. After the COVID-19 lockdowns, students increasingly demanded this togetherness in the classroom. This was often linked to the desire to reduce hierarchies and specific learning requirements. At the same time, the expectation of clear structured instructions increased, and open tasks were often perceived as too demanding. This often came across as a contradictory message: working together and developing learning objectives, but please with clear and manageable tasks set by the teachers. 

One possible explanation is provided by cultural scientist Mieke Bal with her description of affect as a cultural force: 

"We want .... to change something about the state of the world we experience. And this is precisely where affect arises: between a perception that worries us and an action that we hesitate to carry out. Affect is a temporarily coagulated relationship between perception and action that coincides with subjectivity." (Bal, 2006. p.9)

Bal’s thesis poses the question of whether the desire for togetherness develops from an affective deficiency, the loss or unlearning of emotional competences. From this perspective, although our soundscape workshops took place in the fields of design and art, they raised broader intercultural questions regarding the interrelated standpoints of the witness and the agent. The resonance(s) produced by soundscape recordings produce affective connections and states of witnessing that revise many taken-for-granted assumptions of how, why, and what we can communicate about and share with one another, most especially in our relationship to more-than-human agents. Between perception and action, or perhaps betwixt the two?

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