This exposition is published in the Proceedings of the 1st symposium Forum Artistic Research: listen for beginnings.

Becoming Soundscape 
Listening, Perceiving and Acting

Max Spielmann, Daniel Hug, Andrea Iten, Catherine Walthard

Introduction

From Soundscape to Shared Listening. A soundscape is a shared space of possibility. The field of interaction created by sounds—crunching, hissing, whispering, or croaking—influences and includes us, and yet also exceeds our capacity to listen. We allow ourselves to be affected by them, encountering such unexpected sounds with an applied curiosity, because they imply their own effectiveness, linked to a wealth of experience that only comes to fulfillment in a group. The shared listening creates a commonly negotiated and transient listening space, in which we actively decide how, why, and what we are listening to.

Performativity. A soundscape is a collective performance by living beings, machines, and physical phenomena. Although we might feel like we “arrive” inside the soundscape, the “moment” of arrival is actually in a continuous state of becoming: we perform while we listen and vice versa. In this ephemeral and performative space, we encounter our memories, the remnants or traces of a concert, an exhibition, a natural environment, an urban space or a Zoom call. By listening to the sounds that extend beyond the lecture hall and experimenting with them, we create a temporary spatial structure.

What Remains? We created a diversity of perception. Who has a voice and who or what is considered voiceless? Who joins in and where and how do these voices come together? For us, these questions are bounded by the possibilities of the soundscape itself, in that when we inquire we do so interactively and become part of the experiment ourselves. We aim to create an ephemeral pluriverse,1 a space acknowledging diversity, a space that expands outwards in such a way as to produce a “we” that neither subsumes nor valorizes the “I”, a collective experience that adapts to exposure and to whomever is present in that particular moment.
  1. In reference to Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, it is about acknowledging diversity, of many worlds interconnected and of the “human capacity of building worlds differently.” (Leitão 2023, 17⁠–⁠35).

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