In this presentation, I will outline the original concept and the inspirations behind my project, describe how it developed and evolved in unexpected ways, and organize this material as a guide to navigate all the artistic and academic outcomes of the project.
Preamble
This project originated in the idea of recording Spontaneous Music Diffusions in my hometown, as an attempt to understand and describe the societal processes occurring there, in an approach that could be an acustemology.
Spontaneous Music Diffusions were described as:
Televisions, radios, cellphones, and every other media diffusing sound in public space, resonating through the streets and contributing to the sonic identities of those places.
In the original proposal I wrote, as a subtitle for the project:
Using immersive sound technologies to map the evolution of socio-cultural interactions in the Mediterranean, with a specific focus on the area of Napoli, and enable new composition paradigms.
In other words, I wanted to collect sonic evidence of the presence and integration of communities with different ethnic backgrounds in my hometown through their sonic presence, and demonstrate how their sonic traces are integrated into the acoustic environment of my town.
The subtitle of my project felt immediately a bit too ambitious and perhaps naive, and almost simultaneously with the submission of my project, I realized that this approach needed to address a few critical ethical questions, which became the center of my interest in my field recording practice and inspired many of the outcomes that emerged from them.
My methodology
This project was also the perfect opportunity to learn how to research and truly discover my methodology.
In the course of this doctoral research, I realized that addressing questions arising from my practice, inspired by its developments, was indeed my practice. My work relies on a derivative method, in which each outcome results from a reflective process on the previous outcome. My aim with this presentation is to show the patterns in the sequence of sounds and text that constitute my research.
Another feature of my methodology is that there is no clear distinction between artistic results and reflection components; these elements tend to shift roles and merge, and the line between them is blurred. I personally welcome this blur, embracing the idea that there should be no hierarchical distinction between my reflection (my articles, texts, and visual documentation) and my artistic work, and that they should exist in a continuum, in a dialectical relationship, where one cannot exist without the other.
Field Recording and Appropriation
The main issue I encountered when I started my project was how to address the extractive nature of field recording.
Which meant: how do I prevent myself from repeating the usual mispractice of electroacoustic music? That of stripping recorded sounds from their semantic context and utilizing them in a way that inherently re-enacts a colonial power structure. I don’t believe this question can be answered in absolute terms; it requires constant practice in positioning and evaluating different situations, as well as proper documentation of the creative processes and their intentionality.
It became clear through my practice that often, representations of an acoustic environment through composition can be attempts to look into oneself, investigations of our gaze, rather than descriptions or expressions of judgment. However, such operations must be conducted with care and honesty, sometimes even by downscaling the scope of a project to a more intimate dimension. I believe this is what happened in my composition projects in this research, especially looking back at how my practice forked in different directions, each suited to a different goal.
For example, this is what separates my Anecdotes composition series from the anthology of field recordings presented in Street Phonography and in Spontaneous Music Diffusions.
While the pieces in the Anecdotes series use field recordings as their primary source material, they are, by all means, compositions of acousmatic music. In these pieces, I deliberately focused on my relationship with the recordings as sonic material, leaving reflections on my encounter with the place to the textual components that accompany the pieces.
Differently, the two other collections of field recordings respond to different necessities. In Street Phonography, I collected an anthology of unedited sound moments that casually present internal structures that can be interpreted musically. In Spontaneous Music Diffusions, I organized a dislocated map of sonic events that emerges into a complex mosaic of cultural intersections and overlaps.
In all the different ways I engaged with the practice of field recording, I have tried to contextualize my approach and find ways of operating that would claim agency without appropriation.
Shared Practices and Horizontality
Most of my field recordings in Napoli were done in ambisonics or binaural format, but I had no way to showcase them locally due to the lack of dedicated facilities.
This was a problem that highlighted another kind of power structure, in this case, one involving class distinction and access to technology. I had previously been involved in a few projects to democratize access to spatial audio technologies. Still, my work in Napoli provided a great occasion to develop a more structured approach to this.
My initial efforts to move in this direction involved sharing my knowledge of spatial audio with local composers, which began with my collaborations in the trio totaleee. Later, it was about creating the facilities to work with spatial audio locally, which led to the design of VOLTA. The results from these activities might seem like a byproduct of my main project, but they turned out to be even more significant because they carry a seed of activism within the workflow, giving my entire practice a different meaning.
Conclusion
In the end, the spontaneous music diffusions that inspired this project became an actual artistic result in the form of my audio map, but this required the pursuit of a research path that addressed many aspects of working with recorded sounds and produced insights for both my artistic practice and the theory that supports it. This process produced a lot of notes and materials that I haven't managed to use, but that will serve as the base for future projects.
In the different sections of my project, there will be links to PDFs with published articles and some manuscripts that will be listed as ‘unpublished’ but that I considered worth including in this exposition.
Good read and good listen.