Soundhunting in a City: Chronicles of an Urban Field Recording Expedition (original) (raw)

Sound interpretation: acoustic ecologies and urban history

2014

This paper explores how sound artefacts within urban acoustic ecologies can inform our perceptions of place, engaging a new dialogue with the cultural and built histories of post-industrial Tasmanian urban environments.Two modes of inquiry underpin this research. The first concerns sound as a cultural palimpsest that exists – often subliminally or beneath consciousness – across urban environments, which the paper argues can be materialised as sonic artefacts through various recording, production, playback and installation techniques to provide an interpretive window into the histories of place.The second mode of inquiry critiques normative assumptions regarding definitions of heritage status and discusses the value of sonic artifacts and acoustic ecologies in the re-evaluation of cultural and historic assessments of urban heritage, thus furthering the field of conservation studies to include the identification and interpretation of the aural characteristics of place.The research in ...

Soundscapes in the Past: Towards a Phenomenology of Sound at the Landscape Level

During the past few decades, researchers have developed methodologies for understanding how past people have experienced their wider world. The majority of these reconstructions focused upon viewsheds and movement, illustrating how individuals visually observed their environment and navigated through it. However, these reconstructions have tended to ignore another sense which played a major role in how people experienced the wider, physical world: that of sound. While the topic of sound has been discussed within phenomenology at the theoretical level, and has been approached at the site level through the growing study of “acoustic archaeology,” it has not seen much practical application at the landscape level. This multimedia presentation illustrates how GIS technology can be utilized to develop soundscapes, exploring how people heard their wider surroundings, as well as saw them.

Wayback Sound Machine: Sound through time, space, and place, in Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology

Two years ago I found myself in a location and situation that brought to mind the connections between sound and memory, which lead to considerations about sound and history. Upon thought and research, then experiments within my own practice, I have since been exploring what can come from recreating or creating sound from back in time. I have been excited about what this research has meant to my own work, as well as exploring the work of others who I meet of other disciplines engaged in similar lines of practice.

SOUNDSCAPE STUDIES: WHEN ANTHROPOGENIC SOUNDS, NATURE, AND HUMANS COLLIDE

This essay considers the consequences of anthropogenic sounds on the ecosystem with a focus on the human’s relationship with nature. Regardless that it is universally acknowledged that human beings are capable of experiencing the environment through all their senses, the sonic aspect has been studied mainly from a ‘noise pollution’ perspective with little to no focus on the social and psychological perspectives. This essay aims to discuss how important soundscape studies became during the past few decades not only as a field of study that addresses the Biophony and Geophony, but as one that gives equal importance to the repercussions of human-made sounds on humans themselves.