Across the Sonorous Desert: Sounding Migration in El Mar la Mar

Joshua Bonnetta and J. P. Sniadecki’s El Mar La Mar (2017), an experimental documentary on the migrant trail across the Mexico–US border, features a striking audiovisual assemblage that gives equal weight to sights and sounds, allowing the viewer to contemplate the history of not only the cinema of migration but also the various traditions that engage with field recordings. This chapter investigates the ways in which the film challenges our expectations of what a migrant geography feels like, with special attention to the film’s soundtrack, from its contact mic-enabled drone sounds to disembodied audio testimonials, and the broader acoustic ecology that the film construes (influenced by musique concrète and post-Pierre Schaeffer anecdotal sound, in the work of Luc Ferrari).

‘Creator gave us two ears and one mouth’

Acoustic ecology has served as a foundational theoretical field for many sound scholars to understand the soundscape as a signifier for environmental crisis. While sound theorists like R. Murray Schafer and those in the World Soundscape Project have developed ways in which to critically analyze environmental soundscapes, these methods have often excluded Indigenous narratives which offer complex understandings of sound through embodied experience. In this paper I employ a brief description of acoustic ecology, drawing attention to its benefits as a methodological approach to sonic ordering, while also demonstrating the possibilities for expansion of this field when examined in conversation with Canadian Indigenous perspectives and notable sonic activist movements. I address how Indigenous knowledge systems, futurisms, art, and activism can provide critical perspectives within the field of acoustic ecology, which lends well to understanding soundscapes of crisis. I identify a few case studies of sonic forward Indigenous environmental movements which include game design by Elizabeth LaPensée, Rebecca Belmore’s Wave Sound sculpture, and the Round Dance Revolution within the Idle No More movement. In sum, this paper works to bridge the work of acoustic ecology and Indigenous sonic movements to encourage a complex and nuanced relationship to sound, and to explore moments for understanding sonic intersections at the forefront of environmental crisis.

SOUND IN URBAN PLANNING – SELECTED ISSUES

The issue of acoustics is still underappreciated both in interior design in public utility facilities and in urbanized spaces. As noise pollution is on the rise, acoustic ecology is a vital part of responsible urban planning. The article explores the issue of sound in an open space in terms of noise protection, but its primary goal is to discuss it in the context of shaping a soundscape consciously. Finally, the article points out that it is crucial to protect soundscape as cultural heritage.

Camminare per ascoltare. Partiture invisibili del territorio abitato

The paper is focused on some experiences of collective soundwalks achieved by Elisabetta Senesi within her conscious Sonic Arts research (MA Dissertation 2010). Walks are mostly performed in silence at different times and unpredictable urban paths for participants. This practice, not always performed following the tradition of Acoustic Ecology, has become particularly important in recent years, and often carried by artistic fields related to the creation of environmental compositions, both generative and interactive. In this context, Senesi uses her listening walks as case studies to open up multiple perspectives of space and critical listening, as well as its auditive aesthetics to reflect upon author’s soundwalking strategies with feedback from participant’s experiences from the last six years.

Environmental Classification in Hearing Aids

There are two parts to this article. The first is a general overview of how hearing aid classification works, including a comparison study of normal-hearing listeners and multiple manufacturers' hearing aids while listening to a sound parkour composed of a multitude of acoustic scenes. Most hearing aids applied nearly identical classification for simple listening environments. But differences began to appear across manufacturers' products when the listening environments became more complex. The second section reviews the results of a study of the acoustic ecology (listening environments) experienced by several cohorts of hearing aid users over a 4-month period. The percentages of time people spent in seven different listening environments were mapped. It was learned that they spent an average of 57% of their time in conversation and that age is not a good predictor of the amount of time spent in most listening environments. This is because, when grouped by age, there was little to no difference in the distribution of time spent in the seven listening environments, whereas there was tremendous variability within each age group.

Trevurr: A dialogic composition on dementia, auraldiversity and companion listening

This article details the rationale and creative process behind a collaborative – or more accurately in this case, dialogic – sound composition undertaken as part of research into the acoustic ecologies of people in the early stages of a dementia. Changes in abilities around hearing and listening are among the first symptoms of many types of dementia, making such auditory phenotypes an increasingly common part of lived experiences of sound. Following acoustic ecology practice in doing and presenting research in sound, and more specifically Steven Feld in doing so in dialogic or polyvocal ways, co-composition can be a way of exploring the particularities of others’ hearing, listening and sound practices, which is less reliant on the discursive frames of interlocutors and researchers. The process of making sound art together draws attention to particular sounds and experiences, creating dialogic situations of companion listening, discussion and mutual learning. It also provides a framework for engaging interlocutors in soundscape and ethnographic fieldwork methods. The composition discussed here, Trevurr, documents my time working with Trevor, a keen amateur musician in Cornwall who has mild cognitive impairment, and gradually comes to simulate his experience of hyperacusis in a piece of dialogic, auraldiversity-oriented composition.

Localising Acoustic Ecology: A critique towards a relational collaborative paradigm

This article focuses on critically provincialising some of the ethico-political challenges inherent to much of the acoustic ecology vocabulary and conceptual framework. As we will demonstrate, much of the underlying limitations stem from an adherence to a particular self-transformation praxis (from the ‘New Age’ movement) alongside an overtly optimist and culturally selective outlook on how a well-informed acoustic designer would guide individuals and communities to a better sonic world. This epistemological and aesthetic outlook is presented in order to offer an alternative view on how collaborative works that deal with the sonic can take place within communities. One, where rigid hierarchies and orthodoxies are substituted by an intersubjective listening that changes all actors involved in the process. This is the framework from which we present Cildo Meireles’s Sal Sem Carne LP (1975) and Lilian Nakahodo’s sonic cartography Mapa sonoro CWB: Uma cartografia afetiva de Curitiba (2015–).

LISTENING: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PATH TOWARDS LETTING THINGS BE

The Western philosophical and scientific tradition was and still is based on rationalism, objectivity, truths that are all sought from the ocularcentric paradigm. Many thinkers, however, have been recognising this perspective to be exclusive towards the other senses, and therefore insufficient. Listening, as enabled by the auditory sense, has a potential for revealing a deeper sense of being in the world. In this article listening is presented as a possible way towards inhabiting our life-world and nonetheless “to let things be.” In order to do so, an interdisciplinary approach of research is adopted. First, the author offers some perspectives from the field of the ethics of listening, where the thoughts of Lisbeth Lipari, Luce Irigaray and others expose listening as an intersubjective gesture of encounter with the other in acceptance. Through his philosophy of listening, Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the crucial voices in this study, offers an explication of how listening can be the force of liberating sense and senses. Further on, an account on auditory phenomenology is offered, combining it with and stressing the importance of Husserl’s understanding of intersubjectivity. These perspectives are then enriched with echoes from acoustic ecology and its experiences of listening to the environment. The reverberations of multiple voices presented in this text allow for an understanding of listening as an intersubjective and mutually constitutive activity. As such, it involves a liberation of sense and allows for an openness to being and beings.