The Walking Festival of Sound invites field recordist Chris Watson for conversation about sound walking and environmental listening.
How does sound walking relate to the practice of field recording? Does walking through an environment change the way we listen to it? In this conversation, Chris Watson will share his experience of sound walking and how it relates to his long established career as a musician and sound recordist.
Csaba Hajnóczy, Zoltán Mizsei Spring Seminars 2021
Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (MOME) and Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK) started a joint research and development program. Its subject is the acoustic ecology of the Transdanubia region in Western Hungary, combined with elements of the creative provincial city music development program “Sounding City” started by the music department of iASK. In our presentation we will review the regarding pathfinding activities at both institutions in the past few years: “Sounding Houses” and “Sounding City Well (iASK) – sonic ecology related courses and events (MOME). The main focus will be the recently created website “Ruins of the Salföld Pauline Monastery Soundscape”. In its current state, the Pauline monastery in Salföld is a well-kept ruin, half an hour’s walk from the village, in the forest. The place associates two sound worlds: the sacred music of the historic church practice, and the sounds of nature.
The talk introduces the author’s studies of spatial audio phenomenon in a wide range,from spatial aspects of aural perception as a basic need for locating oneself in space, to nowadays application of immersive audio formats such as Ambisonics. The presentation will contain a brief look through the development of spatial audio formats and its artistic and industrial application, followed by the short presentation of the author’s artistic projects, ranging from audio installations in a gallery to audio performance in spatial sound systems.
Throughout the 19th century ear trumpets became the most popular and in fact the only technical solution for deaf people. They merged with the behavior regarded as typical for the deaf such as misinterpretations and communicational loss, therefore ear trumpets turned into a social stigma. They became objects that were bashfully hidden by users. In the 20th century however ear trumpets’ image as well as functions changed as they were substituted with modern, electric and later electronic hearing prostheses. These acoustic hearing aids became antiquated but they did not vanish – they have relocated within the technological and cultural domains.
Soundwalking has traditionally been problematized and exercised as an aesthetic practice that advocates deep aural attention to the here and now. A number of scholars and researchers have dealt with meditative aspects of walking and listening alongside their pragmatic application to the study of noise pollution in urban environments. In this talk, I intend to reroute the dominant paths for theorizing and practicing soundwalking by turning to perspectives from environmental humanities.
