Listening to the Urban

Exploring how aural portraits of urban spaces are perceived, altered, interpreted through the listening process, this paper draws on the discourse between sound and body through the space/time rhythm of urban spaces. In 2017, sound recordings were made at seven everyday sites – café, church, market, station, public transport, high street and shopping centre, in four cities which were, in order of visiting, Leicester, UK; Athens, Greece; Saskatoon, Canada and Cagliari, Sardinia in a methodology that included making alien sound interventions in the field and layering recordings in the studio. This set of recordings, Urban Flows and Non Flows, forms the basis of this paper which focuses on the act of listening, both for artist and subsequent listener. Digital media enables us to listen to sound in our own private spaces, both alone and in public. This brings forth the question of does this create a different listening experience from a shared listening and does this affect its potential meaning? This has an impact on how urban space is heard in the first instance and in later hearings from recordings. The original sites were sites of sonic exchange where one’s own presence (due to recording method) is immanent. Does this mean that subsequent listeners of recordings becomes participants and have to reconcile their presence within that hearing or accept that it is inherent within it? Can the territoriality that the original soundscape itself creates be reproduced in the listening process? This work consists of practice-led research, which takes an artistic perspective and draws on a wide-ranging set of influences such as Henri Lefebvre, Murray Schafer, Cláudia Martinho, Brendan LaBelle and Pauline Oliveros.

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Chris A. Wright

Conference

Publication date: July 2019

Publication date (Print): July 2019

Pages: 121-126

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[0001]nb Sheligoe, Willow Mooring London Road, Kegworth Leics. DE74 2EY, UK

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/EVA2019.24

SO-VID: 74cc2137-6c8c-4e6e-999e-3b3c2ad2d610

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of EVA London 2019

Conference acronym: EVA 2019

Conference number:

Conference location: London, UK

Conference date: 8 - 11 July 2019

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

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1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/EVA2019.24

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

R. BandtM. DuffyD. MacKinnon 2007 Hearing Places Sound, Place, Time and Culture Cambridge Scholars Publishing Newcastle Upon Tyne UK
R. BeilB. Marí 2008 The Killing Machine, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller Hatje Cantz Berlin 13
M. BoonG. Levine Practice, Documents of Contemporary Art Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press Cambridge Massachusetts and London 140
A. CarlyleC. Lane 2013 On Listening Uniform Books Axminster Devon 89
D. Ihde 2007 Listening and Voice State University of New York Press New York 75
D. Kahn 1999 Noise, Water, Meat MIT Press Cambridge Massachusetts and London 7
B. LaBelleC. Martinho 2011 Sites of Sound#2 Of Architecture and the Ear C. Patrick PErrant Bodies Press Berlin 175
C. A. Wright 2019 Chris A Wright Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/chris-a-wright-917928995 retrieved 18 March 2019 )

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[1] R. BandtM. DuffyD. MacKinnon 2007 Hearing Places Sound, Place, Time and Culture Cambridge Scholars Publishing Newcastle Upon Tyne UK

[2] R. BeilB. Marí 2008 The Killing Machine, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller Hatje Cantz Berlin 13

[3] M. BoonG. Levine Practice, Documents of Contemporary Art Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press Cambridge Massachusetts and London 140

[4] A. CarlyleC. Lane 2013 On Listening Uniform Books Axminster Devon 89

[5] D. Ihde 2007 Listening and Voice State University of New York Press New York 75

[6] D. Kahn 1999 Noise, Water, Meat MIT Press Cambridge Massachusetts and London 7

[7] B. LaBelleC. Martinho 2011 Sites of Sound#2 Of Architecture and the Ear C. Patrick PErrant Bodies Press Berlin 175

[8] C. A. Wright 2019 Chris A Wright Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/chris-a-wright-917928995 retrieved 18 March 2019 )

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