Exhibition: 29 May – 3 June 2015
Symposium: Sound and the Urban Environment, Tuesday 2 June 6 – 8pm
Sonic, Digital, Public Spaces: NetPark
Dr Frauke Behrendt discusses how sound and the digital occupy public spaces, drawing form her work developing the digital sculpture park NetPark, she highlights some of the issues of community and collective experience within a digital age.
Speaker: Dr Frauke Behrendt, University of Brighton
www.metalculture.com/projects/netpark/
The Nexus of Soundscape, Art, and Social Action
‘We must hear the acoustic environment as a musical composition and own responsibility for its composition.’ (R Murray Schafer, The Soundscape and the Tuning of the World)
Speakers: Lisa Lavia , Managing Director, Noise Abatement Society
Dr Harry Witchel Discipline Leader in Physiology, Brighton and Sussex Medical School
Urban Acoustic Cartography: Sound mapping as a tool for participatory urban analysis and pedagogy.
Mapping Sound Maps
Sound mapping practices and projects have proliferated around the world in recent years. They offer a critical alternative to the emphasis on noise and noise pollution in current policy, scholarship and practice. Their multivalent character suggests new insights across disciplines: the study of urban sound; practices of (collaborative) sound art; sound in architectural and urban design practice; urban pedagogy and urban data and policy work.
Speaker: Conor McCafferty is a researcher based in Belfast. He is currently pursuing a PhD titled The Acoustic Mapping of Cities, with the Recomposing the City research group at Queen’s University Belfast led by Dr. Sarah Lappin and Dr. Gascia Ouzounian. Prior to commencing his PhD, Conor worked for six years with PLACE, a not for-profit architecture centre based in Belfast. https://twitter.com/comccaff
The Socialisation of Sound
Looking to place sound within an urban social context, framing and contextualising it as an important part of research on space, place and spatial practices. The study of audio cultures, noise cultures, and the soundscape are explored in very different fields of research with very little overlap: ethnomusicology, communications, history and the physical sciences. These all explore sound within society but in very different ways. The result is that while there is a large field of research into sound, there is often a separation between sound as a physical and scientific object and the social meaning of sound. This talk examines a project, which mapped the soundscape of The Smithfield area of Dublin city (an urban regenerated space) over four years with 84 teenagers, 5 older adults and through a series of auto-ethnographic walks. It presents some key findings from this study.
Speaker: Dr Linda O Keeffe, Lecturer in Sound Studies, Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Art Lancaster University Editor of the Interference Journal, Vice president of the Irish Sound, Science and Technology Association
Zone of Tranquil Access
Discusses city planning and soundscape that orientates patterns of life, rather than the fabric of buildings. The Zones of Tranquility are discussed in relation to the sonic environment around the river Taff on its journey through Cardiff, where the project is currently being developed. Civic engagement is at three levels: participants, local
inhabitants, and the public. The participants become custodians of stretches of river. Their initial activity is to map the “zone of tranquil access” along the river, to which pedestrian access extends, and within which their minds are able to listen attentively without being crowded out by too much sound. They plot the zone’s properties onto a device called a “listening wheel” and onto a river map. The participants then shift their focus of listening to conversations with locals about the zone, its value to them, the sonic habitats that give rise to it, and their ecological health. The wheel and map, scaled up to fill a hall and mounted on tables, allow participants and locals to share their findings with one another. They become iconic features around which participants can engage the public about ideas for change.
Glenn Davidson, Artstation
Mike Fedeski, Welsh School of Architecture
Listening Times
1200 1500 Melissa Deerson (Australia) Dawn Chorus: Notes from a Stationary Expedition 7’08” Stereo
1207 1507 Eduardo Brantes (Portugal) Two in Transit 7’
1214 1514 Danny Bright (UK) Ghosting Ruin 18’ 6 channel
1233 1533 Kevin Logan (UK) De Zwaan 14’31”
1247 1547 Joseph Young (UK) 6 Families of Noise 18’
1304 1604 bunú (Northern Ireland, Aidan Deery and Matilde Meireles) Correspondence (Transition #2) 13’32”
1317 1617 Gleeson/ Taylor (Ireland/ UK) up flow of air 6 channel 8’00”
1325 1625 Jesse Doyle & Leo Marcus (UK) Sound, or the Lack Thereof
1335 1635 Leona Jones (UK) On Edge 5’04” stereo
1340 1640 Johannah Hallsten (Sweden) The Onlookers Doubt 6 channel audio, 9’08”
1349 1649 Sindhu Thirumalaisamy (India) Composition for Temple Speakers
1404 1704 Christopher DeLaurenti (USA) Mardi Gras 3’00” stereo
1407 1707 Paula Garcia Stone (Spain) Nunhead: From Dusk to Dawn 12’
1419 1719 Laura Cooper (UK) A Hunt 5‘
1424 1724 Linda O’Keefe (Ireland) Mays song 7’00” & Sara’s song 6’30” stereo
1438 1738 Ingrid Plum (Denmark / UK) The Lightship 3’33” stereo
1442 1742 Mari Ohno (Japan) Floating Sounds 9’05”
1452 1752 Mari Ohno (Japan) Speaking Clock 8’20”