Perceiving, Navigating and Inhabiting: Performance design through sonic strategies

Abstract

In the intersecting fields of performance, technologically mediated live arts and artistic research, the significant potential of deploying sonic strategies is by now well documented. Sound-driven performance design is becoming widespread due to its efficacy in raising awareness of, critically engaging with and traversing and intervening in the complexities of the everyday. Site-specific embodied approaches in particular, such as binaural field-recording and audiowalk composition, have notably underlined the relational, exchange-oriented constellation of interactions between individual and collective bodies, and their diverse surroundings.

The audiowalk format – defined as an immersive soundscape composition, which is anchored in an exploratory embodied perspective and based on listening while interacting with a specific environment – particularly stands out in enabling innovative ways of perceiving, navigating and inhabiting places and communities in contemporary societies. It is implicitly performative, in the sense that the listener’s immediate bodily agency is at stake when a specific choreographic engagement is suggested (following a path and finding your bearings; walking, running, crouching, paying attention to the near and to the far; listening to the layering of composed sounds, local noises leaking in, and “added” sounds brought forth from induced aural imagination). Through a combination of headphone-dedicated aural scenography, choreography, and sound design, the audiowalk activates modes of being embedded in site and situation. This article focuses on presenting and discussing artistic methods and performative strategies developed to counter the aural passivity of everyday listening. It borrows from selected case-studies of artistic production as well as from my own experience as a sound artist creating, researching, and teaching process-oriented sonic strategies for performance design.

Notes

1 For an overview of these terms see: affect (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2007; Ahmed, 2014), atmosphere (Böhme, 1995) and performativity (Fischer-Lichte, 2008).

2 A stereo recording technique where two small omnidirectional microphones are placed at the entrance of each of the listener’s ear canals, so that acoustic elements, such as ear spacing, interaural time and level differences, and the acoustic shadow provided by the earlobes, translate into a spatially realistic recording. Artificial dummy heads can also be used for ‘cleaner’ recordings, but all the examples mentioned in this article imply dynamic binaural recording made by a living, moving listener.

3 Crystallized in his monumental ten-volume System der Philosophie (1964–80).

4 The term situational awareness is connected to the notion of navigation, literally, since its coinage in the field of aviation and aeronautics in World War I. It is defined as the conflation of diagnostic and prognostic skills necessary to secure ‘the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future’ (Endsley and Jones 2004: 13).

5 Concretely the vestibular system, housed in the inner ear, and composed by the semi-circular canals, which are sensitive to rotational movements; and the otoliths, indicating linear accelerations (Angelaki and Cullen 2008: 126).

6 The stereophonic omnidirectional quality of the ears (360 degrees) takes precedence over the binocular (circa 150 degrees, including peripheral vision).

7 From penguins (Aubin and Jouventin 1998) to treefrogs (Richardson and Lengagne 2010), among many others.

8 For a systematic and in-depth historic, conceptual and methodological consideration of the soundwalk see McCartney (2014).

9 This refers to smartphone-specific audiowalks whose different segments are triggered by the listener walking into or through specific areas that are mapped in a GPS-tracking platform. This adds great scenographic and dramaturgic potential by enhancing the audiowalk’s site-specificity, intimately entangling geographical locations and walking paths with the listener’s moving body.

10 Pauline Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations (1971) is an example of an invaluable resource for this practice.

11 Where graphic tools such as drawings and diagrams are combined with text and found objects to re-create spatial and temporal models of a given listening experience.

12 Such locations are placed and mapped through a GPS-tagging audiowalk platform, such as Echoes https://echoes.xyz/