‘Patterns of Ecological and Aesthetic Co-evolution’: Tree-guitars, River-violins and the Ecology of Listening

Abstract

The move ‘outside’ of the concert hall has repercussions for listening and creative practice beyond simply resituating ‘music’. The building of an environmentally specific instrumentarium draws on in situ exploration and cultivation of affordances, but also on the embodied pre-existent knowledge of the artists concerned. A sense of space/place and strategies of listening work together both to situate emergent creative practices within a landscape and to take the affordances of that landscape, the instruments constructed there, and embodied musical experience forward into completed artistic and musical works.

Keywords:

• Ecology of Listening
• Affordances
• Environmental Sound Art
• Instrument Construction
• Improvisation
• Sonic Space

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The artistic research this paper is based on was carried out as part of the project Landscape Quartet: Creative Practice and Philosophical Reflexion in Natural Environments, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council RC id: AH/J004995/1.