Creating Sounding Underground

Abstract

Sounding Underground is an online interactive sonic environment that links sound excerpts from the metros of London, Paris and Mexico City, as selected by commuters, as meaningful moments of sound from their commuting routine. Designed as a navigation structure, the environment draws on identifiable architectonic spaces such as entrances and corridors, but also incorporates more abstract ‘spaces’ based on memorable sounds that passengers had in common. The creation of the environment focused on the perception of social, political and symbolic experiences, and was derived from an iterative ethnographic and artistic practice which involved self-reflection, interviews, recordings of and listening to the journeys, and commuters' selections of sounds. This article describes the process of creation through the abstraction of a physical space, as well as the responses the work has evoked in the users and the academic community. It exemplifies the transdisciplinary nature of practice-based research involving the creative use of digital technologies.

Keywords:

• online sonic environment
• underground transportation
• ethnography
• listening
• soundscape
• collective memory

Acknowledgements

This project had technical and logistic support from the Centro Multimedia del Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City (CENART); the Centro Mexicano para la Música y las Artes Sonoras in Morelia (CMMAS); and the Plate-forme Technologique, Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, Paris Nord, Saint Denis.

Notes

¹ A video of Interactive Metro, 1998, is available at http://vimeo.com/51626952 (accessed February 14, 2013).

² In the Bogotá and Tolima region in Colombia, I worked with people producing their own radio and television programmes and experimental video, addressing local interest issues, experimenting with new aesthetics and formats, with greater freedom (in terms of both aesthetic and content) than do the mass media.

³ Different aspects of Sounding Underground research have been presented in international conferences such as Royal Geographical Society, American Anthropological Association, Iberoamerican Soundscape Summit, and Going Underground.

⁴ Sounding Underground was awarded an honorary mention by the IAWM New Music 2011 Competition, International Alliance of Women in Music, for New Genre: Innovation in form or style, including improvisation, multimedia, use of non-traditional notation, and a special mention for Soundscape work by the International Festival of Image, University of Caldas, Manizales, Colombia, 2011. It was featured by Pauline Oliveros in her ‘Her Noise’ Symposium keynote speech at the Tate Modern in 2012, and is part of the Java Museum and of Ear to Earth's 100 x John collections. It has also been exhibited in art venues and academic events in the cities of Berlin, Boston (MA), Burgos, Edinburgh, London, Mexico City, Morelia, Nantes and Towson (MD).

Additional information

Ximena Alarcón is an artist who engages in listening to migratory spaces and connecting this to individual and collective memories. Her practice has involved ethnography, deep listening, and sonic improvisation, intertwined with the creative use of internet multimedia technologies. She is interested in working interstitial or ‘in-between’ spaces where borders become diffused, such as underground transport systems, dreams and the ‘in-between’ space in the context of migration. She completed a PhD in music, technology and innovation at De Montfort University and was awarded The Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship 2007–2009 to develop Sounding Underground at the Institute of Creative Technologies. There, in 2010, she worked as a programme leader for the masters in creative technologies. She has studied with Pauline Oliveros, Carole Ione Lewis and Heloise Gold, the Deep Listening practice, and in May 2012 she gained a deep listening certificate. Since October 2011, she has worked as a research fellow at Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at the University of the Arts London, developing her project ‘Networked Migrations—Listening to and Performing the In-between Space’. She is currently a lecturer for the masters in creative technologies at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University.