Listening as Methodological Tool: Sounding Soundwalking Methods

Amongst the interplay of competing commands and demands for our attention in daily life, multitasking attentive listening to the here-and-now with the bipedal locomotion mode of ambulation – along with an inordinate amount of other incessantly shuffling and intermingling of tasks – is considered by many as routine. Relentlessly endeavoring to attend to the sounds around you, whilst dwelling in and passing through everyday environments for an extended duration of time, by actively curtailing other customary cognitive tasks or behaviors, on the other hand, is an atypical activity. Prefiguring the developments of sensory ethnography (Pink 2015) and the “sonic turn,” (Drobnick 2004: 10), such a pursuit, under the overarching term, soundwalking, has been employed over the past 40 years as a designated and dependable, even vital sonic method. Approaching soundwalking as an emergent rather than a transplantable fixed practice with an ossified methodology, this chapter will feed off historical precedence and draw from the author’s direct experience as a soundwalk facilitator in multiple situations, catering for participants with disciplinarily specialisms including acoustic engineering, architecture, ornithology, city planning, accessibility, social science, and arts practice, and extending out to school children and the general public at large – all stakeholders and individuals with diverse general and specific needs, concerns and understandings. Attentive concentration on listening is an engrossing experience where one can becomes absorbed in the flow of the enveloping soundscape. As it is beholden on the soundwalk leader to guide and to plan ahead to the safe and sound completion of the walk, whilst poised to attend to any pressing pragmatic issues that may transpire midst-walk, the actual emphasis on their listening tends not to be prioritized. But this in turn permits the participants to dedicate their entire attention to the task in hand. So, reversing roles, the author will also reflect on his various soundwalking experiences as participant – experience which encompasses dogmatic and more idiosyncratic approaches, in formal and performative, intimate and extrovert configurations. The chapter will critically reflect and evaluate on this multitudinous data-set that endeavors to incorporate and verbalize sensuous experience and behavior, whilst surfacing the practical, logistical, and ethical vagaries. It will unashamedly concentrate on soundwalks that do not incorporate audio playback via headphone or aspects of telepresent or augmented reality (beyond participants’ regular use of audio prosthetics) such as audio walks by e.g. Janet Cardiff, Christina Kubisch, and Duncan Speakman; it is contended that soundwalking with the “naked ear” is an already highly sophisticated and infinitely practicable and malleable methodology suitable for multiple research, training and artistic needs

Soundscape Composition: Listening to Context and Contingency

Soundscape composition does not easily qualify as a delineated genre with clear aesthetic or procedural criteria; rather it represents a common set of attitudes and values that emerge out of the themes, methods and strategies associated with the study of the soundscape, itself, a circa 50-year-old subject area that has perpetually undergone development and subsequently revivification by allied disciplines (such as acoustics, biology, geography, ethnomusicology, sociology, etc.). In the same vein, any meaningful exploration on soundscape composition should nurture and prompt action and experimentation across disciplines, not nostalgically cling to the preservation of ossified art genre specifications. In this regard, the most comprehensive and I think enthusing definition of soundscape composition that primes practice has been the articulation by Hildegard Westerkamp, asoundscape artist and activist, who also resists pinning it down too tightly: [I]ts essence is the artistic, sonic transmission of meanings about place, time, environment and listening perception. (Westerkamp, 2002, p. 52) It goes without saying that such all-encompassing themes have great resonance with commercial sound design; however, soundscape composers are permitted to dedicate all their efforts to their exploration, not subservient to an external narrative or the strictures of fi lm sound clichés etc. Westerkamp leads by example: soundscape compositions such as the stereo acousmatic works, Talking Rain (1997) and Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989) and the eight-channel Into the Labyrinth (2000), each address and activate these themes in a continuously creative and context responsive manner. These works don’t just present edited, juxtaposed and superimposed fi eld recordings, but they enquire into the methods and modes of their construction, and most importantly they are not exclusively framed through Westerkamp’s highly attuned listening. They involve, include and inform the listener in their practices of listening and sonic ways of knowing. This chapter will explore the amalgams of orthodoxies and orthopraxis of those salient soundscape concepts that are exercised in manifold configurations in soundscape compositions and related practices. Naming, attending to and more deeply examining these aural vicissitudes, it is hoped, will inform future expressions of sound design practice in a deeper manner, as habitually experienced by our everyday listening and encountered in our everyday soundscape, a discussion that should provoke the sound designer’s ever-increasing dependency on tried and tested stock sound effects

The Sublime in Acousmatic Music: Listening to the Unpresentable

Included in the proceedings of the International Conference 21-23 June 2001, De Montfort Universit

Sanitary Ambiance: the noise effects of high speed hand dryers

"Publicly accessible toilets have been populated by a new variety of hand dryers – the ultrafast hand dryer, using cold air at tremendous speeds to strip moisture off hands. Designed for speed and efficiency they chime with current agendas of “ecology” and “austerity”, whilst their marketing pulls on notions of dynamism and muscularity, sporting tags such as air force, blade, blast, hurricane, jet, turbo and typhoon. While dryer makers claim engineering success, this ongoing project probes at the ‘sonic footprint’ of the hand dryer and its consequent noise effects on everyday users. Led by Dr John Levack Drever, Senior Lecturer in Composition and Head of the Unit for Sound Practice Research, Goldsmiths, University of London, this project consists of a range of studies including product acoustic testing, environmental acoustics and noise assessment, and sociological discourse

London Street Noises: A Ground-Breaking Field Recording Campaign from 1928

In a leading article by Sir Percival Philips in the UK popular newspaper, the Daily Mail, July 16, 1928, came the following headlines: “Millions Lost by Noise – Cities' Worst Plague – Menace to Nerves and Health – What is Being Done to Stop it”. The article was supported by research from Prof Henry J. Spooner, who had been researching and campaigning on the ill-effects of noise and its economic impact. The article sparked subsequent discussion and follow-up articles in the Daily Mail and its international partners. In an era of rapid technological change, that was on the cusp of implementing sound pressure measurements, the Daily Mail, in collaboration with the Columbia Gramaphone Company Ltd, experimented with sound recording technology and commentary in the field to help communicate perceived loudness and identify the sources of “unnecessary noise”. This resulted in the making of series of environmental sound recordings from five locations across central London during September 1928, the findings of which were documented and discussed in the Daily Mail at the time, and two recordings commercially released by Columbia on shellac gramophone disc. This was probably the first concerted anti-noise campaign of this type and scale, requiring huge technological efforts. The regulatory bodies and politicians of the time reviewed and improved the policies around urban noise shortly after the presentation of the recordings, which were also broadcast from the BBC both nationally and internationally, and many members of the public congratulated and thanked the Daily Mail for such an initiative. Despite its unprecedented scale and impact, and the recent scholarly attention on the history of anti-noise campaigning, this paper charts and contextualises the Daily Mail’s London Street Noise campaign for the first time. As well as historical research, this data has also been used to start a longitudinal comparative study still underway, returning to make field recordings on the site on the 80th and 90th anniversaries and during the COVID-19 lockdown, and shared on the website londonstreetnoises.co.uk

Soundscape composition: the convergence of ethnography and acousmatic music

Despite roots in acoustic ecology and soundscape studies, the practice and study of soundscape composition is often grouped with, or has grown out of the acousmatic music tradition. This can be observed in the positioning of soundscape compositions juxtaposed with acousmatic music compositions in concert programmes, CD compilations and university syllabuses. Not only does this positioning inform how soundscape composition is listened to, but also how it is produced, sonically and philosophically. If the making and presenting of representations of environmental sound is of fundamental concern to the soundscape artist, then it must be addressed. As this methodological issue is outside of previous musical concerns, to this degree, we must look to other disciplines that are primarily engaged with the making of representation, and that have thoroughly questioned what it is to make and present representations in the world today. One such discipline is ethnography. After briefly charting the genesis of soundscape composition and its underlying principles and motivations, the rest of the paper will present and develop one perspective, that of considering soundscape composition as ethnography

The Case For Auraldiversity In Acoustic Regulations And Practice: The Hand Dryer Noise Story

With its inclusion of “hearing impairments and hearing aids” as factors that may “influence auditory sensation”, within the criteria of the new International Standard definition and conceptual framework of soundscape (BS ISO 12913-1:2014), we witness a sea change in how a standard in acoustics may regard hearing: not as a fixed, universal and generalizable metric predicated on the otologically normal (BS ISO 226:2003), but as a shifting, unsteady human trait that we individually, tacitly know from day to day experience. This paper will present a case study that exemplifies the pressing need for such as sea change. It will present the issues arising from a preliminary study of the noise effects of ultra-rapid “ecological” hand dryers in publicly accessible toilets. They are very popular due to impressive data and marketing on efficiency, effectiveness, hygiene and speed, the adverse corollary is a dramatic increase in sound pressure levels in this socially sensitive environment. The study comprised of sound power tests, followed up by in situ sound pressure tests in a range of different sized WCs. The most extreme example from this study showed one dryer in a reverberant public toilet had the equivalent combined Leq of 19 dryers in a free field environment. From provisional interviews it appears that the noise effects are impacting on a wide range of vulnerable subgroups: breast-feeding mothers, infants and children, dementia sufferers, the visually impaired, hearing aid users and most seriously the discomfort on those with hyperacusis and hyperacute hearing in ASD. This study functions as a microcosm for soundscape/environmental noise issues in the urban environment. The paper will conclude with a proposed paradigm for situating hearing in acoustics that extends from a normative, clinical model of hearing, the otologically normal to a socio-cultural concept of the auraltypical and auraldiversty

Soundwalking: Aural Excursions into the Everyday

Soundwalking – a persistent yet markedly peripheral activity of experimentalmusic and sound art – in its most fundamental form, in the words of soundwalker/composer/acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp, is ‘… any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment. It is exposing our ears to every sound around us no matter where we are.