Soundscape, site and installation

Location is a key concern for soundscape researchers. Many classic and contemporary studies evidence a strong affinity for place. Cusack’s work, for example, remains intrigued with the incidence of sound at the same time as using the sonic as a starting

point for social, geo-political and environmental discussions. Drever’s discussion of the soundscape of contemporary Hong Kong is as sociological as it is sonorous.

Site is a particularly useful concept if our goal is to simultaneously explore soundscape and location. The term does not play a defined role in the lexicon of either soundscape studies or acoustic communication and is therefore open to fresh interpretation. At the same time, there is an adequate intellectual heritage to allow for the assimilation of concepts and approaches from art and design. I believe that locating this enquiry at the interstices between site, place and space – while using the terminology and approaches of soundscape studies and acoustic communication within a mixed methodology – offers a unique perspective for considering the aural aspects of quotidian experience and the development of sound art practice.

Conceptually, I believe site affords us the opportunity to bring together documentary practice, social and ecological enquiry and the creative aspects of soundscape

composition. On the one hand, site may simply represent the location of study, on the other, it may represent the space of an intervention. This is particularly useful for me as my practice embraces both perspectives. I investigate sites and soundscapes and then, using my own composition techniques, create mediatised phonographic montages that are designed to be experienced in situ. This is a use of transphonic sound to influence and shift the focus of attention.

Site is a highly appropriate perspective from which to consider sound because all sound is, or becomes, situated. Following Gibson’s (1968) observations concerning the

relationship between sound and affordance and Clarke’s (2005) concerning sound and perceptual learning, it is reasonable to propose that the ultimate situation of sound – the sound we experience as sound and not as a compound pressure wave – lies within the listener’s field of consciousness. As we journey outwards from this core of experience, it may be observed that every audible sound has its own acoustic space within the overall situation of the soundscape (See Schafer, 1994). Each sound is shaped on its journey to the ear by the characteristics of the site; diffused sound, unless experienced in the treated environment of the anechoic chamber, is always heard as the relationship of sound to space.

In section 1.2.8 I discuss the ongoing, but problematic, relationship between sound art and the site represented by gallery space. Issues relating to both reverberation and isolation are identified, as well as those relating to sound’s ability to mix with external sources (see Connor 2005). I also note how the established tradition of creating or adapting sound art for specific spaces and contexts has generated a particular focus on site-specificity within research methodology. In relation to sound art, gallery space is essentially porous; sound brings the outside into the gallery and it potentially extends the art experience into the world beyond. Thus, gallery space becomes both fluid and

malleable and its boundaries become harder to define or delimit. In order to explore this porosity further it will be necessary to place this discussion of site-specificity and sound art installation into the broader context of site as it is explored in general art theory.

Erika Suderburg (2000, pp. 2-5) observes that defining site-specific artworks in relation to form or content is impossible as they exist in a “zone of maximum hybridity”, that started to coalesce in the early 1960’s as a result of the ongoing dematerialsation of the art object and a desire among many artists to dispense with accepted art-form boundaries.

However, at the intersection of many practices, “the site of the installation becomes a primary part of the content of the work itself” (ibid.). According to Suderburg, installation is, “the art form that takes note of the parameters of that space and reconfigures it” (ibid.). This taking note may take many forms, for example, the augmentation, configuration or negation of physical factors, or a focus on historical, political, gender or psycho-geographical profiles. Collectively there is a focus on the,

“aural, spatial, visual, and environmental planes of perception and interpretation” (ibid.).

James Meyer (2000, pp. 24-27) defines two types of site. The first is the literal site. This is the actual site we have already been introduced to by Suderberg, where the artist’s work, “conforms to the physical constraints of its situation.” The work is defined by, and experienced in relation to, the site. Sound works, such as Henning Christiansen’s (2006) multichannel Symphony Natura for Rome Zoo and the Davos Soundscape (2007) are both examples. Despite their differing realization, experiencing these works requires one to be physically present. Meyer (2000, pp. 24-27) points out that such works encourage an awareness of the body and criticality. Emerging from the 1960s, he also identifies this form of site specificity as a manifestation of the desire for authenticity and as offering an aesthetic of presence.

The soundscape is intimately connected with site, however it remains fluid, responding to local conditions and the movement of the listener. Throughout my experience of site investigation I have been constantly aware of sound from around the corner, over the hill and from behind closed doors. As David Toop (2010, p.30) points out, “sound is the medium that outreaches the known and negotiable world.”

The separation of sound from source by distance or visual occlusion is an everyday experience that does not require electroacoustic process. This reinforces the suggestion I made earlier that the final specificity of the site for sound is the point of comprehension:

the consciousness of the individual listener. Consequently, there is nothing strange about the experience of moving with, and through, sound; it is a part of us – something both intrinsic and extrinsic at the same time. I have observed that this is a factor exploited by works designed for mobile listening technologies. This observation renders Mayer’s (2000, p. 24) second form of site, the functional site, highly significant. The functional site may be a physical place but it can also be, “a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and textural filiations and the bodies that move between them. It is an informational site, a palimpsest of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places, and things: an allegorical site.” Sound, by its nature, is easily

transplanted and the experience of relocated sound is ubiquitous in our culture.

Miwon Kwon identifies the functional site (2000, p. 44) as a discursively determined site:

one that is, “delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange, or cultural debate.”

If, as he suggests, the initial move towards literal site specificity in the 1960s defeats the nomadic capacity of an earlier generation of modernist artworks that did not respond to site, then the emergence of a functional approach confers a form of “nomadic

subjectivity” (ibid., p. 32) on the artist. This may be focused towards the critique of site and authorship. Work may deal with journeys and events or political and environmental issues.

Sound is fluid, comparatively easy to manipulate and easily transplanted. Hence there is a scalable and controllable degree of slippage between the literal and the functional site for sound-based work. For example, Janet Cardiff’s audio works which are originally

designed to be experienced in situ and then ‘relocated’ to a functional site created by Mirjam Schaub’s Walks Book; Udo Noll’s Aporee project where recordings may be

experienced on location using a GPS enabled mobile device or away from the site using the web interface. This thesis is also an example of the process by which the literal is progressively converted into functional form.

Viewed from this perspective there is a vast archive of sound works that operate as site critique. Part of this critique is the awareness that the mediatisation of the soundscape through electroacoutic processes changes the very nature of site. The direct relationship between sound and source that went unquestioned before the introduction of recording, reproduction and broadcast technologies is subverted to the extent that the ‘authenticity’

of the literal site cannot be taken for granted. Site potentially becomes a mobile, multidimensional, polyvalent and multi-temporal potential that may be intentionally reconfigured. At the same time site is place, and as I discuss in the next section of this chapter, it cannot be entirely disassociated from its concrete aspects. Hence site acquires both fixed and fluid attributes. This is a useful perspective for the soundscape researcher, phonographer or sound artist because it creates a flexible, scalable relationship to

location, one that may be closely aligned with the specifics of place and community or abstracted away towards critique and sonic intervention.