Workshop ›Listening to the Environment‹ with Peter Cusack

Photo by Laura Caroline Ranglack (Galaxaura)

Workshop ›Listening to the Environment‹
Peter Cusack, University of the Arts, London

Wednesday, Nov 9, 3:00-7:00 pm, ZeM – Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften, Potsdam

As an introduction Peter Cusack gave an overview of his work in field recording and environmental sound, in particular the project Sounds from Dangerous Places that asks the question, ›What can we learn of damaged places, like the Chernobyl exclusion zone, by listening to their sounds?‹

›Walking in the City. Hidden Sounds and Mobile Places‹

A miniature for mobiles inspired by Michel de Certeau’s seminal text ›Walking in the City‹, based on the radio aporee app

John Cleese, The Ministry of Silly Walks

›The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language. It is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language).‹ (Michel de Certeau)

Photo by Judith Willkomm

›Walking in the City. Hidden Sounds and Mobile Places‹ is a sound art installation in public space, accessible via a customised smartphone app. Listeners are invited to explore and appropriate an area of hidden sounds–and to compose their own radio play by walking.

›Footsteps weave places together.‹ (Michel de Certeau)

©: Kerstin Kühl, 2013

›Walking in the City. Hidden Sounds and Mobile Places‹ was created and presented in September 2013 as an exceptional soundwalk for the KOSMOS Summer University 2013 ›Modern Walking. Innovative Urban Mobility‹ (here’s a video clip on KOSMOS Summer University).

Compose by walking! A miniature for mobiles

›Inside every room of every house of a street, each of them full of audible details, usually concealed behind closed doors: if it would be possible to listen to these everyday choreographies, what could you hear?‹

Buddhist temple at Berlin Ackerstraße (Photo: Andreas Praefcke)

This experimental project called Berlin Ackerstraße (2006-2007) takes you on a participant observation or rather, a participatory sound expedition in Berlin, Ackerstraße. It enables you to listen to the sounds of everyday life in Ackerstraße five years ago – while walking down the street today.

Miniatures for mobiles is an app which responds to your movements: you are literally composing by walking. You are wandering around in a radio play.

A soundscape remodelled

Urban square Nauener Platz in Berlin was recently remodelled and reconstructed by urban planners and acousticians in order to improve its ambiance – with special regard to its sonic properties. One of the outcomes of this project is a middle-sized noise barrier (gabion wall) reducing the crossroads’ traffic noise on the playground by 3 dB.

Nauener Platz playground with noise barrier (gabion wall)

Following a distinct ›soundscape approach‹, acoustician Prof. Dr. Brigitte Schulte-Fortkamp and her colleagues at Technische Universität Berlin not only took measurements and calculated noise contour maps. They also conducted ›soundwalks‹ and even invited local residents to participate in the planning process. In the end, local residents required more pleasant sounds at Nauener Platz.

In respondance, several ›audio islands‹ were installed: today’s visitors of Nauener Platz are supposed to sit down on ›ear benches‹ with integrated speakers to listen to ocean surf or birdsong (sound devices by Barbara Willecke, sound files by Konstantin Dudel).

›Soundwalkers‹ by Raquel Castro

We still don’t know what sound looks like. But here’s how soundwalkers look like (and sound like): Sound researcher Raquel Castro shot this eclectic documentary about her fellow researchers, about their experiences with sound in everyday life and what still incites them to listen. 

›Talk about the walk‹. Kathrin Wildner’s soundwalk at the Tempelhof Field

In June 2010 I participated in a soundwalk conducted by Kathrin Wildner, an urban ethnographer reknown for her research in Mexico City and Istanbul. In Berlin, we were taking a walk at Oderstraße along the line of the fence which encloses the former Tempelhof airport. We asked ourselves if the fence may act as a sonic border and what – in general – a border sounds like.

In the meantime, the airport had been opened to the public which slightly shifted the focus of our inquiry towards the massive change of the soundscape in this area. Surprisingly, the Tempelhof Field today makes up an area of quietness in the middle of Berlin.