Listening carefully is more important than making sounds.
Alvin Lucier
Soundwalks! is a transdisciplinary project of informal education which studies people’s acoustic environment, together with its complete psycho-geographical and social context. The activities centred around field-recording and were based on individual field research which took place in selected towns, as well as during creative workshops aimed at the youngest inhabitants of small villages in the Warmian-Masurian Voivodship in Poland. The classes were conducted by professional musicians, sound engineers, and audio-experimentators. Their task was to introduce the participants to sound processing and to make them more sensitive to the music of their surroundings. Due to the area’s specificity, it was water that was the theme of the workshops: its aesthetics and possibilities, within the context of sound anthropology and a creatively understood hydro-acoustics. While tracing the soundscape hybrids of Warmia and Masuria – the sounds of industry and tourism; we were interested in creating a sound hydropolis: the sound-map of the Polish Lakeland.
Soundscape is our acoustic environment, including its context: perceptional, geographical,social. According to R.M. Schafer, our acoustic environment is contaminated and the Western culture’s permission for the primacy of visual perception impedes our sensitivity to sound. In the light of this, the Canadian musician and intellectual proposes the process of ‘ear cleaning’ as a set of practical exercises: going for a walk while focusing on listening and excluding sight, repeating the sounds heard, or keeping an audio diary; these are only some of the techniques advocated. Employing such practices should aid in developing our hearing culture and improving our sensibility to the auditory aesthetics of the places we stay in. So, the place of a passive perceptron, which we are getting accustomed to by ‘muzak’, the advertising background music, should be taken by an active and conscious listening. Sound walks! hydroacoustic channels is based on the propagation of such an activity, with a simultaneous recording of the ‘found compositions’, the preservation of the sound ambience of the ‘here and now’ of the given areas – all with the use of new media, contemporary techniques and technologies, while remaining fully respectful of the tradition and identity of the places visited.
landscape – to experience through sight (the eye)
soundscape – to experience through hearing (the ear)
contact: utu.fundacja@gmail.com