The project "Bodies of Sound – Performing the Soundscape" bridges listening and recording environmental sound with gestural, embodied interaction with sound.
Listening is one of the fundamental ways of engaging the environment. Sounding environments, both artificial and natural, play an essential role in manifesting our embeddedness in the world. The concept of the soundscape was coined by the acoustic ecology movement and has since been integrated into the discourse on sound and listening. The convergence of methods and approaches around sound spaces between sound art and music makes the development of theory and practices a relevant and important issue. Gesture and embodied interaction provide an active, non-verbal engagement to perception and promote an understanding of relationships with our social and cultural context. The theory of enactive relations shows that meaning is generated in the adaptive cycle between presence, perception, and actions in our environment.
This project explores the premise that by combining sound recording and musical performance technologies, the experience of the world can be re-mediated in active and interactive listening. Artists as well as the general public have the ability to redefine listening situations through performative actions and create multi-layered experiences of the sounding world. The methods of this project are aligned along three axes: first, field recording using conventional and surround techniques, secondly, gestural interaction using movement and spatial sensing (IMU and motion capture), and finally, surround sound diffusion using multichannel audio or headphone techniques. The development of models for the integration of these three phases forms the central practical goal of this project. The resulting experimental settings will be made accessible in installation and performance. The option of using mobile platforms is considered, depending on the development directions taken for the time-span of this project.
Goals: Foundational research on combining environmental sound and gestural interaction, integration model (practical development), dissemination in publication and performance.