This content is also available in / Ce contenu est également disponible sur: Français

TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE (this episode is a mix of English and French, below is the complete English version)

(bell and breath)

Claude (C ): Steven Morin, I invite you to take a sound walk with me. 

Steve (S): Excellent. Shall we? 

C: So you’re a local councillor here? 

S: Yes. From Hull-Wright.

C: Me, I’m an artist in residence here at DAIMON then I create works for the radio-hull 2023. Then I decided to take a walk with a friend, you, in French and English. The idea of a sound walk is to pay attention to all the details. For example, our feet are making a rather soft sound at the moment. It just rained here in Gatineau. You can feel all the details of life through sound.

Claude: And it’s going to be a bilingual conversation because Gatineau is multilingual and I’m bilingual. In fact, my family, my grandfather lived in Hull at the time. So there are lots of stories that we can tell. 

C: I’d start with what you’re hearing right now, Steven. 

S: I can hear the leaves in the poplar over there. You hear construction because you always hear construction in the city center. I hear birds. I think it was a chickadee. I hear the wind. I hear the wind by itself, I think. I hear the wind in the leaves. I hear the highway and then Montcalm. Someone with a chainsaw, it sounds like. 

C: So that’s the idea. But what’s interesting about the sound walk is that you can also interact with the soundscape. So you listen to it, you perceive it, you’re sensitive to… for example, the car that’s just gone by. You can perceive all sorts of things with sound. For example, there are bustards ahead. We’ll see if they make a sound. We’re so used to seeing that our sense of hearing is sometimes a little less developed, so a sound walk is a way of sharpening our… 

S: With geese, you can hear them in the sky, but you don’t think about them as much when they’re on the ground. 

C: For example, the building here is interesting. The spinning mill was an old factory, the Hanson I forget the name of.

S: Hanson Mills. Socks, among other things? Yes, among other things. 

C: Then it was converted into an artist center in the ’80s and now it’s AxeNéo7 and Daimon. I find it interesting that there’s a cultural center in a former industrial site, that it’s a way of giving new life to the building and the neighborhood.  

(soundscape of children playing)

S: Ruisseau de la Brasserie was really the center of a whole industrial environment. It was the beating heart of Gatineau industry. The axes were made right there. The distillery was right there and a lot of things happened on the creek. So, when we think of industry and culture, when we talk about places, obviously it’s often post-industrial spaces that aren’t necessarily suitable for housing, so we use them to make cultural spaces. The spinning mill was a perfect example. 

(urban soundscape)

S: But it’s clear that in this place, if there was an era. I try to imagine it, and then I hear it in my head: the hammers, the big machines, the saws, and so on. That’s not the case anymore. I mean, there’s no heavy industry of that kind here. The sounds would be completely different. It’s fascinating to imagine what it would have been like back then. Also, you have to remember, just before World War II, there was a big homelessness crisis of what we called the homeless at the time, who were here, who were centered on the West Side. So there would even have been camps. Are those industrial sounds? But it would have been families left in poverty, in this industrial system that left them behind. It would also have been a family place. But not in the same way as now. 

(soundscape of children playing)

C: When I came here earlier, there were a lot of children playing with their bikes. I did some sound recording, and for me it’s also a discovery, because I don’t know Gatineau very well. I’m an artist from Ottawa who comes here to listen… and to take part in Radio-Hull. And I find it really interesting to get caught up in Gatineau’s atmosphere, culture and spaces.

(sound of foot on the road)

C: But speaking of sound, that’s a nice one. Yeah. Tell me what just happened here.

S: Cars going through puddles, everybody knows that sound.  So typical of after the rain. Yeah. Yeah. But also, I mean, it’s asphalt. It wouldn’t be the same if this were, you know, mud. It wouldn’t be the same if this were grass. A car going through puddles definitely has to do with asphalt. And we forget to think… I always think it’s interesting to keep in mind what was here before we built cities and what were the sounds that were possible then it’s I mean, I don’t think about just sounds, I think about all the spaces, the trees. Of course the sounds come with that. How would this place have been different? It would’ve been totally forested. So you would’ve had a different perspective on everything. It would’ve sounded very different. The sounds of a forest, you know, it would’ve almost certainly been a maple forest. So what were the sounds of that, right?

C: Well, right now we’re above what kind of tree this is, but it’s not the poplars from earlier. It’s a more gentle leaf.

S: This is a Manitoba maple. A really big one, surprisingly.

C: Now on my way here this morning, I was playing with this sound.

(sound of gate)

S: Another sound everybody knows.

C: But this, this is so rich. And it’s a gate. And we’re gonna go through this gate and back to la filature…

S: This makes me think it’s school: The sound of school. Absolutely. I mean, ’cause I never worked in a factory, but I think people worked in factories, that’s the sound of the factory closing all those probably more of a sound of beep as you slide it rather than closing like that. But that for me is the sound of school. Every school has a fence like this. Right. The click click and the,

C: Is it cool in a good way or a bad way or just whatever, right?

S: I love school, I’m a parent, but I love school. When as a kid maybe I would’ve had a different idea of it.

C: You see as an artist, to me, this is a very interesting sound that I would play with, right? I would say, okay, this is a barrier. So what is the notion of what is, who’s being left out? What, what, what’s being protected? The sort of conceptual side, but then just the sound itself and it’s, it’s the richness of, of the shaking and, uh, sort of, it’s really interesting artistic material.

S: And funny, this is obviously metal, but I don’t think you can hear the metal. Yeah, you can hear the metal in the after shake, but during the, this sound isn’t necessarily clearly metallic. 

C: Alright, Steven, let’s continue. What I’m going to do with this sound walk, this is a special way of doing the sound walk, is I’m going to insert sounds and do a little bit of composition with it so that your, interventions will bewith closeups of the sounds, which is a, a fun way to play with the notion of a space because that’s what artists do is, is interpret and be playful with aesthetic experiences so that audiences can have different sensations and different ways of, in this case, listening to…

(sound of a cart passing by)

C: What do you hear? 

S: I hear a plane

C: So it’s going to pass over us. stereophony to pick it up. 

S: It’s obviously something specific. In this part of Hall, there’s a certain height that planes are at because they’re landing or departing from the Ottawa airport. That’s one thing we hear. The other thing we hear is ‘biplanes’, often small fun planes, coming out of the Gatineau airport. They’re lower, but a different sound comes with them. But it’s still a very specific pitch.

C: Interesting. You’re good. You pay attention to the details, because it makes a difference to know where a sound comes from, at what height is it clearer if there are clouds or not? It’s all really important and interesting details, I think. So I promised at the start of our walk that I’d tell you a little story. My father, Maurice, who has sadly passed away… His father’s name was Maurice and I remember we used to come here to Hull on Roy Avenue, which isn’t far from here. I have a childhood memory of a fire, a wood-burning stove, because in those days, most people heated their homes by wood-burning stoves. Good morning, sir. 

S: Can I hear the fridge? Very typical of a convenience store. 

C: Is it? How’s that? 

S: Listen? Do you know that sound? Are you in a convenience store, sir? 

C: Can we come in? Okay, this fridge here. Wow. Hi, I’m just taking a sound clip for a sound walk. 

S: He’s just taking a sound clip. OK?

C: Want to record the fridge. 

Convenience store owner: Go ahead.

C: Cheers. Tell me more Steven. 

S: You hear the fan that is very typical of the fridge. Low ceilings. The small areas, it’s very typical. I love depanneur. It’s something that we take for granted. 

Owner: For Youtube? 

C: It’s for a radio station.

Owner: Ah, radio station 106.5 ok cool. Thank you.

C: You’re welcome…  

S: I think we need to think about the role of the convenience store as a community center. Convenience stores are an endangered species. I used to live in Montreal, but that’s the case in Hull too. Convenience stores have played and will continue to play a central role. It’s what they call the third place, where people gather because there’s something to do, they talk to each other, they recognize each other, they see each other. These are becoming very important community places, especially with the shrinking of public space and state-owned spaces. These third-place spaces are super important. I think we need to think hard about the role of convenience stores. 

C: And the sound of convenience stores. 

S: That’s part of it. You know, the smell you get in there. The vision, it’s an addiction. It’s a convenience store. Everybody knows it. When you walk in, but a very typical sound. You know, the ‘sloche’ machine has its noise. It’s a refrigerator, it makes a noise. There’s always the crooked lights that make noise. All the cash coming through the counter, it makes a noise. A sound. 

C: Steven, it’s fascinating. I’m so glad we were able to discover this. There’s another sound phenomenon that happens here, and that’s dogs. 

S: Hello, hello. Hello. 

C: The little dogs make a particularly high-pitched sound and when there are three of them like that together. I call it an interesting sonic presence. 

S: I’d say so. You can also hear the noise of the machines, the buildings around. I don’t know if I can hear them, I don’t think it’s air conditioners or heating, but you can hear this background noise that’s really ‘white noise’. I think we still need to think about sound and noise pollution, because we’re in a poor neighborhood next door. The sounds would be very different. In my opinion, there’s always something to be said for that. When you think about the city, you always have to think about that. 

(cricket sound)

 C: Well, we’ll be back. We’ve done a bit of a tour of the building. The spinning mill, which is spinning, I think it has to do with thread and mending and all that. We’re going to go into the building for a moment, and then we’ll finish with a sound sculpture that’s on site, here in front of the Daimon Artist Center. 

C: Hello Philippe, you know, part of the Radio Hall team, so I’ve been very well received here… so inside, here, it’s just to feel the difference between the outside and inside space. So, what do you hear here inside? 

S: It’s silent. It’s more than silence. It’s what we call it. We stop the noise. Everything is organized to stop the noise.  Very typical inside buildings. We’re going to lower the noise, so the walls, it’s as if they’re eating the noise. You hear people talking, playing with wires, someone like that, pieces of metal, which is still someone talking. A telephone, I think. There’s a noise. It’s the sound of light. 

C: Then there’s a fan over there that makes a little sound here. Yeah, that’s it. S: That’s what I was hearing. You can hear people.

C:. the contrast between an indoor and an outdoor space, something that’s really interesting, something that happens to us every day and that we don’t pay much attention to. But it’s a really nice experience to just stay inside. Outside. 

(silence)

C: There’s a sculpture in front of the building here by a Montreal artist. I’ll find out his name. 

S: There isn’t. There isn’t a little sign. 

C: It’s Adam Basanta. It’s called Triad. Then I’m going to put my mic on like this. I invite you to listen. 

S: Super interesting experiment. And if you do two different ends. 

C: I can tell you about it. 

S: Sounds like different frequencies. But tell me about this one. 

S: You want me to tell you about here? That’s interesting. Yes. Wow! 

C: Let’s sit here and try it out. I’ll go to the other end. Go ahead. 

S: Hi Yes, you can hear me. It’s a fascinating noise in here, but there’s actually something in this pipe here. I imagine it changes the sound slightly. It’s fascinating the interplay of frequency and length. There’s a mathematical game going on here, which we ignore or listen to, because it’s so natural. But length changes frequency. 

C: Well, we’ll stop here, since there’s a work of art that has helped us listen more closely to the space here. Thank you for the sound walk. It’s going to play, obviously. a Radio-hull 2023, but also on my conscious podcast because it’s part of the series I’m exploring, on the sounds of modernity. So we talked about all that this morning. Thank you very much Steven Moran. 

S: It’s always a pleasure to talk about Hull, and then it’s fun to see too. 

C: See you soon. Thank you, Steven.

*

Recorded at La Filature, Gatineau, August 30, 2023. Warm thanks to Steven Moran for his collaboration. 

This episode was created while I was in residence during the summer of 2023 at the Centre de production DAÏMÔN in Gatineau Québec as part of the fourth edition of Radio-Hull 28 days of programming from September 7 to October 4 2023 showcasing local artistic practices. 

With thanks to the Centre de production DAÏMÔN production team: Manon, Coco, Philippe and Simon and DAÏMÔN’s funders and partners. 

I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).

My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the Canadian Red Cross.

The post e141 filature – what does gatineau sound like? appeared first on conscient. conscient is a bilingual blog and podcast (French or English) by audio artist Claude Schryer that explores how arts and culture contribute to environmental awareness and action.

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———-

About the Concient Podcast from Claude Schryer

The conscient podcast / balado conscient is a series of conversations about art, conscience and the ecological crisis. This podcast is bilingual (in either English or French). The language of the guest determines the language of the podcast. Episode notes are translated but not individual interviews.

I started the conscient project in 2020 as a personal learning journey and knowledge sharing exercise. It has been rewarding, and sometimes surprising.

The term “conscient” is defined as “being aware of one’s surroundings, thoughts and motivations”. My touchstone for the podcast is episode 1, e01 terrified, based on an essay I wrote in May 2019, where I share my anxiety about the climate crisis and my belief that arts and culture can play a critical role in raising public awareness about environmental issues. The conscient podcast / balado conscient follows up on my http://simplesoundscapes.ca (2016-2019) project: 175, 3-minute audio and video field recordings that explore mindful listening.

season 1 (may – october 2020) : environmental awareness and action Season 1 (May to October 2020) explored how the arts contribute to environmental awareness and action. I produced 3 episodes in French and 15 in English. The episodes cover a wide range of content, including activism, impact measurement, gaming, arts funding, cross-sectoral collaborations, social justice, artistic practices, etc. Episodes 8 to 17 were recorded while I was at the Creative Climate Leadership USA course in Arizona in March 2020 (led by Julie”s Bicycle). Episode 18 is a compilation of highlights from these conversations.

season 2 (march – august 2021 ) : reality and ecological grief Season 2 (March 2021 ) explores the concept of reality and is about accepting reality, working through ecological grief and charting a path forward. The first episode of season 2 (e19 reality) mixes quotations from 28 authors with field recordings from simplesoundscapes and from my 1998 soundscape composition, Au dernier vivant les biens. One of my findings from this episode is that “I now see, and more importantly, I now feel in my bones, “the state of things as they actually exist”, without social filters or unsustainable stories blocking the way”. e19 reality touches upon 7 topics: our perception of reality, the possibility of human extinction, ecological anxiety and ecological grief, hope, arts, storytelling and the wisdom of indigenous cultures. The rest of season 2 features interviews with thought leaders about their responses and reactions to e19 reality.

season 3 (october 2021 – february 2022 ) : radical listening Season 3 was about radical listening : listening deeply without passing judgment, knowing the truth and filtering out the noise and opening attention to reality and responding to what needs to be done. The format is similar the first podcast format I did in 2016 with the simplesoundscapes project, which was to ‘speak my mind’ and ‘think out loud’. I start this season with a ‘soundscape composition’, e63 a case study (part 1) and e64 a case study (part 2), a bilingual speculative fiction radio play, set in an undergraduate university history seminar course called ‘History of 2021 in Canada’. It concluded with a soundscape composition ‘Winter Diary Revisited’.

season 4 (1 january – 31 december 2023) : sounding modernity

About

I’ve been retired from the Canada Council for the Arts since September 15, 2020 where I served as a senior strategic advisor in arts granting (2016-2020) and manager of the Inter-Arts Office (1999-2015). My focus in (quasi) retirement is environmental issues within my area of expertise in arts and culture, in particular in acoustic ecology. I”m open to become involved in projects that align with my values and that move forward environmental concerns. Feel free to email me for a conversation : claude@conscient.ca

acknowledgement of eco-responsibility

I acknowledge that the production of the conscient podcast / balado conscient produces carbon. I try to minimize this carbon footprint by being as efficient as possible, including using GreenGeeks as my web server and acquiring carbon offsets for my equipment and travel activities from BullFrog Power and Less.

a word about privilege and bias.

While recording episode 19 “reality”, I heard elements of “privilege” in my voice that I had not noticed before. It sounded a bit like “ecological mansplaining”. I realize that, in spite of good intentions, I need to work my way through issues of privilege (of all kinds) and unconscious bias the way I did through ecological anxiety and grief during the fall of 2020. My re-education is ongoing.

View the original: https://www.conscient.ca/e141-filature-what-does-gatineau-sound-like/

(soundscapes of east vancouver at c. 5am)

I can’t sleep tonight. 

What about you? 

I love nighttime soundscapes. 

They’re so bareboned, minimal, like the rumble that you hear now, mostly from Vancouver harbour, but also the industrial area here in east vancouver.

So I’m up, recording, listening, figuring out what keeps me up at night, this night, other nights, when I listen and try to understand… 

Sometimes I feel like I can hear inaudible sounds, like the polar ice caps melting…

(homeless person walking by with wagon)

But of course what I’m hearing here is the life around me. A homeless person just walked by with their wagon of survival materials and that’s what happens at night. Life unfolds and people try to survive. 

Some are dormant and some are very active, like the raccoons who are doing their work. 

But back to the ice melting, that’s what I find bewildering is this state between awakeness and sleep. A kind of dream state where I’m not sure what exactly I’m hearing and my imagination kind of takes over, so, I do sometimes feel like I’m listening to things like the ice melting up north in the arctic or feeling the trees around me growing. 

What is the sound of a tree growing? What are those kinds of things. 

They don’t always wake me, but they sometimes keep me up at night in wonder and I worry about this fragile world…

Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023, 5.12am. 

What keeps you up at night?

*

The soundscape for this episode was recorded at 5.07 am in Vancouver on May 3, 2023.

I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).

My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the The Only Animal theatre company.

The post e126 sleepless – what keeps you up at night? appeared first on conscient. conscient is a bilingual blog and podcast (French or English) by audio artist Claude Schryer that explores how arts and culture contribute to environmental awareness and action.

Powered by WPeMatico

———-

About the Concient Podcast from Claude Schryer

The conscient podcast / balado conscient is a series of conversations about art, conscience and the ecological crisis. This podcast is bilingual (in either English or French). The language of the guest determines the language of the podcast. Episode notes are translated but not individual interviews.

I started the conscient project in 2020 as a personal learning journey and knowledge sharing exercise. It has been rewarding, and sometimes surprising.

The term “conscient” is defined as “being aware of one’s surroundings, thoughts and motivations”. My touchstone for the podcast is episode 1, e01 terrified, based on an essay I wrote in May 2019, where I share my anxiety about the climate crisis and my belief that arts and culture can play a critical role in raising public awareness about environmental issues. The conscient podcast / balado conscient follows up on my http://simplesoundscapes.ca (2016-2019) project: 175, 3-minute audio and video field recordings that explore mindful listening.

season 1 (may – october 2020) : environmental awareness and action Season 1 (May to October 2020) explored how the arts contribute to environmental awareness and action. I produced 3 episodes in French and 15 in English. The episodes cover a wide range of content, including activism, impact measurement, gaming, arts funding, cross-sectoral collaborations, social justice, artistic practices, etc. Episodes 8 to 17 were recorded while I was at the Creative Climate Leadership USA course in Arizona in March 2020 (led by Julie”s Bicycle). Episode 18 is a compilation of highlights from these conversations.

season 2 (march – august 2021 ) : reality and ecological grief Season 2 (March 2021 ) explores the concept of reality and is about accepting reality, working through ecological grief and charting a path forward. The first episode of season 2 (e19 reality) mixes quotations from 28 authors with field recordings from simplesoundscapes and from my 1998 soundscape composition, Au dernier vivant les biens. One of my findings from this episode is that “I now see, and more importantly, I now feel in my bones, “the state of things as they actually exist”, without social filters or unsustainable stories blocking the way”. e19 reality touches upon 7 topics: our perception of reality, the possibility of human extinction, ecological anxiety and ecological grief, hope, arts, storytelling and the wisdom of indigenous cultures. The rest of season 2 features interviews with thought leaders about their responses and reactions to e19 reality.

season 3 (october 2021 – february 2022 ) : radical listening Season 3 was about radical listening : listening deeply without passing judgment, knowing the truth and filtering out the noise and opening attention to reality and responding to what needs to be done. The format is similar the first podcast format I did in 2016 with the simplesoundscapes project, which was to ‘speak my mind’ and ‘think out loud’. I start this season with a ‘soundscape composition’, e63 a case study (part 1) and e64 a case study (part 2), a bilingual speculative fiction radio play, set in an undergraduate university history seminar course called ‘History of 2021 in Canada’. It concluded with a soundscape composition ‘Winter Diary Revisited’.

season 4 (1 january – 31 december 2023) : sounding modernity

About

I’ve been retired from the Canada Council for the Arts since September 15, 2020 where I served as a senior strategic advisor in arts granting (2016-2020) and manager of the Inter-Arts Office (1999-2015). My focus in (quasi) retirement is environmental issues within my area of expertise in arts and culture, in particular in acoustic ecology. I”m open to become involved in projects that align with my values and that move forward environmental concerns. Feel free to email me for a conversation :

View the original: https://www.conscient.ca/e126-sleepless-what-keeps-you-up-at-night/

Note : Une version en français de cet article est disponible sur : Français

(Jacek Smolicki)

The ultimate question I’m asking is how can we move away from soundwalk as a kind of framed aesthetic experience or artistic experience and turn it into an existential practice or basically something that is just ingrained in our everyday life and we don’t have to frame it anymore. It’s just basically part of our way of living. 

(Claude Schryer)

Can you give an example of that? 

(Jacek Smolicki)

An academic example would be the concepts developed by Steven Feld, acoustemology, where basically listening, a kind of sonic way of being in the world is part of your culture, part of existence. You don’t tell yourself, okay, I will listen to the world more carefully from now for another hour, and then I can just return back to my everyday life but you basically just keep listening, right? A kind of sonic sensitivity is one of the most important ways of understanding the world as opposed to being pushed to the background and only lifted up during those kinds of frame situations such as a soundwalk. 

(Claude Schryer)

I’ve been sound walking in an analytical way, so I’ll try to make sense of the sounds and where they are and what they’re about but there’s also an absorption factor where you allow the sounds to speak to you in their own language, right? As opposed to sort of rationally figuring them out. So, if we stop here and listen, what are you hearing? 

(Jacek Smolicki)

I hear a coexistence of culture and nature and at the same time a kind of friction between two realms that in fact are just one realm and we kind of try to maybe separate them. We talked a little bit about this positionality and we hear the whistle of the train. From one perspective, we heard some people here referring to that sound as being very calming and reassuring, but if you think of indigenous people, that sound might mean a completely different thing. It’s a form of bordering and creating, some kind of a division, of cutting the land and deciding how the land is to be traversed and utilized. So it definitely has a violent connotation if we look from that perspective and if we listen from that perspective. I think that this is some kind of sensitivity that I’m aiming at, also, while teaching, to be able to also take that thought into consideration when we try to value or kind of assign value to different sounds. I think Dylan Robinson is talking about oscillation. I think he calls it to be able to constantly oscillate, to move from one way of understanding sound to another. And basically by doing that it destabilizing certain certainties that characterizes our way of listening and, and by doing that, becoming open to those other understandings and perceptions… 

(Claude Schryer)

And asking questions. You know, we were on a panel together a few days ago (Stetson University) when we were asking the question, how can listening help the world that is in crisis? and it’s an open-ended question because with listening everybody has their own way of listening, but there are certainly deeper ways of listening that we can learn and unlearn as we work our way through these issues. 

(Jacek Smolicki)

Exactly and that we’ve been talking a lot about hope. We’ve been talking a lot about how this openness is almost inherently good. I have that feeling. People talk about if we open up our listening and if we invite other perspectives, then we are doing something good. But I think that opening comes with certain responsibilities too, right? I like to think of it in a way that the more open we become to those different perspectives, the more troubled, actually, we should become more concerned rather than content and calm, so there’s this disruptive aspect to listening that Hildegard Westerkamp has been writing about, but as we open ourselves, as we include other perspectives, we at the same time disrupted something, right? That we at the same time should be calling ourselves to action and becoming more responsible. So, there’s some kind of an obligation I think that should follow that act of opening and deepening our listening. 

(Claude Schryer)

I agree. Thank you for this moment. We will listen again.

*

This episode with artist Jacek Smolicki was recorded on Friday March 24th, 2023 at 8.44 am at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. 

It’s a soundwalk about soundwalking but also about the role of acoustic ecology in the ecological crisis. 

After completing our first 5 minute conversation (e113 part 1) we heard a passing train and continued our conversation, which is this episode (part 2).

I encourage listeners to do your own soundwalks. There are many guides and methods. One of my favorites is Soundwalking by Hildegard Westerkamp but also Jacek’s new book Soundwalking through space, time and technologies.

I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).

My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the  Children and Youth Artists’ Grief Deck! Artists’ Literacies Institute.

*

Jacek Smolicki (born during martial law in Kraków) is a cross-disciplinary artist, designer, researcher and educator. His work brings temporal, existential and critical dimensions to listening, recording and archiving practices and technologies in diverse contexts.

Besides working with historical archives, media, and heritage, Smolicki develops other modes of sensing, recording, and mediating stories and signals from specific sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, and audio-visual installations.

He has performed, published, and exhibited internationally (e.g. In-Sonora Madrid, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, AudioArt Kraków, Ars Electronica, Linz, and Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo). His broad scope of site-responsive artistic and research work includes projects concerned with the soundscapes of the Swedish Arctic Circle, the Canadian Pacific Coast, the world’s tallest wooden radio mast in Gliwice, the UFO testimonies from the Archive for the Unexplained in Sweden, the Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, the former sites of the Yugoslav Wars, Madrid’s busking culture, and Alfred Nobel’s factory complex in Stockholm, among many other places.

In 2017 he completed his PhD in Media and Communications from the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University where he was a member of Living Archives, a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Between 2020-2023 Smolicki pursues an international postdoctorate funded by the Swedish Research Council. Located at Linköping University in Sweden, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Harvard, USA, his research explores the history and prospects of field recording and soundwalking practices from the perspective of arts, environmental humanities, and philosophy of technology.

In 2022/2023 he is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard.

He is also an associate scholar at the Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University. From January 2020 he is a member of BioMe, a research project that investigates ethical implications of AI technologies on everyday life realms. Smolicki explores sonic capture cultures and the impact of AI technologies on human and other-than-human voices.

He is a co-founder of Walking Festival of Sound, a transdisciplinary and nomadic event exploring the critical and reflective role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings.

Since 2008 Smolicki has been working on On-Going Project, a systematic experimentation with various recording techniques and technologies leading to a multifaceted para-archive of contemporary everyday life, culture, and environment. The On-Going Project includes Minuting, a record of public soundscapes performed daily ever since July 2010, for which he received the main prize at the Society for Artistic Research conference in 2022.

For info see https://www.smolicki.com/index.html.

The post e113 soundwalk (part 2) – how can we deepen our listening? appeared first on conscient. conscient is a bilingual blog and podcast (French or English) by audio artist Claude Schryer that explores how arts and culture contribute to environmental awareness and action.

———-

About the Concient Podcast from Claude Schryer

The conscient podcast / balado conscient is a series of conversations about art, conscience and the ecological crisis. This podcast is bilingual (in either English or French). The language of the guest determines the language of the podcast. Episode notes are translated but not individual interviews.

I started the conscient project in 2020 as a personal learning journey and knowledge sharing exercise. It has been rewarding, and sometimes surprising.

The term “conscient” is defined as “being aware of one’s surroundings, thoughts and motivations”. My touchstone for the podcast is episode 1, e01 terrified, based on an essay I wrote in May 2019, where I share my anxiety about the climate crisis and my belief that arts and culture can play a critical role in raising public awareness about environmental issues. The conscient podcast / balado conscient follows up on my http://simplesoundscapes.ca (2016-2019) project: 175, 3-minute audio and video field recordings that explore mindful listening.

season 1 (may – october 2020) : environmental awareness and action Season 1 (May to October 2020) explored how the arts contribute to environmental awareness and action. I produced 3 episodes in French and 15 in English. The episodes cover a wide range of content, including activism, impact measurement, gaming, arts funding, cross-sectoral collaborations, social justice, artistic practices, etc. Episodes 8 to 17 were recorded while I was at the Creative Climate Leadership USA course in Arizona in March 2020 (led by Julie”s Bicycle). Episode 18 is a compilation of highlights from these conversations.

season 2 (march – august 2021 ) : reality and ecological grief Season 2 (March 2021 ) explores the concept of reality and is about accepting reality, working through ecological grief and charting a path forward. The first episode of season 2 (e19 reality) mixes quotations from 28 authors with field recordings from simplesoundscapes and from my 1998 soundscape composition, Au dernier vivant les biens. One of my findings from this episode is that “I now see, and more importantly, I now feel in my bones, “the state of things as they actually exist”, without social filters or unsustainable stories blocking the way”. e19 reality touches upon 7 topics: our perception of reality, the possibility of human extinction, ecological anxiety and ecological grief, hope, arts, storytelling and the wisdom of indigenous cultures. The rest of season 2 features interviews with thought leaders about their responses and reactions to e19 reality.

season 3 (october 2021 – february 2022 ) : radical listening Season 3 was about radical listening : listening deeply without passing judgment, knowing the truth and filtering out the noise and opening attention to reality and responding to what needs to be done. The format is similar the first podcast format I did in 2016 with the simplesoundscapes project, which was to ‘speak my mind’ and ‘think out loud’. I start this season with a ‘soundscape composition’, e63 a case study (part 1) and e64 a case study (part 2), a bilingual speculative fiction radio play, set in an undergraduate university history seminar course called ‘History of 2021 in Canada’. It concluded with a soundscape composition ‘Winter Diary Revisited’.

season 4 (1 january – 31 december 2023) : sounding modernity

About

I’ve been retired from the Canada Council for the Arts since September 15, 2020 where I served as a senior strategic advisor in arts granting (2016-2020) and manager of the Inter-Arts Office (1999-2015). My focus in (quasi) retirement is environmental issues within my area of expertise in arts and culture, in particular in acoustic ecology. I”m open to become involved in projects that align with my values and that move forward environmental concerns. Feel free to email me for a conversation :

View the original: https://www.conscient.ca/e113-soundwalk-part-2-how-can-we-deepen-our-listening/

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Note : Une version en français de cet article est disponible sur : Français

(Claude Schryer)

Jacek, what is soundwalking? 

(Jacek Smolicki)

That’s a very broad question, but I’ll try to answer from two perspectives: my own and from what is kind of more generally considered soundwalking. So, to quote Hildegard Westerkamp, one of the pioneers of that practice, basically, a soundwalk is any kind of excursion into an environment which is motivated by us listening to it. Whether we do it with or without technologies or whether we do it on our own or in a group and the point of soundwalking is to connect or reconnect us with the environment, with how it sounds at the very moment to kind of reaching this sense of immersion in the here and now. 

My approach to sound is slightly different. I treat soundscapes as a kind of gateways to not only the momentary – the way that the sound  expresses itself in the moment  or the sound expresses events that happen at the moment – but also as gateways into the past and into the future. 

I like to kind of expand the perspective of soundwalking and use it as a kind of a vehicle to move us between different scales, between different temporalities and between different standpoints or different angles from which we can engage in this act of connecting with the environment. And the way I do it is by encouraging people to listen with whatever listening capacities they have, but also through technologies. 

And, as a scholar in media, in communications and within a personal interest in technological developments within sonogram, I’m trying to treat technologies as our companions rather than enemies or something that is alien to our human nature and try to build kind organic synergies between the way we implement technologies in our lives and in our ways of understanding nature around us. 

(Claude Schryer)

And all the ethical ramifications of that…

(Jacek Smolicki)

Exactly and of course, ethical ramifications, so I like to call my approach to soundwalking as kind of a kind of transversal listening or hybrid listening where basically listening becomes like a vector that cuts through different layers of the environment in a kind of geological material sense, but also in a temporal sense. So as we stand here for example, we’re not standing only here in this particular geography, but we are at the same time kind of benefiting from other geographies that surround us and we can actually hear, for instance, air traffic and through that sound we can connect with very distant geographies in a most direct sense, the geographies from which those planes arrive or are destined to, but we can also think of the plans around us as some of them are not necessarily native to this geography, right? They come from somewhere else. They pertain to different histories of, for instance, colonization and so on. And the same applies to temporalities. The sounds we hear today are here for some reason, right? They have roots in other sonic events that might not be directly accessible to us and this is also why I like to encourage imagination as a kind of natural component to soundwalking and listening and to enable a more speculative approach to how we listen. So instead of really trying to dissect and understand all the sounds around us to also think more imaginatively about what kinds of sounds existed before we stepped into that environment and what kind of sounds might exist in the future also because of our actions at the very moment.

(Claude Schryer)

We’re doing a soundwalk now here, mostly talking about sound walking, but it’s an experience and I’ve done it over the years and I encourage my listeners to do it because it’s a very rewarding practice and it’s one you can do anywhere, anytime. So before we run out of time, what would be a good question for people to ask themselves or to keep in mind as they soundwalk? 

(Jacek Smolicki)

I think one important question would be what is my position within the soundscapes that I’m working through and how do I approach the soundscape? What kind of associations dominate my way of experiencing it, for instance, and start basically there and then trying to maybe gradually leave that zone and consider other ways of positioning ourselves in the soundscapes and by doing that, acknowledging the possibilities of other perspectives on the soundscapes and other ways of understanding and coexisting with it. 

(Claude Schryer)

In other words, what is my position in listening ?

*

This episode with artist Jacek Smolicki was recorded on Friday March 24th, 2023 at 8.38am at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. 

It’s a soundwalk about soundwalking but also about the role of acoustic ecology in the ecological crisis. 

After completing our 5 minute conversation we heard a passing train and continued our conversation, which is part 2 of this episode.

I encourage listeners to do your own soundwalks. There are many guides and methods. One of my favorites is Soundwalking by Hildegard Westerkamp and also Jacek’s book Soundwalking through time, space and technologies.

I am grateful and accountable to the earth and the human labour that provided me with the privilege of producing this episode. (including all the toxic materials and extractive processes behind the computers, recorders, transportation and infrastructure that make this podcast possible).

My gesture of reciprocity for this episode is to the Children and Youth Artists’ Grief Deck! Artists’ Literacies Institute.

*

Jacek Smolicki (born during martial law in Kraków) is a cross-disciplinary artist, designer, researcher and educator. His work brings temporal, existential and critical dimensions to listening, recording and archiving practices and technologies in diverse contexts.

Besides working with historical archives, media, and heritage, Smolicki develops other modes of sensing, recording, and mediating stories and signals from specific sites, scales, and temporalities. His work is manifested through soundwalks, soundscape compositions, diverse forms of writing, site-responsive performances, experimental para-archives, and audio-visual installations.

He has performed, published, and exhibited internationally (e.g. In-Sonora Madrid, Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, AudioArt Kraków, Ars Electronica, Linz, and Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo). His broad scope of site-responsive artistic and research work includes projects concerned with the soundscapes of the Swedish Arctic Circle, the Canadian Pacific Coast, the world’s tallest wooden radio mast in Gliwice, the UFO testimonies from the Archive for the Unexplained in Sweden, the Jewish Ghetto in Kraków, the former sites of the Yugoslav Wars, Madrid’s busking culture, and Alfred Nobel’s factory complex in Stockholm, among many other places.

In 2017 he completed his PhD in Media and Communications from the School of Arts and Communication at Malmö University where he was a member of Living Archives, a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Between 2020-2023 Smolicki pursues an international postdoctorate funded by the Swedish Research Council. Located at Linköping University in Sweden, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and Harvard, USA, his research explores the history and prospects of field recording and soundwalking practices from the perspective of arts, environmental humanities, and philosophy of technology.

In 2022/2023 he is a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Harvard.

He is also an associate scholar at the Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence at Uppsala University. From January 2020 he is a member of BioMe, a research project that investigates ethical implications of AI technologies on everyday life realms. Smolicki explores sonic capture cultures and the impact of AI technologies on human and other-than-human voices.

He is a co-founder of Walking Festival of Sound, a transdisciplinary and nomadic event exploring the critical and reflective role of walking through and listening to our everyday surroundings.

Since 2008 Smolicki has been working on On-Going Project, a systematic experimentation with various recording techniques and technologies leading to a multifaceted para-archive of contemporary everyday life, culture, and environment. The On-Going Project includes Minuting, a record of public soundscapes performed daily ever since July 2010, for which he received the main prize at the Society for Artistic Research conference in 2022.

For info see https://www.smolicki.com/index.html.

The post e113 soundwalk (part 1) – what is my position in listening? appeared first on conscient. conscient is a bilingual blog and podcast (French or English) by audio artist Claude Schryer that explores how arts and culture contribute to environmental awareness and action.

———-

About the Concient Podcast from Claude Schryer

The conscient podcast / balado conscient is a series of conversations about art, conscience and the ecological crisis. This podcast is bilingual (in either English or French). The language of the guest determines the language of the podcast. Episode notes are translated but not individual interviews.

I started the conscient project in 2020 as a personal learning journey and knowledge sharing exercise. It has been rewarding, and sometimes surprising.

The term “conscient” is defined as “being aware of one’s surroundings, thoughts and motivations”. My touchstone for the podcast is episode 1, e01 terrified, based on an essay I wrote in May 2019, where I share my anxiety about the climate crisis and my belief that arts and culture can play a critical role in raising public awareness about environmental issues. The conscient podcast / balado conscient follows up on my http://simplesoundscapes.ca (2016-2019) project: 175, 3-minute audio and video field recordings that explore mindful listening.

season 1 (may – october 2020) : environmental awareness and action Season 1 (May to October 2020) explored how the arts contribute to environmental awareness and action. I produced 3 episodes in French and 15 in English. The episodes cover a wide range of content, including activism, impact measurement, gaming, arts funding, cross-sectoral collaborations, social justice, artistic practices, etc. Episodes 8 to 17 were recorded while I was at the Creative Climate Leadership USA course in Arizona in March 2020 (led by Julie”s Bicycle). Episode 18 is a compilation of highlights from these conversations.

season 2 (march – august 2021 ) : reality and ecological grief Season 2 (March 2021 ) explores the concept of reality and is about accepting reality, working through ecological grief and charting a path forward. The first episode of season 2 (e19 reality) mixes quotations from 28 authors with field recordings from simplesoundscapes and from my 1998 soundscape composition, Au dernier vivant les biens. One of my findings from this episode is that “I now see, and more importantly, I now feel in my bones, “the state of things as they actually exist”, without social filters or unsustainable stories blocking the way”. e19 reality touches upon 7 topics: our perception of reality, the possibility of human extinction, ecological anxiety and ecological grief, hope, arts, storytelling and the wisdom of indigenous cultures. The rest of season 2 features interviews with thought leaders about their responses and reactions to e19 reality.

season 3 (october 2021 – february 2022 ) : radical listening Season 3 was about radical listening : listening deeply without passing judgment, knowing the truth and filtering out the noise and opening attention to reality and responding to what needs to be done. The format is similar the first podcast format I did in 2016 with the simplesoundscapes project, which was to ‘speak my mind’ and ‘think out loud’. I start this season with a ‘soundscape composition’, e63 a case study (part 1) and e64 a case study (part 2), a bilingual speculative fiction radio play, set in an undergraduate university history seminar course called ‘History of 2021 in Canada’. It concluded with a soundscape composition ‘Winter Diary Revisited’.

season 4 (1 january – 31 december 2023) : sounding modernity

About

I’ve been retired from the Canada Council for the Arts since September 15, 2020 where I served as a senior strategic advisor in arts granting (2016-2020) and manager of the Inter-Arts Office (1999-2015). My focus in (quasi) retirement is environmental issues within my area of expertise in arts and culture, in particular in acoustic ecology. I”m open to become involved in projects that align with my values and that move forward environmental concerns. Feel free to email me for a conversation :

View the original: https://www.conscient.ca/e113-soundwalk-part-1-what-is-my-position-in-listening/

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