Anne Line MI, Thomas UA, Sofie MI og Jonas MI
Download to your mp3-player:
The Speed of Sound Walk.mp3
Then go to the waiting area (by the miniature model train) at Aarhus Trainstation and push play!
The Speed of Sound Walk takes you on a little walk in Aarhus city - on the walk you will be aware of your own movements
and you get to feel the pulse of the city.
- we recommend you to take the Sound Walk in the afternoon or whenever the streets are (just a little) crowded.
Starting point - Map
Documentation
The assignment:
For the assignment you are to develop a project for a place influenced by beginnings. The project should heighten a feeling of publicness based on the idea of speeding.
We are going to create a sound-walk through the centre of Aarhus, in which we are going to control the speed of the walker as he/she walks. This will, we think, create a heightened awareness of you in relation to the public by breaking normal patterns. Also it will enhance your awareness of the public and the tempo of the different locations.
We chose the train station as the starting point of our walk, because it is a place that is very influenced by beginnings. It is sort of the beginning of Aarhus when you come by train.
During the sound walk you will be asked to walk at certain paces, stop at certain points, and pay attention to certain aspects of the public, while listening to sounds and/or music to set the mood and facts about the speed of a variety of things in order to create perspective.
Theoretical base:
Pinder/Cardiff
Cultural geographies of the city relating to subjectivity, representation and memory. Urban walking (and the work of contemporary artists) take to the streets in order to explore, excavate and map hidden spaces and paths in the city.
“The steps that make up this solitary walking tour are simultaneously real and imagined. The voice locates you within a fictionalised realm with characters and routes […] The artwork literally takes place in the streets, finding it’s meaning through it’s embodied enaction. In effect it is performed or co-created by participants."
The sound-walk will heighten your senses, and as a listener you are participating in something (a book, a film…) as you are caught up in the narrative (its directions, intercutting, voices, bursts of music). It creates a space-between – between fiction and reality.
Cardiff: “The Missing Voice” sharpens attention to outward surroundings, it also fosters inward awareness and an almost detached sense of the urban scene. The voices on the soundtrack shift between spaces and location.
Toby Butler
A Walk of Art: The potential of the sound walk as practice in cultural geography
“Sound Walks - the potential of this medium is to create flowing, multi-sensory and embodied ways for social and cultural geographers to research the outside environment.”
Cultural Geography: The sound walk’s interpretation of space and place – experiments in combining walking, sound, memory and artistic practice is useful tools for researching cultural geography. According to Butler the art world and the site-specific media, has the potential to inspire social and cultural geographers to communicate their work to a wider audience - in a way that will really make them notice.
The sound art movement: The focus (today) moves from the visual towards the audible because of technology (recording technology) and the changing character of every day noise (modern, urban life – Aldous Huxley calls the 20th century as the Age of Noise). Move performance and display outside the conventional cultural spaces record/celebrate more contemporary everyday sound (that used to be “noise”).
The mobility: Just as the world has become noisier, it has also become more mobile – mobility is borderless, ever-changing, flowing and playful (de Certeau, Thrift and Guatarri).
Sound Walks: Janet Cardiff (“The missing voice”) – a guided walk presents a series of observations, unanswered questions ect. David Pinder: the effect is to heighten your senses and the stories mix with your own thoughts and memories as you wander the streets. Melding between the artwork and the consciousness of the participant means that the walk is a highly specific experience that will differ according to the mood and circumstances of each listener on the particular day.
Michael Bull
According to Bull the new mobile technology such as mobile music players have made it possible for the listener to create a feeling of privacy in the public arena. “The private and the public arena melts together and makes it possible for the listener to choose which world he/she wants to be situated in.” The use of mobile music players there by gives the listener a very unique kind of experience of the urban space. By selecting the “right” song to a specific state of mind the listener incorporates there own music into the urban surroundings and there by sets the mood and there own personal touch on the surroundings.
In our project we turned Bulls theory around. Instead of creating a feeling of privacy we used the mobile music player to inhance a feeling of publicness. We incorporated the surroundings into the listeners private bubble by highlighting the speed of certain places in the urban city and at the same time tried to make the listener aware of there surroundings. Instead of selecting a song to a specific state of mind, we picked songs that highlighted the surroundings and the specific paces, either by inhancing the speed of a certain place or by making the participant stand out of the crowd by walking in a pace that do not match the speed of the surroundings, which also inhance the feeling of publicness.
Debord
According to Debord a derive is a specific way of experiencing ones surroundings and there atmospheres. A derive differences itself from just walking around by demanding you to be aware of your surroundings. Specific for the derive is that every city has its own geographical psyche which means that there are certain directions and tendencies that prevent you from walking in and out of different urban places. A neighbourhood is not just a neighbourhood because it is on a map, but also because the neighbourhood has its own distinct feelings and characteristic traits. It is exactly this geographical psyche we have tried to incorporate in our sound walk. Al thou our sound walk can’t be seen as a true derive because of its lack of randomness, it is very similar to the derive because it highlights the same things as the derive does.
Goffman
According to Goffman people communicate and make information available through body idiom. How we act depends on the situation - where we are, who’s around and so on. Goffman uses the term involvement (in situations) – it’s a matter of an (individual) inward feeling and outward expression. During The Speed of Sound Walk the listeners (or actors) will have to move in different ways that are out of the “normal” behaviour (in the particular places). By acting differently it’s easier to see “how people normally act” in the city (by looking at other peoples’ reaction when your acting sends out different signals).
Hemment
About the things we did in class on 11/3 we would say that our project fits into the box with the words “Interpretive, explanatory” under “Ambulant” because we enhance the sense of the speed of both yourself and your surroundings partly by explaining to you how to experience things, and you are then supposed to interpret these new experiences.
Obstruction: If we have to make our project fit into the box with the words “Social authoring” we would ask the walkers to document and tell about their experience on a web page or forum, thereby making their own footprints on the walk. (perhaps we will actually do this)
Feedback from Lone and Johanne
Great project, the inversion of the ‘normal’ sound walk by making the walker stand out is a good idea. Also, by incorporating the speed of certain places you nicely incorporate the actual places where the walk takes place, instead of just ‘applying it’ to a random space (this is what Flanagan (UA) and partly Hemment discussed, as well as Pinder and LaBelle (UA)).
