Sounding ruins: reflections on the production of an ‘audio drift’

Abstract

This article is about the use of audio media in researching places, which I term ‘audio geography’. The article narrates some episodes from the production of an ‘audio drift’, an experimental environmental sound work designed to be listened to on a portable MP3 player whilst walking in a ruinous landscape. Reflecting on how this work functions, I argue that, as well as representing places, audio geography can shape listeners’ attention and bodily movements, thereby reworking places, albeit temporarily. I suggest that audio geography is particularly apt for amplifying the haunted and uncanny qualities of places. I discuss some of the issues raised for research ethics, epistemology and spectral geographies.

Following or forging a way through the world: Audio walks and the making of place

“…This would not be our way of doing things now, but at the time we were motivated by a particular vision of the footprints we wanted to leave within Grangetown e we wanted something that simultaneously emulated the touristic audio walk model while occurring in a place and being made by communities that disrupted the accepted discourses of urban tourism. Thus the audio walk a participant encounters today is haunted, to borrow from Gallagher (2015), by absent presences; by other lines, other footprints, other 'intensities of feeling' (Thrift, 2004:57) of and about place that we struggled to reconcile with what we knew of touristic audio walks.…”

“…We suggest that by attending to the creation and reception of particular non-touristic audio walks we can begin to understand them as living and lively encounters with the world; they are emotional and affective ways of making not merely representing place. Our work builds on a substantial critical interest in audio walks (Lavery, 2005;Butler, 2006;Myers, 2010;Gallagher, 2015), but where this paper diverges from this heritage is in its focus not just on the walker, but on the producer as well. Approached in this way, audio walks produce place not as a smooth and coherent expression, but rather as ragged and messy happenings that occur in the interstices of, or relationality between, self and world.…”

Making sense of sound: Visceral sonic mapping as a research tool

“…The second strand arises out of the soundscape literature. It begins with the work of Schafer and the World Soundscape Project to catalogue particular places, through to the use of portable audio devices such as MP3 players in soundwalks (Bull, 2000;Drever, 2009;Gallagher, 2015a). While both sets of literature contribute to approaching body-space relations in a dynamic, shifting and non-reductive framework, current geographical research remains somewhat vague in comprehending how sound is known through the body.…”

Creative processes: From interventions in art to intervallic experiments through Bergson

“…An approach to the process of creativity which is evident in and around the question of methodology, where there is a push towards creative research in the name of experiment itself (Jellis, 2015). A key part of this shift has been an increased engagement with artistic techniques of, for example, photography (Yusoff, 2007), video (Patchett, 2014;Simpson, 2011), curatorial work (Alfrey, Daniels and Postle, 2004), and sound art (Butler, 2006;Gallagher, 2015), as a form of geographic method in its own right. Through these experiments, geographers attend to the qualities of the artistic process rather than to the artistic artefact.…”