//Unheard_Landscapes - listening | resonating | inhabiting 10th FKL/ENP/AAU_CRESSON International Symposium on Soundscape BLOIS | October 27 -30

Unheard landscapes: this metaphor leaves space to imagination, to the un-thought, to the un-known, to past and future, as well as unexplored sound scenarios. It also reaches the field of auditory perception, the acoustic domain. Sound, through auditive qualities, acoustic phenomena, design practices, artistic creations, and listening experiences, offers an inspiring transversal entry onto landscapes and ambiances. Beyond the discussions on “soundscape”, approaching ordinary environments through sounds increases the awareness of our own capacities to feel, while we inhabit and move across different worlds. From an ecological perspective, resonance appears a key word, too. It puts sound and space together. It implies the idea of a plurality of bodies, things and living beings vibrating all together, sharing common contexts of time and space. The act of listening bypasses the passive meaning it usually receives. It contains in itself a completely unexpressed potential, connoted with «project», «pro-action» and «active decision» by individuals. What will be the sounds of the future and the soundscapes in which we will live, or would like to? How can listening practices evolve, how will we listen or how differently could we listen to the world around us, tomorrow? Inhabiting the world brings to us questions about how we want to manage our being in it. How do we want to inhabit the world sonically? How sound and listening do actually affect our way to inhabit it? Have we lost some of our abilities to resonate with the world? What remains to be heard? Where could the practices of listening and attuning take us to?

Sébastien DE PERTAT; Thomas BONNENFANT; Nicolas TIXIER; Olivier LABUSSIERE | FR |

Paper

LOSONNANTE Re-découvrir les paysages par l’écoute solidienne Losonnante Rediscovering soundscapes through listening by bone conduction

Abstract

Losonnante is a bone conduction sound device for a sensible and critical approach of territories. Based on a micro digital audio system, the listening requires to rest the elbows on the device while resting the hands on the ears. Thus, it offers an immersive experience that works on questions such as form, aesthetics, listening position, attention, and sound content. Beyond its practical aspects, two dimensions, less directly functional, catch our attention, and return to the “unheard” question: 1/ First of all, we experience a new kind of listening, which is not so much listening to content, but listening to the sound itself, to the sound material, and this through the whole body. Listening is both internal and external, we have become a body of sound which in turn plunges into a new sensory immersion as much as it develops new attention to the surrounding sound environment (see for example Deleuze and Guattari (1980) on the 'sound block' and diagonal listening). What do we pay attention to when listening to an environment? What are the worlds of sound that pass through us and of which we have no or no longer the sensitivity? Listening to the compositions of the Danish artist Knud Viktor (1924-2013) is particularly revealing, allowing us to hear in a totally new way sound worlds that were previously inaudible or to which we had not paid attention. 2/ We then experience a device that encourages reflection and collective and multidisciplinary creation. The support that benefited the project along the maturation process was directed toward a fast setup of a viable economic model. This process, that tightens the Losonnante early on in a the phase of its development leaves the possibilities partially explored. The difference between an artifact standardized to be commercialized and a plastic device made by the collectives that take it over is an "unheard of" part, which the so-called innovation processes do not manage to grasp. Through its close approach to the sound material and the links it creates in order to think about its exploitation and installation in situ, Losonnante promises an ‘unheard’ listening and potential because it reinvents and experiments with each context. The Losonnante project was developed within the PACTE laboratory's Environment team and the AAU laboratory's CRESSON team. It was supported by the CNRS and Satt Linksium. About Losonnante in the “innovation newsletter” from CNRS, November 2019: https://www.cnrs.fr/cnrsinnovation-lalettre/actus.php?numero=703 BONNET J. François (2015), L’infra-monde, éditions MF DAMIAN Jeremy (2014), Intériorité/Sensations/Consciences : sociologie des expérimentations somatiques du Contact Improvisation et du Body-Mind Centering, Université de Grenoble DELEUZE Gilles et GUATTARI Félix (1980) Mille plateaux, Paris : Éditions de Minuit

Thomas Bonnenfant is an architect and joined the AAU-Cresson as a CNRS study engineer. He participates in the Losonnante project as a continuation of his Fine Arts work on “Solidarity listening stations”, sonorous bodies. His approach is to conceptualize spatial devices with strong societal interactions whose mass balance takes on a poetic meaning. - Sébastien de Pertat is a PhD student at AAU-Cresson laboratory in Grenoble. His research relates to the sensible approach of socio-ecological issues of the Anthropocene, with particular attention paid to listening and sound ecology. - Olivier Labussière is a geographer and a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (Pacte / CNRS). He is the head of the Environments Research Group of the Pacte Research Center. His research works deal with the relationships between energy, space, and society in a low carbon context. It aims at analyzing the evolution of living lifestyles considering different dimensions (sensitive experience, landscapes, and biodiversity). - Nicolas Tixier is an architect and a Professor HDR of theory and design at The Grenoble School of Architecture. He also teaches at the Annecy Alpes School of Fine Arts. He is the director of the CRESSON team (CNRS laboratory Ambiances, Architectures, Urbanities). The different areas addressed by his research, projects, and teaching experiences concern the relationship between ambiances and projects.

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