//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?

Clara POIRIER | FR |

Paper

Altérité et résonance : ouverture d’un espace pour l’éthique environnementale par le silence et l’écoute. / Otherness and resonance: opening a space for environmental ethics through silence and listening.

Abstract

The act of being silent and listening can bring awareness of the raw reality, a point of view from which it is fruitful to consider the ecological crisis in such a complex period. This presentation will explore the significance of this acoustic awareness on the basis of the concepts of otherness and resonance. First of all, I will explain how the silence of words (to perceive nature without affixing names, analyses, or stories to anything) and the attentive listening (to perceive each being’s sounds and silences in their own consistency) enable the other beings, living or non-living, to appear with all their density. When sounds replace words in supporting sight, it is as if we saw each being for the first time. I will present the concept of otherness from this experience. The resulting density of beings gives facts, to the ecological crisis itself a thickness that helps to consider its seriousness. This acoustic awareness opens a space instead of offering analysis or a piece of information. This space invites people to get prepared to act, by making themselves open to other beings and by reflecting on human activities. I will present this space on the basis of these two facets: listening and resonance. The otherness that attentive listening makes a person aware of, makes reality vaster, because space and time are enhanced by the spatialities and temporalities of each way of being, beyond the comprehension we have of them, and the role we give them. On the other hand, this density of the other beings contextualizes our activities within an ecological crisis that we share with them: we humans have to resonate, time-wise (echo), by responding to others with our own way of being, and space-wise (consonance), by living and acting together with others. Resonance is a non-opaque form of construction, namely, it does not erase otherness when responding to it. It enables collaboration. I will present the questioning that resonance involves about the form human presence takes because this form sends back a certain echo and enables a certain consonance in a larger community of beings: what adequacy is there between the fundamental meaning of human activity or need and the construction, the installation that corresponds to it, among the other beings? I will finally propose three measures, three facets of a soundscape that would make possible the opening of this resonance space, which would be a fertile space for environmental ethics: human living environments that enable the acoustic experience of face-to-face with non-human beings; a sufficiently vast and coherent network of protected areas for other beings to spread their own spatialities and temporalities; and a sociopolitical context that enables thinking about the purposes of our actions and not only about the means required in times of urgency.

Biography

I am in my second year of Ph.D. in environmental philosophy at the CEFE (a French research center in ecology and evolutionary ecology: CNRS UMR 5175) in Montpellier, supervised by Virginie Maris (philosopher) and Anne Charpentier (ecologist). After studying philosophy in Lyon, I specialized in environmental philosophy. I decided to leave the academic domain and make my final-year internship in a research center in scientific ecology, Irstea Lyon-Villeurbanne (now called Inrae), to be with people who work with nature and to use the tools of environmental ethics in practical problematic situations. I have gone on with a Ph.D. in a similar context at the CEFE. My Ph.D. is about the concept of otherness in nature conservation. I am bringing together theoretical research and fieldwork in the French national park “Parc National des Ecrins”. I work on the concept of otherness from an acoustic approach to nature, and I hope I will be able to record a series of acoustic portraits of non-human beings in this national park before April 2021. In that case, my presentation for this symposium would be accompanied by some of these portraits.

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