//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?

Francesco MICHI, Mechi CENA | IT |

Installation

Orizzonti/Horizons

In our world, that what allows us to see our life as a (more or less) regular proceeding, which allows us to plan, to have expectations, as well as to perceive the past and to get to know when it is gone, is the idea that we have got time. Listening, as well as the emission and transmission of sound, develops over time. We do not have a snapshot of a sound, because a sound, for its complete perception - and therefore in order to have its own recognizability, to have a meaning, or a significance -, it needs our time. The link between sound and time is therefore indissoluble. On the other hand we know, from physics, that time does not exist, or rather, it does not exist at a fundamental level (C. Rovelli), it is a construct of man, so we "invented" it. We are walking on a minefield, these things are for physicists: how can we doubt of our experience of time, that is perhaps the most important emotion of our life, which itself develops in our perceived time ... indeed we can say that the end of life is the end of the perception of time ... This all seems impossible But it is fascinating to think of possible perceptions of time different from ours (which are actually not so different): sound can serve as a "litmus test" to make them explicit. Horizon is a gash that opens towards listening to another world: we listen to it and perceive the passage of time "beyond" as different from the one "on this side": we perceive it through hearing. Sound, we know, lies upon time, it is carried by it, and it is narrated over time. How would the sounds appear to us when brought by times that flow a little different from ours? There are many worlds that could differ from ours, even for the smallest detail, if we apply combinatorics we can imagine a number that is hard to write. A sonic multiverse that would surely surprise us by falsifying our perception of continuity. One of these possibilities is, for example, that of delay - when the continuity of an event, because of some unknown physical phenomenon, is interrupted, has a stumbling block ... and then starts again -, or that of a time that is suspended, or that flows in a inconstant way. ORIZZONTI is a minimal installation: in a possibly empty room, light is dim or darkened, four speakers are placed in front of us and allow you to listen to the world beyond the horizon: from our listening point we perceive the sounds of the environments, of the passing objects, voices, animals, machines that populate that world, the same things we perceive every day, everything is normal, known. But slowly, in every micro-cell of the sound material, something changes . A stumbling block, for instance a "delay"; what we expected to hear is late, does not arrive or deforms. And that daily microcosm decomposes, becomes indecipherable.

About the authors

Mechi Cena studied electronic music and computer music at the Conservatory of Turin and then in the Conservatory of Florence. In the meanwhile he worked as a sound engineer in a recording studio and with Leo de Berardinis Theatre Company. Around mid-'80s, he wrote for RAI “Radio Tomography” in 25 episodes and “Nel cuore delle tenebre” (“In the darkness’ heart”) in 12 episodes, which he both produced and directed. He quitted the artistic activity to start it again in 2004; since then he wrote nine night tales for radio broadcasting entitled "The powerful soul of trains", being a speaker, author and director; then "L'Essere Rumoroso"(two series) and “Suonetti”(with Francesco Michi), both produced by RTSI Lugano. Francesco Michi lives and works in Florence, where he graduated in Philosophy and then in Electronic Music. He works along two main lines of research: the experimentation of creative approaches through technological, poor and daily use materials, and at the same time the study of acoustic environment and its changes. In 2003 set up ARTECO with Elsa Mersi and Anton Roca. He is the Italian coordinator of the international association for soundscape FORUM KLANGLANDSCHAFT (FKL) since march 2009. Starting 1999 he works on music and Web, both as a theorist and a web-based sound designer: with Albert Mayr, Anton Roca and Luca Miti, he takes part to AEFB (Aesthetic Flow Bureau), which website hosts his last works. In 2007, 2008 and 2012 he realized with Mechi Cena two series of "L'Essere Rumoroso" and “Suonetti”, radio programs on sound produced and broadcasted by the Swiss Radio RTSI2.

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