In recent years, my personal artistic practice has become heavily focused on what I consider “sonic placemaking.” In the worlds of sociology and urban design, placemaking refers to the participatory act of shaping a public space in order to best serve the people it hosts.1 However, this act can also extend into artistic creation for the same purpose, turning placemaking into a process in which one can interact with and reimagine places through music. Within the concept of placemaking and considering place, it’s important to remember that the world around us is reinvented daily, our existence constantly in a state of disintegration, decay, renewal, and formation. We are left behind faster than we can accept it, moving towards a future that remains intangible even as we rocket towards it. Our pasts are left behind and what was once so tangible to us degrades away and becomes fiction. How do we as artists reconnect with this past and understand this future, the things which we hold so close to us even when we physically cannot? Graham Harman’s thoughts on the “fiction” that we create out of our life experiences push back against the idea that lacking this tangible connection is a hindrance:
...we should be in no hurry to flush fictional objects out of existence…And remember that by ‘fictional’ I do not just mean the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Emma Woodhouse, but also the everyday houses and hammers that we seem to encounter directly, but which we perceive in the manner of simplified models of the real houses and hammers to which we can never gain direct access.2
Embracing the fictional becomes a pivotal way in which we can create meaningful connections with place — not just choosing to represent the world that does exist, but instead looking for the world that did exist and will exist.
This leads to what is, for me, a pivotal question of interacting with place. Can the essence of something only be found through its direct translation into a medium? Or, can the essence of something instead be found in a way that prioritizes its useand contribution to the translation? Harman’s concept of object-oriented ontology provides a philosophical basis for a manner of indirect artistic interaction having value over literal recreation:
…any literal description, literal perception, or literal causal interaction with the thing does not give us that thing directly, but only a translation of it…an indirect or oblique means of access to reality is in some ways a wiser mode of access than any amount of literal information about it.3
The main crux of my approach focuses on the idea that allowing indirect translations of places (e.g. field recordings, photos, or videos of an object taken in a specific place and time) to actively be re-contextualized within artistic creation and performance (e.g. being used as the formal structure for a piece, turned into musical notation, projected on or into the instruments —either visually or audibly) provides for a significant, socially meaningful interaction with the place itself.
Composer and researcher François Bonnet’s research on the ability of sound to retain histories and backgrounds relates to this as well. In speaking of the concept of “soundmarks” (acoustic marks representing a given territory), he notes that “Each sound…once it becomes audible (once it leaves a trace) and forms a territory (makes a mark) can become the soundmark of a more or less virtual. more or less sensible territory.”4 Allowing an object, a soundmark of a place — something statically fixed or caught in time — to play an active role in artistic creation (and, especially, performance) essentially turns it from a “dead” object into a “living” one, one which does not only shape the creation but is also shaped by it.
Placemaking is a collaborative process and I propose that incorporating it into artistic practice provides a blueprint in which one can explore personal connections, provide an amplifying platform for diverse outside voices, and work to reimagine a shared future for the community at large. This relies on one embracing the belief that art can help to enact change — or, at the very least, seriously influence our views on the future. As music theorist Judith Lochhead notes, “While it may be true, as Luciano Berio points out, that ‘music can’t lower the cost of bread, is incapable of stopping…wars, [and] cannot eradicate the slums and injustice,’ the affective powers of music as sensuous presence can spur imaginings of new futures.”5 The difficult part in this process is then not the conceptual level, but the translation of the concept from its tangible form to the intangible art world. Urban designers know how to build a place because it is a literal thing — a courtyard, a garden, a library — but what about an artist? Beyond only dealing with literal place, with my work I aim to tackle how musical placemaking exists as a way to reimagine our connections to the intangible — our past and our potential futures as individuals and as a larger society.
I must admit that figuring out what place actuallyis can offer an immediate roadblock, and defining the concept of place itself becomes the key element for setting a blueprint for this artistic practice. Aristotle’s concept of place6 — the belief that the place of x is the first innermost motionless boundary of the thing that contains x — is a logical starting point for many, but handles a concept that relies too much on physicality for the interest of my philosophy. Finding a definition for my practice begins with differentiating it from a space, geographic location, or simply physical existence, something which geographer Tim Cresswell points out is “a more abstract concept than place…Spaces have areas and volumes. Places have space between them.” As space may be used to represent the geographical location, place then becomes what defines a particular location:
The word place is often used in everyday language to simply refer to location. When we use place as a verb for instance (where should I place this?) we are usually referring to some notion of location-the simple notion of 'where'. But places are not always stationary. A ship, for instance, may become a special kind of place for people who share it on a long voyage, even though its location is constantly changing….As well as being located and having a material visual form, places must have some relationship to humans and the human capacity to produce and consume meaning.7
As Cresswell further observes, space is perhaps that which needs to be contextualized along the way to creating a place:
Space, then, has been seen in distinction to place as a realm without meanings as a 'fact of life' which, like time, produces the basic coordinates for human life. When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way (naming is one such way) it becomes a place.8
This sense of place, and its flexible manner of being, is a major component of what I aim to connect to with my compositional practice. However, mere reference to, or surface connection with, a place is not quite enough; rather, I have preferred to elevate the importance of objects which make up our places, or even create them for us. These objects are things that can define a place and serve as more of a link between the abstract elements of a place and elements which can drive its transformation into a work of art.
François Bonnet’s use of the conceptualized sonorous trace offers a possible connection between a place’s objects and the role of sound in a place — asserting that the impact a sound has on a place in many ways defines the sound. As noted by Peter Szendy, “Even before materializing or becoming a signal, the sonorous — sound — in order to be, must leave a trace'... For 'to leave a trace', as the otographer tells us, to be a trace, is already for a sound to be 'somewhat more than a sound.'”9 Bonnet’s conceptualization of this asserts that a sound in a place has a goal, an impact with which it can establish the guidelines of a place:
…sound is not simply that which we hear; as soon as it exists, as soon as it leaves a trace, it is already somewhat more than that. It has functions to perform, expectations to meet, things to say. In fact, the utilitarian reinvestment of the sonorous is always already in play as soon as its tracing comes into effect. The trace of sound, neither purely sensible nor solely signifying, is where the sonorous opens onto the audible world, the great matrix of interfacing between sounds and listeners.10
Can the impact of a sound then bring its meaning to a space and transform it into place? The use of a space is a placemaking action, like how the use of a public park over time transforms its intended use into its real existence. Bringing sound from one place into another space then could leave the mark of one onto the other. For example, playing a field recording from x place into y place creates a new amalgam where one could have a hybrid forest-concert hall or courtyard-studio. Each combination changes the space in a way that is difficult to define but is all the same irrevocable:
All over the world people are engaged in place-making activities. Homeowners redecorate, build additions, manicure the lawn. Neighborhood organizations put pressure on people to tidy their yards; city governments legislate for new public buildings to express the spirit of particular places. Nations project themselves to the rest of the world through postage stamps, money, parliament buildings, national stadia, tourist brochures, etc. Within nation-states oppressed groups attempt to assert their own identities. Just as the new student climbs on the bed to put the poster on the wall, so the Kosovan Muslim flies a new flag, erects a new monument and redraws the map. Graffiti artists write their tags in flowing script on the walls of the city. This is their place too.11
Does the graffiti artist tagging the wall, claiming their place, not define — or even redefine — what that place is? My practice is focused on the hope that yes, my sonic graffiti defines my places, legitimizes them, and changes them all at the same time: The sounds I offer are traces that impact these places; the manipulation of objects through sonic means validates their connection to places; and in doing so, these processes open up space for collaborators and audiences to make personal connections to the artwork. As artist Ronald Ophuis considers, this redefinition of experience is a crucial element of how we experience the world, and not just how we experience it through art:
We attempt to create an image of the events we weren’t a part of…You could say we dishonour the truth, that we’re lying. But it’s not the truth we’re talking about, it’s the experience, the feeling that comes with it. If you watch the crucifixion of Christ in any Catholic church, you know it’s not Christ you’re looking at but a body double and still you believe in his suffering.12
When we step outside of the world of sound for sound’s sake, the transformative power of sound in the reimagining of a better future becomes immediately more real. Sound has historically been a means by which the oppressed have been able to redefine existence and ‘the self’ on their terms. As writer and researcher Jayna Brown notes in her book Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, sound has long been a guiding factor for Black artists, philosophers, and mystics in the United States engaging in placemaking within their communities. Sound served as a pivotal element in the spiritualism of figures such as Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson as they reframed and reimagined their existence within the cruelty of the reality of being free Black women in the United States of the 1800s. For example, as Brown notes, Jackson’s focus on dreams and their deeply sensual nature full of sound and touch served as a monumental element of this placemaking process:
Jackson’s residence in the surreal, often dystopian landscapes of her dreams charts with precision the cruel touch of black existence and the phenomenon of black survival. Jackson chose to exist in her surreal interior world…Jackson grounded her sense of self and subjectivity in her power and ability to move and to act, between worlds, with her spiritual self as real and effective as her bodily one.13
This placemaking through sound continued with musicians in the Black community in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s as they dealt with the realities of segregation and a new paradigm stuck between societal progress and continued struggle. For artists such as Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, sound was once again a way in which humanity could transcend the cruelty of existence and build spaces of change:
To practice sound was to exist in a sense of time without normative breaks. Existence is not the result of an antagonistic dialectic, but of flows and vibrations. It is continuous and ceaseless change.14
I mention these examples specifically because they provide the space to understand that sonic placemaking in differing forms has had a real-life impact for hundreds of years — both in an active and passive sense — displaying that placemaking as a foundational element of artistic practice has a very tangible effect on the world at large.