Audio as the in-between.
Gernot Böhme defines an "atmosphere" as existing in between the subject and the object. In his book "The Aesthetics of Atmospheres" he writes about the interaction between sound and bodily space. Of particular interest to me in this context is his discussion about listening to sound on headphones:
“Bodily space is neither the place a person’s body takes up nor the volume that it constitutes. A person’s bodily space is the sphere of his or her material presence. The latter continually transcends the limits of the body."
He continues by claiming that when listening to music on headphones, we perceive the music as occuring in a space outside of us, and that "It is very important that this form of listening does not differ from listening without headphones*.
This [...] demonstrates that the space of listening is a space of bodily presence that is independent of the existence of concrete things."
I think that it's possible to link this idea - listening extending our bodily presence - to the idea that an audio walk creates a kind of "sound stage" or in-between-space that connects our body to the world around us. In a conversation about headphones with Renate Zentschnig she called this "a third space" where things can happen in-between the subject and the environment, like a portable theatre. Ksenia Fedorova talks in her book Tactics of Interfacing about the idea of "the imaginal" world - an in-between space created by locative media, "that includes both subjective and objective, virtual and real..." She continues:
"The imaginal of locative media can be described as proprioceptive, since its references are embedded in physical locations and its index, the operator, is the very perceiving body. It is the embodied subject (the body-self) that finds the linkages not only among the parts of its own material being but between the body's physical location and the mythopoetic, imaginary (imaginal) layers of reality."
Proprioception, the sense of one's body in space, is in my opinion closely linked to hearing as the sounds reaching our ears always convey the distance between our body and the boundaries of the space and let us hear who and what we share the space with. The use of geolocation, which can display our bodies as a moving dot on a map augments this feeling. For Fedorova this is both a doubling of the body and an increased sense of our place in the larger world around us.
This idea of the listener's body as an index that "reads" the map and the piece, like the stylus on a vinyl record is intrinsic to geo-located media, but can also work for linear walks as well where the sense of moving through a space can appear to "trigger" events. Indeed, in Dream Map São Paolo one of the characters reveals "the sounds of the city recorded in the street" by dragging a stick along the pavement as we walk next to him.
This brings up many questions about dealing with this in-between space that we create. Is it a portable or site-specific theatre? Are we reading a map or a narrative with our bodies as we move through the city? I see from my older works that I have often already played with these possibilities but the techniques that I am learning and developing now with Tracks could expand this much further.
* I don't actually agree with Böhme about this. When listening to headphones, each ear is separated from the other, inside a different spatial container and thus each ear can receive totally separate streams of sound. This never happens in "normal" listening. But Böhme is talking about listening to recorded music, and music recording tends to work towards creating a "natural" sense of space. Also the psychological effect is very strong. In my opinion we perceive musicians playing "outside our head" because we don't expect them to be inside it. If the musicians started to produce unexpected, unidentifiable sounds would this effect be as strong, I wonder?
