2.2 Sound

Why sound? I start from the position that I enjoy listening. With an inclination towards the heard, I have come to realise that I am in the world by listening to it. Carpenter and McLuhan argue that the wane of aural, spoken culture in the face of the optic hegemony of the printed word was reversed by the arrival of radio—‘Poets have long used the word as incantation, evoking the visual image by magical acoustic stress. Preliterate man was conscious of this power of the auditory to make present the absent thing. Writing annulled this magic because it was a rival magical means of making present the absent sound. Radio restored it.’ (Carpenter and McLuhan, 1960, p. 69). I can still remember, as an early teenager, lying in bed at night listening through a Bakelite earpiece to my first radio (a Ferguson Flight 3132 Transistor Radio), its tuning wheel offering the likes of Luxembourg, Allouis, the Light Service or the Third Service. In addition, around this time I was given a small reel-to-reel tape recorder as a birthday present and experimented with sound recording. At that point my parents had a black and white television and viewing options were limited and constrained in time (for children) to about an hour a day, and so my home entertainment balance, between looking and listening, was very different from that of today. As the technologies evolved so I will have watched more but I still lean towards the aural. I prefer radio sports commentary to watching television coverage—think Test Match Special (Lemon, 2019). My position, summed up by Carpenter and McLuhan, ‘in evoking the visual image, radio is sometimes more effective than sight itself’ (Carpenter and McLuhan, 1960, p. 69) was more succinctly put by the late broadcaster and journalist Alistair Cooke—‘I prefer radio to TV because the pictures are better’.

Sound arrives from all around us. We look into the distance—‘aestheticisation of landscape is grounded in objectification and distancing’ (Hogg, 2013, p. 260)—but we hear sound from behind us in a way that we do not see behind us—‘Though we hear sound as it comes at us from all directions, our vision is strongly directed’ (Hogg, 2013, p. 252); a point also made by Voegelin—‘Unlike vision, which assumes a position away from the seen, there is no place where the hearer is not simultaneous with the heard’ (Voegelin, 2010). I consider sound as one amongst several balanced means of presenting the world, a sensus communis (McLuhan, 2017). Arguing against the implicit, almost unnoticed, cultural visual dominance and a consequent organization of the senses to a visual logic, and arguing for an intermodal approach to the senses instead, Hogg (2013, p. 261) suggests ‘We are implicit in our own sound worlds; we generate sound as well as perceive it, and we therefore hear ourselves in the world in a way that we generally do not see ourselves … From the position of aurality our senses are intermodal, not separated out, and very closely imbricated with motion and muscular reaction’ (my emphasis). Working with these same ideas, Voegelin suggests that a focus on sound, ‘the sonic sense ... presents the seemingly paradoxical strategy of focusing on sound to reach the multisensory’ (Voegelin, 2021, p. 349).

We experience landscape and place through the dynamic intertwining of multiple senses that do different things, and are complementary (Tilley, 2004, p. 16). As we know the world through our bodies, our bodily orientation shapes the roles of our senses. We see what is in front of us (and cannot simultaneously see what is behind us); with our ears positioned between our ‘front’ and our ‘back’ we hear all around us and we also hear inside ourselves (our breath, our heartbeat, our chewing and swallowing); our ‘handedness’ means that touching with our left hand is different to touching with our right. Ingold argues ‘the environment that we experience, know and move around in is not sliced up along the lines of the sensory pathways by which we enter into it. The world we perceive is the same world, whatever path we take, and each of us perceives it as an undivided centre of activity and awareness (original emphasis)’ (Ingold, 2007a).

So, accepting the multi-modality of my sensate world I choose to predominantly present my embodied, integrated, undivided, intermodal experience of the world through the sensory routes of recorded sound, writing and a combination of the two as I record my reading of my poetic works and incorporate them with my field recordings. I do this from the premise that despite the contingent activation of all of my senses in my listening present, it is not possible to compose an ‘entirety of the senses’ and that composing my artworks are a process of distillation, transformation and (re)composition. For me, invoking Voegelin’s sonic sense to reach the multisensory, sound provides an engaging, intimate means to describe the world in ways that trigger a sense of immersion, proximity, physical connectedness to, and location within, the world, seeking ‘some form of symmetry between the sound heard at the point of recording and the sound heard at the point of audition’ (Carlyle, 2021, p. 300).1

My processes of recording and re-presenting sound is technologically mediated at several points in the chain from my walking (recording my walking), through my editing the recording in a digital audio workstation (DAW), to an audience’s hearing my re-imagining of my physical act. I have evolved to using equipment (audio recorders and microphones) that add as little as possible of their own sound and that change the sound which they record as little as possible (Appendix C). I have also made some efforts to standardise the technical mechanics of my practice; for example, the point at which I press the record button, though this may be shaped within the overall idea and largely dictated by my walking ... I press record, stand for up to a minute and then walk ... I stop walking, stand for up to a minute and then press stop. Having made a recording I seldom make substantial tonal changes to it in a DAW. Given my focus on my embodiment and human scale walking I am not looking to foreground the materiality of the technology that I use, though I am aware that there are artists who have a different practice (Shaw, 2023). I am predominantly interested in the technology that I use being an inaudible interface along the way—listening through it, not listening to it.

My use of recorded sound is an art of participation not observation; it is about my being in the world, moving through it, and reflecting that experience for a listener to then (re-) interpret. The element of moving requires that I am sonically present in my recordings. Salome Voegelin (2014) asserts that ‘Exciting field recording … neither abandons the reality of the recorded, nor does it take it for granted, but works with it, responds to it, understands it as one imprint in the landscape made by the body of the recordist and retraced tentatively by the listener.’ For her this is a shift ‘towards the body inhabiting the field’ thereby reflecting ‘the comfort and self-assurance of the recordist in the world of the everyday, of music and of art’, a view shared by Hogg (2013).

Voegelin suggests that the aesthetic subject in sound ‘is defined by this fact of interaction with the auditory world. He is placed in the midst of its materiality, complicit with its production. The sounds of his footsteps are part of the auditory city he produces in his movements through it … His sense of the world and of himself is constituted in this bond’ (Voegelin, 2010, p. 5). In this sense I am my own aesthetic subject and I inhabit nearly all my recordings—you hear my footfall, you hear my breathing (and this embodiment is one of the main differences between my work and that of many other sound artists). How obvious I am, my imprint in the landscape, depends on the circumstances—the place and weather I am walking in and the surface I am walking on. My footfall is regular, an often obvious, sonic signal of my embodied presence that, unsurprisingly, signifies my walking.2 It is often the case that when I am walking on grass my footfall becomes indistinct, almost inaudible as is the case in a number of walks in A walk round Contención Island. By contrast, in Búðahraun my footfall is clear throughout, and the nature of the place seemed to enhance the sound. There is a resonant quality to my footfall that is unusual; the soil was thin, and the lava field beneath contained air pockets of various sizes that produced a sonic sense of ‘hollowness’. In No. 1: ‘trace’ sounds of my walking within a mine are close, tightly held within the mine tunnels, and the sound is ‘hard’, reflecting the stones that I trip over and kick into one another. In contrast, my walk on the fellside above the mine sounds open and is held inside the sounds of the weather. Nonetheless, I have taken steps to shape this into a manner that I judge to contribute positively to the overall aesthetic of the work evolving a wardrobe that minimizes the sounds of my moving generated by my clothing, sounds that by virtue of their proximity to the microphones and their constant presence can mask other wider, fainter, sounds of place.3 So, my presence in my recordings is more shaped by my body—my humanness, my physiology (breathing, sniffing, coughing) and my footfall.

The other dimension of my footfall is rhythm. The rhythm of my footfall exists in the face of myself as an embodiment of rhythms (Lefebvre, 1992). Located within the basic diurnal rhythms of my world I am a multiscale composition of rhythms—the ‘Bower-time’ (Wilson, 2021) rhythms of my internal organs, the rhythms of my breathing and my heartbeat, and on down to the wave-rhythms of my brain as it decodes sonic impulses into what I understand as sound (Denham and Winkler, 2021). As I walk on the smooth, even surface of the street pavements of The 42 walks of Contención Island (p. 142), my footfall is regular, and my walking cadence is relatively high. Against such a backdrop my act of walking, and the act of listening to the recording of it, can drift towards the semi-automatic, as Tim Edensor notes as he describes walking allowing for ‘a particular experiential flow of successive moments of detachment and attachment, physical immersion and mental wandering, memory, recognition and strangeness’ (Edensor, 2010, p. 70). As a flow-state beckons, it gradually becomes a less-than-fully-conscious act, and some part of the mind is freed up to drift alongside the walker or to meander off along other psychic paths. However, when the going is rough, uneven, steep—as in the start of the fellside route in No. 1: ‘trace’ —the sound of my embodied presence is similarly unsettled. There is no regularity to the rhythm of my movement as I labour uphill through knee-high bracken and heather; the longer it goes on the more audible my breathing becomes. Such unpredictability, and effort, is less conducive to a parallel psychic wander both for me, the walker, and for a listener hearing the effort and unpredictability of my movement.

2.2.1 Sound Art

Having used a very straight forward definition of walking art I am grateful that the taxonomic debate about what constitutes sound art has been addressed by others (Bhaugeerutty, 2018). Bhaugeerutty suggests that sound art is an ‘ambiguous and mutable concept that shares concerns with other forms such as experimental music and sonic art’ and that it is ‘typically concerned with issues of sound, space and perception’ and ‘there are many competing interpretations of these definitional ideas’ with ‘categorical porosity and liminality that ultimately characterize it’. Thus, the definition of sound art feels a little like a paraphrasing of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass

‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully ... ‘When I use a word’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone ‘it means just what I choose it mean’.

Nonetheless, sound art appears to be, by some common consensus (or perhaps serial (re)discovery by commentators) a relatively recent phenomenon, an emerging area of practice and one that has been greatly facilitated by new technologies—‘Prior to the invention of recording [the sounds of nature] could exist only through imitation on an iconic level where certain attributes of ... natural sounds were mutated into a stylized form suitable for articulation either by human utterance or instrumental gesture. Once the microphone provided convenient direct access to sounds previously beyond human control then the sounds of nature could be integrated more closely into musical contexts’ (Smalley, 1996, p. 99). The evolution of field recording devices alongside improvements in battery technologies, has opened up the collection of material in (at least) one of the areas that features in sound art—what the world sounds like. Sometimes presented as sounds alone or incorporated into wider compositions, there are a range of words used when writing about the area—field recording, environmental sound art, soundscape, acoustic ecology—examples of Bhaugeerutty’s ‘categorical porosity and liminality’. Each term seems to attract its own adherents though usage may merely reflect authorial or editorial preference. As an example, two books of interviews with practitioners are titled to highlight Field Recording (Lane and Carlyle, 2013) and Environmental Sound Art (Bianchi and Manzo, 2016). On reading the books most contributors could have figured in both, but only one of the 41 artists involved did. However, on closer inspection of the interviewed artists it becomes apparent that almost all of the artists included by Bianchi and Manzo are based in north America and almost those included by Lane and Carlyle come from Europe. Sound art played out as a question of geography and who you know.

2.2.2 Sound Artists and Walking

Given this fluidity, it is not surprising that, unlike walking artists, where I am clear that there are two artists whose work I think about to contextualise and approach my practice, when I think about sound artists the situation is much more diffuse and varied.4 I have already alluded to the early work of Luc Ferrari and his willingness to present the sounds of the world (p. 32) though his work did not involve walking. In order to offer some context within which to contextualise my practice I have, over a period of years, used internet searching and snowballing techniques to follow along contacts between artists to seek out sound artists who seem to consistently make walking a core part of their practice; I have found very few,5 and it is a subjective judgement to say precisely what a consistent, core part of a practice might be. Addressing movement or using walking is something that some artists working with sound do some of the time, producing a spectrum of activity and focus, in a way that is reminiscent of Morrison-Bell’s definition of walking art that I quoted earlier. The situation has become somewhat more straightforward with the publication of two recent anthologies of ‘soundwalkers’ (Biserna, 2022; Smolicki, 2023). Acknowledging that soundwalking as an artistic practice ‘exists in a large variety of formats, draws on many different strategies ... is rooted in various desires ... and is still a young artistic format, without a clear definition or a shared canon’ (Biserna, 2022 Foreword), together these two books offer an overview of the thoughts and practice of over 50 thinkers or artists who engage with some manifestation of soundwalking.

When thinking about relationships with my practice, I look to those who are at the end of the spectrum that walks more often, and who seem to walk more consistently. To offer points of context I think of these artists as individuals that can each offer one or more points of comparison or contrast—Janet Cardiff, Dallas Simpson, Katrin Emler and Viv Corringham.

Janet Cardiff is an artist whose uses walking and her own voice in creating a series of sound walks (Cardiff and Miller, 2014). Lasting between five and 50 minutes her 20 audio walks each require a solitary listener to wear an audio headset then ‘follow pre-recorded instructions that lead them into open-ended and ambiguous narratives. Her voice features prominently in these haunting works as she guides her audience on routes that take them to unexpected places, both indoors and out, where emotions such as fear, regret, longing, anger, denial, confidence, and loss are aroused’ (Christov-Bakargiev, 2002, p. 15; Cardiff, 2022). The listener hears Cardiff’s voice giving directions along with additional thoughts and observations; the recording also presents additional sounds that were present when Cardiff researched the walk (her footsteps, traffic noise, birdsong) and the listener hears these alongside the ambient sounds occurring as they make the walk. They combine a sense of isolation (walks are recorded and taken alone) with a sense of intimacy (the proximity of Cardiff’s voice, her use of whispering). For Cardiff walking is central to these sound works; the overall effect is that ‘Fiction and reality overlap’ (Tubridy, 2007, p. 6) as the walker/listener disorientatingly experiences two worlds, that of their current walk and its sounds along with their own thoughts and the sounds of the recorded world along with Cardiff’s voice giving directions, narrative elements and thoughts.

Dallas Simpson creates binaurally recorded6 works ‘centred around the experience of now as a continual state of communion with the physical realm … (that) celebrate our continual presence in the environment, our responsibility for it, our perception of it, our reaction to and interaction with it.’ His work is often generated through walking (Simpson, 2018) and he describes using a ‘loose framework of form involving phases of search and discovery, listening and observation and communion through interaction’ which, at a practical level, involves ‘walking to a location, observing then interacting intuitively with found objects’, sounding objects through tapping etc. (Simpson, 2019).

With a background training in music, Katrin Emler (working under the name katrinem) is a German artist who performs walks to explore her interest in gait and rhythm, and the sonic environment of (usually) cities drawn together as her go your gait series (52 works to date) (Emler, 2018; katrinem, 2022). Across a range of presentations and performances she offers live sound walks on which an audience can accompany her, solo works during which she records a soundtrack (often integrated as part of a video work) or as written scores. Along specifically chosen routes, her walking plays with the sounding of walking (she encourages a walker to use their ‘most sounding shoes’), the sonic interplay between human movement and urban architecture. With accompanying images, the soundtracks echo through tunnels under blocks of flats or through shopping arcades to quieten (almost a sigh of expansion) as she moves out into the wider spaces between her various tunnels.

Finally, Viv Corringham is a composer and sound artist who, in her shadow-walks works with walking and sound. She describes her practice thus: ‘I arrive in a new place and ask local inhabitants to take me on a special walk, one that has been repeated many times and has meaning or significance for that person. While walking together, I record our conversations and the sounds of the environment. I then go back along the same route alone, trying to get a sense of my previous companion’s traces on the walk. Then I sing what I feel using wordless improvisations’ (Corringham, 2022). An interesting technical aspect she described when talking about her practice in an interview with Angus Carlyle, (and one that resonates with my own (Appendix C (p. 195)) is that she uses DPA microphones mounted on over-ear headphones and does not monitor as she is recording and records whilst walking (Carlyle, 2013, p. 218).

On to 2.3 Walking and Poetry 

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