Sounds of walking: Can sound re-present the embodied experience of movement time and distance in the landscape?

Martin P Eccles

In this thesis, having introduced my research questions, in Chapter 2 I present a layered analysis of the important contexts of my practice—walking, sound, walking poetry, and place. In Chapter 3 I present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4 I develop what I came to call replicated walks—walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to re-configure time, they also led me to extend my consideration of place beyond that defined by geography, to place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence. In Chapter 5 I describe my emerging ideas of human-scale of place and my underlying ideas of island-ness. Initially I worked on real islands, walking circumferential routes and those defined by chance procedures. From this I developed an imaginary island in the foothills of Northumberland’s Cheviot Hills; made from the human-scale of my embodied walking this led to my creation of an imaginary pandemic island of containment, created in a city, in my locale, made, and made real, by the traces of my embodied walking. Together my works constitute a body of work that represents a contribution to knowledge with specific contributions of: the use of Replicated Walks as a method of experimenting with time and place; Walking Words – the presentation of poetic text in forms (concertina-fold books, scripta continua, scrolls) that requires walking to engage with it, and that also function as metonyms for my original walking act; Walking Islands –the use of human-scale walking to imagine an island into existence, and then invoke the island as a lens through which to continue to pursue the idea. My work also contributes knowledge to the methods of how to record the sounds of the world whilst walking through it, over extended distances and time.

Chapter 3. Walking Through My Senses

In Chapter 2, I reviewed theory and practice relevant to my method—walking—and my principal research tools—sound and text—and discussed the context in which I move—the land and ideas of place. In this chapter I move on to present and discuss three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. Each work offers a configuration of impairing, overwhelming or functionally removing one or more of my senses in ways that elucidate my embodiment. Embodiment, knowing the world through having a (moving) body, implies a sensate body; we know where we are in the world through the interplay of our senses. The works in this chapter explore how my senses could be overwhelmed in the gales of Fair Isle and be selectively impaired when I walked in a lead mine or in a river.

3.1 Gale blown

It is September 2018, and I am on the Scottish island of Fair Isle.1 I am walking in a place of moorland, sheep pasture, and grassland; the sea is constantly close by, pounding the base of high cliffs. I see a contemporary landscape, a framework of wire fences and stone walls, and the small community of scattered crofts. The crofts speak to centuries of farming as do their associated feannagan (Rennie, 2020, p. 105).2 Towards the north of the island, atop Ward Hill, sit the slowly crumbling outlines of a radio station and living quarters, shapes from a past war. I also see a scatter of unused and derelict buildings, and some remnants of dwellings that are barely present, reduced to ghosts of lines of stone walls punctuated by doorways unused in decades.

On the autumn equinox a depression, with gale force winds, moves across the island.

We would all regard ourselves as familiar with the wind and would recognise its sound. Our hearing relies on variations in air pressure detected by our ears and transmitted to our brains. Today, here, the air is moving at Force 7 to 9 and my balance is compromised and my hearing overwhelmed. Away from any shelter the physical impact of unseen moving air moves me. I am prodded sideways as I try to walk along a road; as I step along a rough hillside I am knocked off-centre, my boot catches on a tussock, and I fall. No longer something I can take for granted my balance becomes something I concentrate on. As the wind races past my ears, I hear a fluctuating, loud, complex, undifferentiated sound. This forms a background roar, and all other sound is competing with this. Conversation is impossible—words are shouted, one person to another. Other sounds are obscured and only apparent in lulls in the wind—the gurgle of a stepped-over stream, or the calling of a lone Pink-footed Goose as it battles south across the wind. If the pipits choose to fly, they lift into the air and then are hit by the wind, whisked away downwind, yet, amazingly, they maintain some control over their movement. A bird that weighs scarce two-thirds of an ounce moving in and through a wind that can level a well-grown tree, a manifestation of aerodynamic mastery, animal embodiment that is an everyday reality for a bird but utterly beyond the understanding of most humans.

The next day I walk onto the island headland of Buness.

The sound is of moving air, on my head in general, and my ears in particular. Is this the sound of the wind or the sound of my ears? It is both, together. Voegelin argues that the listener and that which is heard are inseparable, ‘partners rather than adversaries ... constituted through each other without abandoning their own purpose.’ (Voegelin, 2010, p. 15) A similar point is made by Francisco Lopez (Lopez, 2017) who argues that in the case of sounds made in relation to plants, the sound of air moving through the leaves of trees is usually referred to as the sound of wind, but it is at least as much the sound of leaves—leaves moving in moving air. Sitting inside the tumbledown dry-stone walled sheep fold, I can hear the changes in sound as the wind blows against the other side of the wall. Inside the sheepfold, shielded from the force of the wind I hear two sounds of moving air. I hear the gusting, gale force wind as it hits the other side of the wall and passes over the top of the wall 18-inches above my head and I hear a quieter, higher pitched sighing, hissing sound of the air passing through the interstices of the wall. There is no direct channel through the wall so the air is flowing around the stones of the wall (in the same way that it can move, and sound, through an instrument (Hogg, 2017)). The medium in which I hear is moving through the wall. As I sit, I partner the wind to constitute the sound of the wall in the wind.

On to 3.2 'trace no trace'

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Chapter 3. Walking Through My Senses

3.1 Gale blown