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.

3.2.2 N^o. 2: ‘no trace’

N^o. 2: ‘no trace’ was a work based in the River Pont over the half mile for which it flows inside the estate boundary of Cheeseburn Grange, Northumberland. At its core were quadrophonic recordings made as, on two occasions, I walked downstream, paused, and then walked upstream in the river. The first downstream/upstream walk was recorded around the winter solstice and the second was recorded around the spring equinox.1 On a third occasion I made a series of sequential hydrophone recordings about every 15 metres along the length of the river walk; at each recording point I faced south and took a photograph of the surface of the river immediately in front of me (of which, more below). On a fourth occasion, I made a mono recording of my walking the river whilst talking about the act of my walking—a (literal) stream of consciousness. The final recording was a mono recording of my reading the poem I wrote about walking the river, River Drifting Leaves, a 20-verse poem written in the style of a renga, this appeared towards the end of the composition.

N^o. 2: ‘no trace’ at Cheeseburn Grange

No.2: ‘no trace’ was presented in the estate chapel and the grounds at Cheeseburn Grange. It was presented as an ambisonic octagonal array.2 Also, the mono track of my speaking whilst walking in the river, titled on maintaining three points of contact, played in its entirety, as a looped track, in the portico at the back of the parterre garden.3

I produced two photo text images and a catalogue. The photo text images were displayed on the prayer rails of the pews, downstream on the left side of the chapel and upstream on the right.4 My words, transcribed from on maintaining three points of contact, were incorporated and formatted with gaps to represent the pauses in my speech. The effect was to produce short phrases which could be read along the line as originally spoken, or read vertically, diagonally or at random, offering new meaning within my words. Much of the text was printed in black but words that represented movement—step, trip—were formatted in green so once again, a reader was offered a further way to read the text and form meaning from it.

The catalogue had a cover printed with a wraparound version of the composite river photograph plus titling text, and contained: a ‘trace no trace’ essay, River Drifting Leaves renga (below) and an edited coloured version of a map of the river as it flowed through the Cheeseburn estate (below).

The photo images were displayed on the prayer rails of pews in the chapel and on tables in the Steklenik Gallery.5 The structure of the support influenced how people could interact with them. With the images on the prayer rails, they were best read by sitting in the pews; the relative narrowness of the pews didn’t invite standing and moving back and forth. When laid on a table, although walking back and forth along them was an easy way to read them, it wasn’t possible to approach them from more than one side or to move across them to see them from their other side.

My sound works are relatively long, and their durations have been anecdotally reported to me as challenging for a listener; certainly, a casual attender at one of my installations seems unlikely to stay the course of a two-hour piece. In the chapel at Cheeseburn Grange people listened for relatively short periods of time and for a maximum of about 15 minutes. Wanting to explore whether the site of playing could affect how long people would listen to a durational sound work, I repeated the installation of N^o. 2: ‘no trace’ as a one-off performance in the Digital Lounge of the Tyneside Cinema.6 People willingly spend two hours watching a feature film at a cinema. Whilst accepting the obvious differences between my work and the average cinematic blockbuster, I presented the work as an advertised, scheduled, ticketed event held in a lounge in a cinema. This mimicked features of movie-going—a pre-determined attendance, an event chosen in the light of its known duration. An initial audience of about 30 spent longer with the work than a gallery installation audience had done, though by the end of the work only about one quarter of the audience remained. Clearly such listening is not movie going.

The work was also re-imagined and presented on three further occasions:

in the Steklenik Gallery, a gallery run by CONA, a contemporary arts institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia
as a stereo mixdown prepared for a radio broadcast on walkplacedistancetime
in The Arches, Newcastle University

These re-imaginings all draw on the same core installation recordings. The 59-minute stereo mixdown prepared for a radio broadcast is suggested as one for examiners to listen to.