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.

Details of further re-imaginings/presentations of No. 2:’no trace’

N^o. 2: ‘no trace’ in the Steklenik Gallery

N^o. 2: ‘no trace’ is described in 3.2.2 No. 2: 'no trace’. The work was also re-imagined and presented on three further occasions:

in the Steklenik Gallery, then 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 and details of these works are presented below. The 59-minute radio broadcast version is suggested as one for examiners to listen to.

N^o. 2: ‘no trace’ (version 2) (Št 2: ‘brez sledi’)

I was invited to install N^o. 2: ‘no trace’ in the Steklenik Gallery a gallery run by CONA, a contemporary arts institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia1). It ran as a 107-minute, eight-channel sound installation from November 2019 to January 2020.

The gallery was a glasshouse with two lateral shelves and a central bed of plants. The gallery was entered through an internal door and set of steps at one end. A door at the far end was not used. Eight speakers were attached to the metal frame of the building as shown above.

Rather than use the ambisonic diffusion as I had for Cheeseburn, I wanted to work with the more linear structure of the Steklenik Gallery and used the original quadrophonic structure of the recordings.2 To compose the work for the installation I assumed that the river flowed through the gallery from the entrance steps to the external door and that winter occurred in the far half of the gallery and spring in the near half. For the downstream walks the left-side microphones appeared in the left-hand speakers as viewed from the steps and for the upstream walks the left-side microphones appeared in the right-hand speakers as viewed from the steps.

Having decided on the tracks to be used and their allocation to speakers, the sound files from the walks were mixed to produce a single mono track for each of the eight speakers in the Steklenik greenhouse. This was then transferred to, and played through, the gallery’s dedicated sound system. Alongside the sound piece I showed the composite images. I had taken one of the downstream and one of the upstream photographs (that had been placed on the pew prayer rails at Cheeseburn) and bound them into two concertina-fold books. These were displayed on tables inside the gallery.

radioCona broadcast and a live performance at Steklenik Gallery

A stereo mixdown of the Steklenik Gallery version of the work was broadcast by radioCona. I also did a live performance using recordings from the installation supplemented with recordings made whilst in Ljubljana and also from the paired work N^o. 1: ‘trace’.3

N^o. 2: ‘no trace’ walkplacedistancetime

A stereo mixdown of the Steklenik installation was broadcast as a walkplacedistancetime episode on 2^nd April 2022. Whilst the overall sequence of the tracks from the installation was maintained, as with several of my radio broadcasts, there was a degree of shortening/selecting/cross fading in composing a 59-minute work.

No. 2: ‘no trace’ during Mycelium

A quadrophonic version of the original recordings was presented in The Arches, Newcastle University during Mycelium. On this occasion they were edited into a quadrophonic sound file that played continuously as a loop. I produced a vertically orientated sinuous shaped poster using one of the composite photo images from the Cheeseburn installation that also contained all of the text from the steam of consciousness walk as a vertical column.