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.

4.2 Replicated walks

4.2.1 Orford Replication

In July 2016 I spent three days on Orford Ness.1 I recorded myself walking a 3.4 ml. route across the Orford Ness, once every three hours for 24 hours.2 Orford Replication was composed for a radio broadcast, and this was the first occasion that I worked through this method of composing. I will describe it in detail here and then refer back to this for the later compositions using the same method.

The structure for the composition was of the eight sequential recordings arranged in a digital audio workstation and centred around a common point, the point at which I walked across the metal bridge over Stoney Ditch.3 Whilst the walk itself took around 65 minutes, given the variation across the recordings the overall span of the eight recordings was 73 minutes. The general method that I used in composing is shown in the notebook sketch below—the eight recordings of Orford Replication with the indicative sections that were mixed down into a single stereo file for broadcast.

With the time span of the recordings being about 72 minutes, each recording would contribute one-eighth of this—nine minutes. I took a structure of sequential sections from the recordings (0 minutes to 8 minutes 59 seconds from walk 1, 9 minutes to 17 minutes 59 seconds from walk 2 and so on). This produced a single track of 72 minutes but Orford Replication was composed for a framework:afield radio broadcast which has a programme length of 57 minutes. Therefore, the sections had to overlap by about two minutes to allow a total length of 57 minutes. In this manner I composed a single recording that moved in time across the 24 hours of the series of walks and moved in distance across both the 3.4 miles of an individual walk and the 27.2 miles of the set of eight walks. These eight sections were mixed down to form a single stereo track for the radio broadcast.

I wrote a poem (below) and the broadcast contained two almost synchronous recordings of me reading the poem.4 I also produced a recording of the poem that had the natural speech pauses removed so they sounded as a constant, slightly pressured spoken text; this was faded in and out of the recording on two occasions.

On the radio website, during broadcast, the recording was accompanied by a composite image taken whilst I was on Orford Ness.

The materials and ideas for several of my pieces have been re-imagined and recomposed for different modes of presentations, such as an eight-channel audio installation being converted into a stereo radio broadcast. Orford Replication was my first such attempt, to take a set of recordings of a replicated walk and to present this as a radio broadcast. This led to my subsequently re-visiting two works, Daag Einn I Juni and Búðahraun (that had been multi-channel installations shown prior to starting this PhD) and presenting them as radio broadcasts, and iterating one of them (One Day in June) back into an installation.

On to 4.2.2 One Day in June

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4.2 Replicated walks

4.2.1 Orford Replication