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.

4.2.6 seven days in June

In June 2019 I spent just over a week around the Alaskan city of Nome on the Seward Peninsula1. On each of seven consecutive days I made and recorded one walk2. As with begin to hear this piece took an extended view of place. As with begin to hear this piece took an extended view of place. Each walk was across land that was socio-culturally coherent, being based in the locale of the Inupiat peoples. I wrote a series of poems for each walk (based on contemporaneous notes) and took two photographs, one facing directly down to the ground and one directly up in the sky, and from these I made a composite image for each walk. The poetry was prepared in an A5-size concertina-fold book (14.8 x 458.8 cm folded to A5) that featured a title, an introduction (describing the dimensions of the socio-cultural coherence of the land) then the poetry and composite photo-image for each day. I also created an A6-size concertina-fold book (231 x 14.9 cm folded to A6) with vertically ranked longitudinal lines of handwritten text, lines that ran the width of the book.

seven days in June was presented twice: first, as a two-hour stereo radio broadcast and then as a seven-channel installation. The two-hour stereo radio broadcast of seven days in June is one of the curated suite of files for examiners to listen to.

seven days in June Radiophrenia

For this two-hour stereo radio show, the composition was of sequential 17-minute sections of each walk which formed the basis of a stereo mixdown, using the same process as I used in the earlier work Orford Replication. The composition also featured a radio intro and outro and a recording of me reading the haibun; my reading of the text of the haibun appeared at the start of each section and the haiku towards the end.

seven days in June, presented during Mycelium, Newcastle University

This seven-channel sound work was presented as a 3-hour 38-minute, seven-channel sound work. The full recordings of the seven walks, the start of each offset by 20 minutes on the start of the previous walk, played from seven speakers, so that over the duration of the installation the sounds of the walks moved from left to right across the seven speakers and there would be up to four walks playing at any one time. The haibun were again recorded and incorporated into their respective walk. On this occasion the haiku were spread across the duration of the walk rather than being presented as a single set of verses as they were in the radio version.

The installation was presented in a darkened room with the seven speakers arranged behind a narrow table on which was laid the five-metre A5-size concertina-fold book of text and images (below).3 This was positioned so that speakers were paired with their walk’s haibun and image in the book. The book was illuminated by lights attached to each speaker, and speaker volumes were set so that when standing in front of a speaker, and leaning forward to read the text, a listener would be leaning into the sounds of that walk in the context of the sounds of the other walks that were playing through the adjacent speakers, thereby allowing the ideas of time and space. The lighting encouraged this intimate, close engagement with listening to the work.

Concertina-fold books

In seven days in June I designed and produced my most recent concertina-fold books. I produced an A5-size print book and an A6-size calligraphic book (linked to above). The concertina-fold books offer sequential double page spreads whilst also being able to present four or even six pages when held, or the whole book when laid out on a flat surface. The concertina-fold book references the Chinese album, a design used to produce a more intimate and easier to handle version of a scroll (Micchelli, 2014; Scheier-Dolberg, 2015).

The print book presents a series of alternating two-page spreads of text and image. Time and place are held within a double page spread; paging through is an act of replication; sequences of time and place are held in the continuous nature of the concertina-folded paper. Both time and place are extended by opening two double-page spreads or re-ordered by paging backwards as well as forwards. The text is arranged so that the left-hand page is a sequence of moments along my walked route—echoing both Hamish Fulton and Richard Long’s use of text—and the right-hand page is a series of haiku. The text reflects a complementary view of the walk and offers a reflection of, or a mirror for the haiku to create the haibun. The text pages offer a ‘traditional’ reading experience—left to right along a row, back to the left of the next row down, onto the next page when the bottom line is finished. The progression (movement) from day to day is both explicit and implicit. It is explicit in the heading text that numbers the days—one to seven— but also comes implicitly from the positioning of four pages with text and an image then four pages of text and an image and on over the seven days. It was these units of text-and-an-image that corresponded with the positioning of the speakers, with one speaker at each text-image pair, a spacing of about 60 cm. The speakers were playing the field recordings of the seven walks starting at staggered 20-minute intervals, so across the looped sound piece the sound moved left to right, along the line of speakers and along the book, in a manner similar to that which the reader was encouraged to do.

The calligraphic book presents seven lines of handwritten text that extend across the 231cm width of the book.4 The text is again written first and the haiku (aligned to a common vertical starting point) follow. There is a single image at the right-hand end of the book, a composite of seven vertical slices of the roads walked. The sense of the text requires that it be read across pages as a line of text repeatedly crosses the right-hand edge of the page. The lines are not of equal length and therefore finish at different points. This produces a different presence for the text. It becomes sparser as it moves along the seven lines and the final phrase of the haibun text—‘stand at the furthest point’, the final phrase from the final walk—appears at the bottom of a page of its own.

A traditional book encourages, if not imposes, stillness of the reader. It is difficult to read a book whilst moving and most reading is done as a static activity in which both book and reader are still. Both these concertina-fold books, when presented as extended objects encourage movement and, like scripta continua, are metonyms for my walks. The print book moves a reader from step to step, day to day, and at each step offers a ‘traditional’ reading experience. Similarly, the calligraphic book imposes movement on a reader, but the reading act is different. To read a walk’s line a reader must move along the line and thereby along the extended book. It would be possible to read the print book holding the book and reading one open spread at time in a manner that is similar to, but not identical to, a traditional paged book in that turning a page is constantly inviting the extension of the book beyond a single two-page spread. It would be possible to read the calligraphic book in a similar manner, but this would be to engage in a very different reading act. Reading across then down the lines of a single page (first line, second line, third line etc.) is to read across walks, across time, to engage in an act of personal composition and one that could be extended to moving backward and forward in non-linear ways as words offer themselves into a random reading sequence.

The two books offer different routes from thought to text; one ends in printed text and the other in calligraphic text. In both books the route begins with my thoughts moving to my handwritten (notebook) text, to my spoken word (I use Microsoft Word’s dictate function). This is then edited to produce an accurate version of my notes as a text document in Word. This is then the basis for further poetic composition, that is then finalized. This is then formatted into the structure of the book and printed. In the calligraphic book I hand-wrote this final version onto the paper. This is my final embodied act, the calligraphic inscription of my words of my walks onto the paper.5 As I moved along the walk so, in some degree, I move across the paper. The spacing of the writing also reflects the structure of my walks—gaps represent space and time walked on the land. I feel further physical sensations as I write—I feel increasing tension as I write, self-imposed pressure to not make a mistake; to keep the marks correct (whatever that might mean).

Haiku and haibun

In seven days in June I was also engaged in one of my most recent acts of composing haibun. As I discussed in 2.3 Walking and poetry my use of the poetic style of haibun, haiku (and renga) is shaped by the legacy of the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, who made extensive use of these forms (Bashō, 1966; Bashō, 1985). I noted that the formal conventions of haiku composition can be ‘flexed’ in pursuit of aesthetic effect and that, writing in English, a prescribed syllabic total drawn from Japanese is something of a moveable feast. So, whilst most of my haiku contain (or are close to) 17 English language syllables, I have chosen to think more about attributes that I value, rather than solely aiming for a specific syllabic structure. In my writing I have attempted to maintain simplicity, ordinariness and solitude—wabi and sabi. Indeed, a sense of both is reflected across my practice as when I use Cagean-type processes to identify the ordinary (echoes of Luc Ferrari, Richard Long and Thomas Clark). I also include attributes valued by the Soun School, ideas of naturalness (shizen) and self-expression (jiko); season words also appear. Overall, I aim for a faithful offering of a moment.

Bashō used haibun on his epic walks, writing of his day’s walk and then complementing this with haiku. My prose is often a version of a (music-type) score written from my experience of the physical act of walking the route, and the haiku offer moments from inside the walk. For example, in the day 7 haibun from seven days in June (Figure 4.11 above), there is my initial record of distance, location and conditions.6

4.5 miles Teller Road 4 miles from Teller (north west)

wind SW3 (gusting 4) temperature 14C (feels like 14C)

This is followed by a column of sequential phrases that are of the walk.

down the hill

onto the narrow beach

curve along the shore

cross a stream draining a back-of-the-beach lagoon

Haiku then offer reflective moments from inside the walk.

pass dump and airstrip

sight a curve of beach town spit

a north west wind blows

My writing could be considered narrative, in that each poem describes a moment, and there is an implied progression from moment to moment, day to day and, as marked by the haibun text, they are arranged in a sequential structure. However, the structure is not that of a story—there is no beginning, middle and end. Rather, they work together as a sequenced set of now’s, offering a reader moments observed from within my walking. In this sense each haibun could be considered a poetic equivalent of a single speaker in a multi-speaker installation, its content drawn from, and relating to, a single walk within a larger group of walks. This was reflected in the physical arrangement of text and sound in the installation. While the recordings that play through the speakers of a multi-speaker installation are presenting a temporally contemporaneous account of my walking, the poems are at one removed from this. Based on notes made during, or shortly after the walks the poetry is often composed over a longer time period.7 This means that my sense of time within the poems is different to that of the sound recordings. As I write the poems, all the walks are together in my remembered past and so, in principle, each is present, and its memory is free to inform my writing about the others. However, I attempt an act of focus so that haibun only contain content that relates to the walk that generated the experience. Also, my poetry asks for a different time from a reader then my sound pieces do of a listener. To read and consider a verse is a brief act, engaging with the duration of a sound work is not.

On to 4.3 Reflections on Walking Time: Replicated Walking

On via Interlude 2

Back to Table of Contents