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.

5.3 (A)Round Islands

5.3.1 Around the Wind

Around the Wind was based on a series of nine field recordings made on the Orcadian island of Papa Westray.1 Over seven days I made static recordings that between them covered the time interval from 08:12 to 18:32; on two days I recorded my walking of the 12-mile circumference of the island (notebook details on the back cover of the catalogue). The static recordings were made in a single story, stone-built outhouse of the croft in which I was staying. I left a recorder running in the outhouse, recording the sounds inside and, through a broken window, from the surrounding meadows. On the circumferential walks, I noted features of my route—such as changes in direction, cliffs scrambled up, bird colonies—and the names of the geographical features that I passed. These were presented as the poems within a catalogue, as a scripta continua (Maitland, 2009, p. 147),2 and as a series of spoken word recordings that I played into the sounds of the walks.

The work was presented as a nine-channel, 10-hour 35-minute performance sound piece, performed at the same time of day that it was recorded (below). A catalogue contained an introduction of the piece and the two poems. Its front cover showed a composite photograph of the inside of the outhouse and the back, a double page from my notebook. The scripta continua was laid on the floor.

Whilst recordings appeared in their chronological order in relation to their position in a 24-hour day, they did not appear in date order. So, days were jumbled up, and time was a plastic phenomenon.

5.3.2 Beàrnaraigh

Beàrnaraigh was a work recorded in June 2018 on the small Outer Hebridean island of Beàrnaraigh Mor.3 Informed by the experience of Around the Wind, which spanned over 10 hours, here my idea was to produce a presentation of an island and of a day.

Between the 9^th and 28^th June 2018 I made four static recordings over three days that together covered a period of 24 hours and I made 17 walking recordings across eight days that together spanned from 06:27 to 17:45 (below left).4 Together the walking recordings presented a circumnavigation of the island (below right).

I used these recordings to compose a virtual day of 24 hours containing a (near) circumferential walk of the island shore (the north-east and south-east corners were inaccessible).5

Beàrnaraigh: Resonance Extra

With the recordings sequenced from 00:00:01 and running through to 24:00:00, and entitled Beàrnaraigh, the work was broadcast as 24 sequential one-hour episodes.6 Each episode was accompanied by a composite image of Beàrnaraigh (Figure 5.6) and each had a spoken introduction and a brief outro (Figure 5.7). Two of these one-hour broadcasts are included in the curated list of files for examiners.

Beàrnaraigh: Radiophrenia

The work was also broadcast as a continuous, 24-hour piece, without the spoken words, as the concluding work of Radiophrenia 2019. With the recordings arranged to correspond to the time that they were recorded—starting at 00:00:01 and running through to 24:00:00—it was broadcast ‘real-time’ starting at midnight and running through to midnight the next day.

This was a ‘new day’, the whole of a single diurnal cycle (as well as presenting a circumnavigation walk of the whole of the island), yet given the compositional nature of the work, the continuity of time is an illusion as I took recordings from across 20 days to create one day.7 Having previously argued against mixdowns, when creating replicated walk works for radio (such as Orford Replication), here I experimented with doing exactly this. My concern was the loss of sonic clarity and definition within a mixdown. Here, for much of the time, only two tracks were playing (though this went up to four for short periods) and such a degree of simultaneity felt, and to me sounded, acceptable.

On to 5.4 Random Islands

Back to Table of Contents

Beàrnaraigh

12MN to 01AM

01AM to 02AM

02AM to 03AM

03AM to 04AM

04AM to 05AM

05AM to 06AM

06AM to 07AM

07AM to 08AM

08AM to 09AM

09AM to 10AM

10AM to 11AM

11AM to 12MD

12MD to 01PM

01PM to 02PM

02PM to 03PM

03PM to 04PM

04PM to 05PM

05PM to 06PM

06PM to 07PM

07PM to 08PM

08PM to 09PM

09PM to 10PM

10PM to 11PM

11PM to 12MN

Around the Wind [10 h 14 min]

1] day 7

2] round Papay 1

3] day 2

4] round Papay 2

5] day 1

6] day 6

7] day 5

8] day 4

9] day 3

spoken names 10s

spoken names 2s

spoken names cont.

spoken poem

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