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.

5.4.2 Four Northumbrian Rants

The next work was based in Northumberland and used the metaphor of the traditional Northumberland dance, the Rant. The general methods followed those used for the Fair Isle Reels and these produced a score for the work (below).1

Four Northumbrian Rants

This was presented as a live performance; a 60-minute, four-channel sound work played within two stories of a stairwell (below). Unlike the two earlier Random (Island) works, where all four steps of a Reel played simultaneously, I here experimented with having the same step of each of the Rants playing simultaneously (Rants 1 to 4 step 1, then Rants 1 to 4 step 2 etc.) across the four speakers.2 For each step the recording of my walking from my car to (and from) the site preceded and succeeded the recording. Thus my embodied presence was composed into the work, and on this occasion all of the walk recordings were used, as opposed to the short segment in 4 Island Reels (after John Cage).

Alongside the sound piece I produced a set of seven A8-size cards—their content was a title and introduction, the score (in two parts), and a four-line prose poem per step (using the stream of consciousness recordings as the basis for the poems) (below).

Four Northumbrian rants walkplacedistancetime

The recordings were also presented as a 60-minute radio broadcast on walkplacedistancetime on Resonance Extra in March 2022.

The Fair Isle Reels (and both Alnay and Contención Island, of which more below) present a humanness of scale ... they draw out my human scale, either mapped onto a real island or walking into being an imaginary one (to be presented and discussed below in 5.5 Imagined Islands). This important point was clarified for me through the practice of recording Four Northumbrian Rants. To record each Rant, I had to drive over 100 miles and the idea of how and where to walk (which should have been central to the work) felt lost. I recorded the walk from wherever I parked my car to the site of the Rant and back, usually the closest point on a tarmacked road. A further difference was that on the relatively small scale of Fair Isle, where I had already been for three days by the time of the first recordings, and thereby had a degree of familiarity with the place, the precise locations of the Reel steps were relatively easy to identify and walk to. On the larger scale of the Rants, where all the locations were unfamiliar, they were often more difficult to locate with the same degree of confidence. Thus dawned the realisation that I walk at a certain scale, and that this scale is one that is intimately linked to my bodily capabilities and is a fundamental link between my body and the world. I know the world through having a body; I move on the ground and through the air; how far I move and how much of the world I thus know is a dimension of my embodiment (Merleau-Ponty, 2005, p. 169). I not only know the world through having a body, I know an embodied amount of it. This amount will vary from day to day, season to season - and in this sense, it is the scale of my world—and it is intimately linked to my body.

5.4.3 four rants for the summer solstice (after John Cage, 1977)

After realising the issue of scale and ‘loss of walking’ in 4 Northumbrian Rants, I looked to create a work in a place that I could cover by walking and one that, to some extent, I knew. I chose a small area in north Northumberland.3 I again took the metaphor of the Rant as the basis of the ‘chance process’ that I had used previously.4 This identified the 16 locations within the two-by-four-kilometre area, organised into the four steps of four Rants as shown, along with recording durations, in the score (Figure 5.15).

Walking on the summer solstice 2017, the longest day and the turning point of the year, I recorded my walking between the locations of the Rant steps in sequence (Rant 1 steps 1–4, Rant 2 steps 1–4, and so on) and at each I recorded the sounds of the place.5

four rants for the summer solstice (after John Cage, 1977)

The first presentation of the work was four rants for the summer solstice (after John Cage, 1977) a four-channel, looped, four-hour work that played for 48 hours over the 2019 winter solstice in The Arches on Newcastle University campus. Steps 1–4 of each Rant played simultaneously, and the Rants played in sequence (Rant 1–Rant 4). Each step was composed of its walk recording then place recording; the Rants were synchronized on the start of the place recordings with the four steps each coming from one of four speakers.6

These random (island) works are linked by their method and the latter two were not conceived as islands but became important transition works, steps on my way towards my creation of imagined islands—as I discuss in Alnay below. By the time four rants for the summer solstice was presented, some 18 months after its recording, the idea of an imaginary island had emerged, and was reflected in the accompanying poster presented in a glass fronted cabinet in the space where the work was playing (right and below).

Back Up The Long Wall: four midsummer dances for an imaginary island

The second presentation of the work was as a four-hour, stereo, radio broadcast at Radiophrenia 2020. With an incorporated studio recording of an intro and outro (right) the Rants played in sequence (1–4) and on this occasion the rants were synchronized from the start of the walks of each step. This composition facilitated the incorporation of a studio recording of my reading of my accompanying poetry (below).7

My dances, my locations, their interlinking, their lineage, is offered in the scores for the works, in the list of locations, latitude and longitude made graphic in the display of the linked locations on the maps of Fair Isle and Northumberland. These proto-islands have been formed and shaped from interlinking places chosen by chance procedures. As Cage had, I controlled the process of selecting locations but relinquished control of the outcome (Millar, 2010, p. 17). What happened at any location was not subject to the whims of my artistic interest or judgement. Thus, what I recorded of these places (be it as sound or text) has emerged from the play of chance and is a reflection of the place and offers each site as equally interesting and worthy of attention—an appreciation of the commonplace that reflects the Japanese idea of wabi (Stryk, 1985, p. 10), the ideas of Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien (Caix and Ferrari, 2013) or Thomas Clark’s statement ‘Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant’ (Clark, 1988). By the time I had presented my fourth random (island) work, I felt I had evolved a more settled way of identifying, recording and presenting sound and text that was my own version of an underlying Cagean idea, and was offering a progression of embodied movement, sound and text translated into a single work. From here it became a small step onto my imagined islands.

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