On Sworld — Report and reflections on an artistic research into how audio can evoke human experiences of absence, ghosts and lost memories, explored through performance and composed walks 

“In these troubling times, the urgency to trouble time, to shake it to its core, and to produce collective imaginaries that undo pervasive conceptions of temporality that take progress as inevitable and the past as something that has passed and is no longer with us is something so tangible, so visceral, that it can be felt in our individual and collective bodies?”  

— Karen Barad, TROUBLING TIMES AND ECOLOGIES OF NOTHINGNESS (2018), Lawrence & Wishart

I were five years old, when me and my parents moved from Copenhagen to the countryside of Jutland to be part of starting up and running a meditation center. It was situated far away from any bigger cities in middle of a typical danish heath landscape in an old closed down Hotel that we and a big group of friends had taken over to build up this project. I remember how people from all over the world would travel to this place to practice meditation. The meditation was often done in very big groups and always in silence. These early life impressions of watching hundreds of people sitting shoulder to shoulder, while listenening to the small sounds that surrounds that silence, is a defining memory for me aswell as for my artistic praxis.

Sworld is a word which doesn’t have a specific meaning, and as the meaning of it is absent, it is rather the sound of the word that emerges. It is individual what associations are following the sound. Sword, swirl, world with an s in front. A kind of world. A swirly world perhaps? Or a sword world. Or an old world saw. Woorrrld saw. Sswiiiddsword. Thus Sworld illustrates a potential in sound, that can open meanings in absence. It means nothing, though the sound of it has clear associations to something. 

Between 2021-2024 I have developed a practice-based research project on RMC’s soloist program in Copenhagen. In this context Sworld is also what I name for the multifaceted praxis, that evolved through this program, and thus a label used, not only to connect the many dots in this explorative process, but also for the continued work within this framework. But though alot of new projects and collaborations are now springing out of this marterial I will in this text solely focus on my work at RMC. In the first half of the report the project is contextualised historically and perspectived into different schools of thought, and in the second half the practical proceseses at soloist program are described accompanied by documentational footage. 

Research questions and artistic praxis

The project revolves around two questions: How can audio evoke human experiences of absence? And how can such experiences expand the way humans listen, perceive and engage with their surroundings? 

I have researched this through a compositional praxis, that includes elements of audio, movement, landscape, text and voice. I have worked with different performance formats through out the project, where these elements has been explored seperatly, but the main focus has been the continues development of compositional walks, where all of these elements are being combined in what I call Sworld Walks. A public presentation of the Sworld Walk-piece Charged from September 2024 is documented here. 

Chion’s Synch Points in live performance

"Synch points naturally signify in relation to the content of the scene and the film's overall dynamics. As such, they give the audiovisual flow its phrasing, just as chords or cadences, which are also vertical meetings of elements, can give phrasing to a sequence of music"

—Michel Chion, Audiovision (1993), ‎Columbia University Press

My research questions originally arose out of an interest in the concept of Synch Points coined by the french film theorist and composer Michel Chion. In his book Audiovision (1993) Chion uses this theoretical concept to describe how the simultaneous listening of sounds with and without a visible cause can evoke sensory experiences of things you can’t see in the frame of a film. Absent things, beings and spaces embodied through the film’s sound design. As Chion’s work revolves around sound solely for film, I have been curious to adapt his concepts into live performance. 

Synch Points covers the point in a film where sound and image is synched e.g. when a door on the screen slams synchronised with the sound of a slam playing out of the speakers. Chion writes that due to points of synchronisation all sounds in the film, also the ones with no visible cause, are perceived as part of the films staged environment. So as he writes, all though some sounds are outside of the screens frame, the Synch Points establishes the illusion, that image and sound derives from the same source, which Chion refers to as the Audiovisual Contract. I am interested in adapting this concept into a field of live performance situated in a space or moving through an environment. In this context the screen is replaced with the surroundings of the audience, establishing a perhaps even more illusory experience, which instead of belonging to the reality within a film, it belongs to the  staged yet real situation of the performance. This type of work fits to the definition of what is called Extended Reality, described in this article as "an umbrella term to refer to augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality . The technology is intended to combine or mirror the physical world with a "digital twin world" able to interact with it, giving users an immersive experience by being in a virtual or augmented environment". Chion argues that Synch Points can have the effect of embodying events in the audience’s imagination, but where Chion limits this imaginary field to transcend the cinema screen, I am interested in transcending the audience’s experience of their own surroundings. 

In the initial project description this is the conceptual framework of the research, but now in the project’s concluding fase another concept has gradually surfaced as another core element in the project, which is theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht’s Distancing Effect. In his essay Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting (1936), he writes how this effect is achieved if the performer doesn’t act as if there was a fourth wall, and consequently prevents the audience from passively observe the play but rather becoming an essential part of the play as a critical observer. The precursor of The Distancing Effect is an establishment of another kind of audience contract, that the performer and the performers fictional character are two different entities. This contract can then be broken if the fourth wall is revealed e.g. if the fictional character looks at the audience and thereby reveal the performers "true self". In this moment the theatres artitifical space becomes part of the real space, and ultimatly forms Distancing Effect. In the context of Sworld, these moments are rather the state of normality than the exceptional "shocks" that Brecht describes. Often established through sharing anecdotes in a manner similar to a singer-song-writer that tells personal stories between their songs. In Sworld it is mostly rather the fiction that comes as sporadic "shocks", so arguably an opposite Distancing Effect, but nevertheless serving the same aim. Brecht argues how this effect is what makes the art relevant on a societal level, not only as mirror to reality, but as an instituion of experiences that can shape reality.  

“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”

— Bertolt Brecht, Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting (1936)

Thus similarly to Chion's theories Brecht points out how to connect reality to the artifical space, which in the process of my research have made me more aware of how a performer can adress an audience in ways that coorelates with the compositional work of Sworld. And equally to how Brecht articulates a societal achievement of this connection, I am interested in how the artistic concepts within Sworld can be relevant in this perspective. 

Entanglement of absence, audio, memory and ghosts 

Virtual particles do not traffic in a metaphysics of presence. They do not exist in space and time. They are ghostly non/ existences that teeter on the edge of the infinitely thin blade between being and nonbeing. They speak of indeterminacy. Or rather, no determinate words are spoken by the vacuum, only a speaking silence that is neither silence nor speech, but the conditions of im/possibility for non/existence. There are an infinite number of possibilities, but not everything is possible. The vacuum isn’t empty, but neither is there any-thing in it. Hence, we can see that indeterminacy is key not only to the existence of matter but also to its nonexistence – that is, to the nature of the void. 

— Karen Barad, TROUBLING TIMES AND ECOLOGIES OF NOTHINGNESS (2018), Lawrence & Wishart

My understanding of absence in this project is very similar to the way Karen Barad describes "the void" in their article quoted above, as a phenomenon, which is not noneexistent, but still somehow indeterminantly gone or hidden. Absense in Sworld should similarly be understood multifaceted, which again reflects the multifaceted research praxis, that this report is portraying. This understanding draws on inspiration from different events and phenomenons within spirituality and contemporary art, which I will try to map out in this paragraph.

There are two main catagories of absense in my project, one that refers to hauntology, which is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from a cultural past, in the manner of a ghost. Here absense is thought of as something from the past, which aren't present today, but still effects or haunts the now. The other category is connected to Buddhism, where emptiness is a core element in this religion's philosphy. Both in terms of understanding the human soul, but also to understand form as such. The buddhistic concept of “ma,” which roughly translates to “negative space,” but evokes a deeper sense of a gap or a pause, is constitued by the absense of form, that potentially gives new shape and meaning to a whole. Here something can be projected out of the absent. These two different understandings of absence is what flows through my understanding of this concept within this project.  

In Sworld absence can refer to ghosts, spirits or energies embedded in beings, objects or spaces. In Sworld absence also refers to how humans through memory can access physically absent events in the past. I am interested in the indetermancy of human memory, and how this kind of memory is able to build further on past events, in a process of forgetting and remembering over and over again, or through unconcious processes of imagniation. In my research praxis the element memories, and the processes of how they evolve have come to be a key element to understand the nature of absence. I am furthermore interested in how human memory relates to the less flexible kind of memory within analog and digital recording devices. In this kind of memory the events also develop, but apperently rather as a dissolving process, where the stored memories gets more and more destroyed over time. 

The phenomenons of absence, memory and ghosts are in my research also linked to the phenomenon of acousmatic listening. In this article on Acousmatic Sound it is described how the term refers back to how the ancient greek philosopher Pythagoras (c. 570– c. 495 BC) required his studens to sit in absolute silence while they listened to him deliver his lecture from behind a veil to make them better concentrate on his teachings. In my research I am interested in this way of listening to hidden things. An interest I share with the iconic French  composer and precurser to Chion's work Pierre Schaeffer, who also uses the term Acousmatic in his publication "Traité des objets musicaux" (1966). Here he defines the Acousmatic as an adjective that refers to a sound that one hears without seeing the cause behind it, and furthermore he re-contextualises the term in todays technological context. In this quote, which derives from a translation of the original publication included in the book Audio Culture by Christoph Cox, he resembles Pythagoras's veil with a speaker, and describes the experience of listening to mediated sound as Acousmatic listening:

"... this term marks the perceptive reality of sound as such, as distinguished from modes of its production and transmission, The new phenomenon of telecommunications and massive diffuison of messages exists only in relation to and as a function of a fact that has rooted in human experience from the beginning"

— Pierre Schaeffer, Audio Culture (2017), Bloomsbury Academic USA

I am interested in how audio technology and listening for absenceses connects to the sub culture of ghost hunting. In this article on "EVP" (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) it is described how modern ghost hunters uses audio- and video recording devices to communcate with spirits, representing a more flexible idea of the memory within technology. In this subculture it is believed that spirits are more likely to appear without any humans present. Thus the ghost hunters will leave a recording device alone in an empty space to record potential activity. In this article on the religious movement of Spirituslism it is described how this praxis has roots in the occult and essoteric praxises of this movement, which became popular in Europe and America between 1840-1920, partly as appropriations of Eastern cultures. Out of this movement sprung out different games and techniques of fortune telling and spirit channelling, such as hypnosis, tarot cards and table turning. The growth of Spiritualism coincided with modern inventions of audio recorders and film cameras, which was implemented as a part of this new array of techniques to connect to the supernatural. As the EVP article writes these techniqiues were also adapted by artists, such as the American photographer Attila von Szalay who is credited to be the first to try record EVP in 1941 as a way to augment his photos of ghosts, and the german/swedish painter Friedrich Jürgenson who's recordings are still accessible today a.o. places in this section from a 2018 release by Parapsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative. As the article on Spiritualism writes the praxises of these beliefs are still strongly woven into Western culture today, though it has naturally mixed into spiritual subcultures and movements including modern ghosthunting, neo-pagan beliefs and new-age, wherein the context of my own upbringing also subscribes. In my research I am interested in how these subcultures understand absence through phenomenons of soul, spirits and ghosts, where Spiritualism  provide some examples. Another example is the Bhuddist doctrine of Anattā described in this article. Anattā translates to a non-self representing the empty of self in all beings. As the doctrine writes this doesn't mean that all beings are empty, but that no unchanging, permanent self or essence can be found in any phenomenon. As it writes in this artiticle on soul the bhudsitic non-self stands arguably in contrast to the concept of the traditional western beliefs of human soul in both mythological folklore as well as in the traditional christianities and many other beliefs. 

Thus in Sworld the motif of the empty space draws inspiration from these beliefs and ideas, and also from how these weave into historical movements in contemporary art such as Minimalism, Fluxus, Conceptual Art and especially Musique Concrete that inculdes the works of Chion and Schaefer. In the book "Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (1994)" by the scholar Alexandra Munroe it is described how  the cultural exchange of east and west in the middle of the 20th century inspired these movements. E.g. it is described how the western scene was introduced to the traditional Japanese concept of MA, an in-between space of two points, that focuses the viewer on the intention of absence in an artwork, a concept which is directly connected to the bhudistic concept of non-self as this momentary pause can be seen as a space which visually is blank, untied to a fixed self, and thereby filled with energy. The book also describes how zen-bhudism inspired the iconic composer John Cage's canonised  composition “4′33″”, a piece performed in the absence of deliberate sound:

"Cage’s famous 433” (1952), a concert of silence that tacitly turned the surrounding environmental sounds (of an increasingly restless audience) into music, demonstrated his revolutionary axiom, “let sounds be themselves.” His experiments in chance and indeterminacy, which aspired to “imitate nature in her manner of operation,” reflected the direct influence of Zen Buddhism which Cage studied in the 1950s with the visiting Columbia University lecturer, Suzuki Daisetsu (D.T. Suzuki, 1869-1966)." 

— Alexandra Munroe, Scream against the Sky (1994), Harry N. Abrams / Yokohama Museum of Art

This  indetermancy that this piece enhances by hiding the funtions of the checkers is a key to understand the strucutre within most games, and is also where I think games and absence links. Thus where as games in the context of Spiritualism are used as a way to connect to spirits, in fluxus they are predominantly used as a way to invite audiences to engage in the art. These contexts has informed my praxis with strategies for framing situations of audience participation, chance and improvisation in the work, and also as an aestetic that speaks into  these contexts. This entanglement of spiritual beliefs and artistic expressions has been a key to understand and reflect on the empty space and the context around this phenomenon, as well as it has provided different frames for the practical research. And as all of these fields entangles in my research, my intention is to avoid stating a specific way absence should be understood or conveyed, and instead explore how this entanglement can manifest in a human experience within a staged situation of a live performance. 

Walking

When I started this reserch in 2021 working with walks as a frame for composing was for me a new field, and I am continually understanding this field deeper as the project progress. Not only through the praxis, but also through a personal mapping of the historical context of this field, to understand where the research places it self in this trajectory. There are several sub genres of composed walks as they explain in this episode of the Canadian research project WalkingLab's podcast series on walking as a research methodology: "Soundwalks can be combined with other forms of documentation including recording devices, photography, and field notes. While there are particular features to soundwalks, sonic walks, and audio walks, some people use the terms interchangeably." Thus, according to WalkingLab, soundwalks, sonic walks and audio walks are some of the main catagories within composed walks, that deals with some sort of research. This naturally excludes the catagory of ghost walks, which in the context of Sworld are highly relevant. I will explain why futher down in the repport. A small selection of authentic ghost walks from th british city of York can be found on this online tourist catalog. As the examples on this website shows ghost walks are normally related to urban tourism, where a guide leads a walk through the city with a focus on haunted places, a murder that took place and the likes. Acoording to the website the first ghost walk in the world, was established in York in 1973, not so long after composed walks became a thing within the arts. 

In this article on sound walks the soundwalks by Hildegard Westerkamp and R. Murray Schafer stands as some of the pioneering works within the field in 1970's. Though it seems that Max Neuhaus was a precurser to their work with his "LISTEN" project in the 1960's, which is described on this private website of the artist Ellen Mueller. In the original soundwalks the participant is walking, listening (without headphones) to the surroundings, that they pass through in a composed route. Unlike my project the original soundwalks were not making use of technology. In this regard my project has a closer similarity to the works of artists like Janet Cardiff, who started working with her audio walks in the mid 1990’s and Christina Kubisch, who is known for her “Electrical Walks”, which first was shown in 2003, or the German theatre group Rimini Protocol, which was founded in 2000 by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, and Daniel Wetzel, who also make use of headphones in their composed walks. The dutch artist Cilia Erens, who since the 1980's used headphones in composed walks, is an example that are more relatable to my praxis. On the Amsterdam based art institution de Appel's website they describe how "to her the world is a series of audible spaces to be explored, each with their own identity which will only become manifest when sound and sight are no longer in sync." Equally to my work Erens is interested in using composed sound, that are out of sync with the visual enviroment, as a tool to reveal absent things, or what de Appel names "identity". Though the works of Erens, Rimini Protocol, Kubisch and Cardiff, from a technological perspective, are more relatable to my project, as they all make use of headphones, they are also significantly differing from my work. Neither of them uses audio that are generated (either by the performer or naturally occuring) and amplified live, which is an essential element in my work. Their works could also define as Extended Reality, but where mine examplifies a combination of a real- and a virtual situation, I would argue that they are rather examplifying a mirroring of the two. In this regard my work is perhaps more similar to how the orginal soundwalks of Neuhaus and Westerkamp, where natural occuring sounds are an equally central element in the experience.

Thus it seems that the simultaneous experience of precomposed- and live amplified audio within the context of composed walks are still a relatively undiscovered field. The only example of this combination, that I only know of by coincidence, are the relativly unknown and seemingly undocumented “Parade-walks”, organised by the Japanese duo of Tadashi Yonago and Kayu Nakada, whom I met while touring in Japan in 2019. I had the pleasure of experiencing one of their walks, when we shared the stage for an event in Osaka. This experience was to me highly mesmerising, and was initially what led to my own interest in this field. 

Text

Throughout this report anecdotal intermissions (written in Courier Prime Fond), refer to a writing praxis, which has come to inform Sworld more and more. In the research I have been curious towards scripting a voice of a guide, that would lead the audience on the Sworld Walk. Not only through guiding instructions, but also through different kinds of spoken text that can point towards the absent in the surroundings that we pass through. This text has primarily been composed of two different styles of writing. The first style builds on personal anecdotes —a text that traditionally points towards the past, as something absent in the now, but which can haunt the now through memory. And another style that rather builds on imagination and future projections. Descriptions of landscapes, objects or events, which exist and potentially emerge through imagination.

The scripted voice is inspired by the guide from the ghost walk. Though in the ghost walk the guide will probably not make any fortunetellings, and the anecdotes that are being shared won't be coupled to the guides own experience, but rather to historical events and urban myths. But wether the text are based on future-, historical- or personally esperienced events, the element of vocally adressing an audience and guiding them through a composed experience, is a way for the Sworld Walk-guide as well as the ghost walk-guide to establish a more intamate relation to a group of participants.

Other similar examples of audience releations within live performance is how singer-song-writers or magicians talk to the audience between performing. In these cases the text is similarly used to create a certain intimacy, but also merely to entertain- and in the case of the magicians to distract the audience. On this website about the use of English language they discuss the terminology around this phenomenon, which they name patter: "... it is used by magicians to distract the audience from focusing on the mechanism of the trick; the better you patter, the more you can get away with. Patter can also be used to entertain while the artist sets up for the next song."

The way I use text in my work was initially inspired by the previously mentioned "Parade Walk" of Tadashi Yonago and Kayu Nakada.  I remember how the artists conducting the walk were sharing their own personal memories from the enviroment that we were passing through. The audience would listen to their voice through the headphones telling about how they would fish crabs in the near by canal. This was to me a very intimate situation, and at the same time highly abstract, as the context of sharing these memories remained mysteriously hidden. 

In the 1980's and 90's my grandmother lived on a small farm in the middle of Zealand, where she had a private psychology practice. And as part of this practice, she would  facilitate various types of group meditation exercises. I remember walking around in my granparents's home, and into the space where she would conduct these sessions. There was a certain calm and ceremonial atmosphere in the whole enterior of this space. Later in my life, when my grandmother died and the family met up to look through her old belongings I found some machine written dream journeys printed on A4, between the pages of a book titled "Sjælens Leksikon" (in english "Encyclopedia of the Soul"). The book inlcudes definitions on a big amount of subjects within New-Age culture, western psycology and eastern philosophy. As defined in this book Dream journeys is a kind of guided meditation, that leads the participants into an imaginary enviroment. I also remember the dream journeys from my childhood on the Ashram. Often when the grown-ups would meet up for collective group meditations in the afternoon, the kids would join outside on the grass or inside on materesses and lie around, while a woman called AG, would guide us vocally through a dream journey.

In several different performances I have told this anecdote to initate a guided dream journey, where I guide an audience or a group of particpants into different imagined scenarios. I collected a selection of my dream-journey-writing here. Sworld is thus combining different styles of such as anecdotes, dream journeys as well as scored text, which is described further down in the "additional research"-paragraph. In the context of Sworld Walk, where a group of participants are being guided through a route in a concrete enviroment, while a guide simultaenously leads the particpants through an imaginary enviroment, spoken text is used to expand reality in addition to the other layers of sound. In her book Wanderlust, about walking as a cultural phenomenon, Rebecca Solnit writes about a similar layering of imagined realities:

“To trace an imaginary route is to trace the spirit or thought that passed there before”. 

— Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust (2000), Viking

The quote is taken from a section, where solnit reflects on the technique of memory palaces, which covers how one can mentally place information in specific locations within an imagined physical space, such as a palace or a building, and then mentally "walk" through that space to retrieve the information when needed. In Solnit's reflection, the imaginary route can not only be used as a tool to memorise information, but also as a tool to trace something absent from the past. In releation to my work, I am fascinated by this idea of how imagination can trace absent things on a route, and at the same time it questions the temporality of imagination, as somthing, which can not only reach into the future, but also into the past. The idea of a more fluid distinction between past, present and future is also what Karen Barad urgently calls for in the introducturary quote of this report. 

When I was about 11 years old a friend of my parents who used to visit us in my childhood home gave me a CD with sounds that he had recorded. One of these sounds, he told me could make time spin like a spinning bottle. This inspired me and my friends to develop a kind of game, where we would turn an empty bottle and then take a long walk in the direction that the bottle was pointing. Sometimes these walks would even be several days of hiking.On one of these hikes, me and my friends had woken up after a overnighting somewhere on the Jutlandish heath and were finding our way back to our town. After a while we found a gravel road that we thought might lead home. 

As we walk down this path a car passes by and rolls down the window. Behind the wheel of this car sits a little elf-like person. And on the back seat a snake and another of these elfs sits and wave us into the car. We notice that the elfs are sort of transparent, or rather pulsating between different levels of transparancy, as if they are stuck between different worlds.

Praxis with sound and landscape

A Sworld Walk can start with a guide inviting a group of participants to put on wireless headphones. In the headphones three different audio sources are being displayed through a wireless mixer. One is pre-composed audio, which can triggered through a phone. Another is sounds from the surrounding environment, which are being live amplified through handheld wireless microphones. And lastly the guides voice amplified through a headworn microphone, through which the guide alternates between guiding the audience through a physical route and an imagined route. The audio that constitutes the walks that I have developed so far are clean field recordings, foley recordings, processed recordings, and live-amplified sounds of voice, instruments or the surroundings that we move through. Although alot of different types of sound sources has been mixed in these walks, the project is focusing solely on sound which is mediated through technology, in Sworld collectively denoted under the term audio.  

In 2013 I got involved in a ghost hunt that took place at the closed psychiatric hospital in Aarhus called Det Jydske Asyl, where we spent about four hours during one night attempting to channel messages from the spirits of the former residents. We sat up audio and video recorders in different rooms to see if some spirits would talk to us through the recordings. During this session we did not manage to connect with any spirits, but some years later in 2018 this experience led me to another discovery. I was hiking in southern Norway. Out of curiosity I tried the ghost hunters method and placed my audio recorder inside the hollow of an ancient oak tree. When I was listening back to the recording there was nothing remarkable to start with, but then a few minutes into the recording, a scratchy voice appeared. In the emptiness of this hollow something seemed to speak. It was clearly not a human voice, but rather the sound of someone scrawling messages on the inside of the tree or perhaps something eating its way through the woods.

The starting point of developing the project's audio environment was a specific recording praxis inspired by modern ghost hunting. Like the ghost hunters I leave a sound recorder in a space without any humans present, which has included a match box, a trash can, a bag pack, a pocket, an abandoned house, a stone cave and a tree hollow a.o. The audio on the recordings are mostly constituted by background noises of humans, animals, vehicles etc. On top of these recordings I ad more distinct audio of abstract noises and foley aka. studio recordings of concrete sounds, such as the sound of someone knocking a door. This material became a foundation of the project’s audio environment and developed into a series of audio compositions that are gathered here. 

The aim of combining the ambiances from the empty-space-recordings and this extra layer of distinct audio is to create an illusion of other presences in the recording. While working on these experiments I noticed that the foley mainly creates associations to presences that are known to the listener and the abstract noises rather create associations to things that are unknown. In Audiovision Chion writes about these different associative qualities of sound and how they require different modes of listening, which he calls Causal listening,  Semantic Listening and Reduced Listening. Causal Listening covers the experience of hearing a knock on the door and automatically understanding the cause of the sound, Semantic Listening is when we hear a language that we understand and automatically experience it as concrete meaning, and lastly Reduced Listening is the experience of hearing an abstract sound that we don't associate to anything specific. 

"When we ask someone to speak about what they have heard, their answers are striking for the heterogeneity of levels of hearing to which they refer. This is because there are at least three modes of listening, each of which addresses different objects."  

 — Michel Chion, Audiovision (1993), Columbia University Press

In the reserch I am interested in these different assosiative qualities that the audio design contains, and how they effect the listener's experience of their surroundings. I noticed that when the distinct audio instead of being combined with the empty-space-recordings, were displayed in combination with live amplified audio in a space, the auditive illusion potentially evolves from something present in the reocording into an experience of something present in that space. In continuation of this recording praxis, other types of audio were gradually added into the project, and step by step it developed into a more open frame, which are now more open to improvisation, where any audio that can be accessed through the equipment that we carry are welcome. At the moment this equipment includes a phone with internet connection, so the limits are very wide. In this point of the process I am, rather than limitting the audio pallette, interested in a diverse audio enviroment and how this diversity might inform what associations the audio can evoke to the listener. E.g. what kind of associations are being evoked if a Red-Hot-Chilli-Peppers-song appears as we walk through a door? Or what creature is summoned if a loud abstract sound appears as we look at the ocean? Or what images will surface if an anecdote is shared as we walk up a spiral staircase? I am interested in how each audience member experience their surroundings differently depending on the layering of audio, movement, stories and landscape.

The precomposed audio that I trigger on my phone consists of files about 15 to 20 minutes long. In the files I have inserted sections of silence, so if I e.g. trigger an audio file as we start the walk, it might only be after a couple minutes that a section of audio appears in the headphones, followed by another section of silence and so on. This means that I cannot predict exactly where on the route a section of audio appears. This creates a compositional mechanism of never knowing how the events on the route and the precomposed audio will coincide.

1st Sworld Walk: “Pushing Upward Earth”

Through out the process I have developed three Sworld Walks for three different sites. The first walk titled “Pushing Upward Earth” were composed in and around an old farmhouse, and was developed as part of the Terraform residency on the danish Island Samsø. This was in the very beginning of the first semester on the soloist program. On the residency I developed the technical frame for the walks that I describe above, and in the end I took a little group of locals on a walk. At the time I didn’t name it Sworld Walk, but it was the same conceptual and technical frame of research. On the walk I shared some of the work that I had made during the residency. I shared audio that I had recorded, next to aloud readings from a local story archive. Another section included live generated audio from locally found clams, mixed with audio from a surveillance camera that I had sat up in a nearby chicken coop. Through out the walk I addressed the audience in different ways. I would talk about the work, sort of casually disseminating the process and the context around the praxis, but also go into a mode of speaking more inwardly, as when I guide a dream journey that rounds off the walk. “Pushing Upward Earth” is documented here with photos from the process and scans from a book, that were produced in the aftermath of the residency.

2nd Sworld walk: “Energy Dealer”

The second Sworld Walk, which I titled “Energy Dealer” was developed in the end of my third semester. The route of this walk goes through the neighbouring landscape of RMC, towards Amager Bakke, where it culminates, before it loops back to the starting point. Amager Bakke is a waste energy plant with an artificial ski-slope build on top situated on Refshaleøen in Copenhagen. Thus the construction transforms people's waste into energy, as well as it functions as a public destination for e.g. ski enthusiasts, school children and tourists. Through out the walk I share personal anecdotes that loosely relates to notions of landscapes, walking, absence and ghosts. Sections of processed audio appears throughout the walk. At one point I stop to do a short choreography, which corresponds with an eerie noise. When we reach Amager Bakke I tell an anecdote about my deceased grandmother’s praxis with meditation and therapy, that leads to a guided dream journey, which I narrate, while we walk up the construction. The process of developing this walk informed the project in various ways. Especially the strange ambiguity of the site became defining for how would I choose the next site. And as the choreography were added quite late in the process I became very curious to work further on this element. The walk were not shared publicly, but internally for my peers, supervisors and staff members of RMC. See a short edited video documentation here. 

3rd Sworld Walk: “Charged”

The third walk,“Charged”, I started to develop in my last semester on the soloist program. The walk starts and ends in the foyer of RMC. As in “Energy Dealer” I am sharing personal anecdotes, through out the walk. I introduce by turning on a mini cassette-recorder. With the recorder pointed towards my mouth I share a audience participatory game of placing absent things in space. An audience chooses a route through a map of cue words for improvising a monolog about an obsticle which we will meet as part of the walk. I made a small series of these exercises titled “Monologue Trees”, which I collected in a booklet documented here.

After the exercise and still with the recorder turned on the walk moves towards Papirøen, where it turns down into Operaen’s underground parking lot. Here I rewind the mini cassette, and play it back into the space. The recorded voice and the environment that we just passed through becomes the backing track for a 15 minutes intermission of improvised, movement and voice accompanied by synthetic sounding noises from the precomposed audiotrack. In the improvisation I use the absent object, which are being placed in the introductory exercise as a guide of movement, gestures and abstract vocal sounds. The transition into the improvisation creates a shift in the relation between me and the audience, as I until this moment only address the audience in a rather casual way thorugh guiding the route and telling anecdotes. After this section we walk up through a spiral staircase and into Operaen’s café on floor level. The staircase is situated inside a glass tube, where trees and plants are growing and kept by gardeners, who you sometimes see walking around in this artificial landscape. While we walk up the stairs and through the café environment, a musical piece of synthesised harp appears in the headphone. As we walk out and towards the canal I start to sing accompanying the harp. The sequence of music and song marks another shift in the work, from something rather abstract into a more traditional musical setting. Here is a documentation from a work in progess showing from the spring 2024, and here is a documentation of the final presentation from fall 2024. 

Additional research on movement and voice

My work with choreography and movement sprung out of collaborations with dancers and choreographers. The first of these collaboration happened around 2015, but the most significant to my reseach now is my collaboration with dancers and choreographers Alice Martucci, Stine Frandsen and Lea Vendelbo Persen, which were initiated in the second semester on the soloist program, where we developed the dance piece Mancy. In this piece we are panning abstract audio between four speakers, sometimes following the dancers movements and sometimes following another path in the space. See a short edit documentation here. 

The two elements of movement, one being visible through the choreography of the dance and the other being traced through the audio design, reaffirmed my interest in adapting Chion’s Sync Points into a setting of live performance. It made me aware that the corelation between precomposed audio and live performance is so strongly merged as the eye, ear and mind automatically creates connections between image and audio. Inspired from this work I implemented body movement in the second Sworld Walk “Energy Dealer”. This was then furtherly developed in a performance I did at Arthub in Copenhagen titled “Contour gig” presented in march 2024, prior to the development of the third Sworld Walk “Charged”. It's documented here. In this performance I made the first movement experiments based on the speech scores in my “Monologue Tree”-booklet. 

In the process of developing my research, i’ve been curious about how I could implement more voices in a staged situation of storytelling. In my performance “Audience, in audience” developed with Claus Haxholm in 2023, we experimented with dividing the guiding voice of a dream journey into three voices and a cello. In this case the nature of the dream journey was, instead of framing a relation between a guide and a group of listerners, rather framing a relation between the performers as some kind of a staged reading class. See the documentation here. 

Another project, which was a precurser to the previously mentioned "Monologue Trees" is a collection of similar gamestructed voice scores that I call “Dialogue Trees”. These are made for two "players" and are build around a structure, where player 1 starts by choosing one out of two possible initiating steps on the route through the score. Player 1's choice will decide which next two possible steps player 2 can choose  between, which then again decides player 1's next possible steps and so forth. This mechanic is borrowed from a mechanic in role playing computer games called conversation tree or dialogue tree, covering the kind of mechanic that controls the progress of conversations between the player’s character and other characters in the game. The "Dialogue Trees" were performed only once and wasn’t documented on video, but I uploaded the original scores as documentation here.

I am interested in how human voice differently than other sounds evokes images to the listeners, and how these images connect to the surroundings in a live performance. This part of the research has developed into implementing song and more abstract voice, which functions as compositional elements that bridges the concrete meanings of the text and the associative qualities of the sound. The song and especially the abstract voice, represent a type of sound that can be experinced strange and unknown and at the same time has a clear association to a human attached to it. In relation to Chion's three listening modes, this examplifies how the human voice can require all modes of listening:

"...we must also remember that these three listening modes overlap and combine in the complex and varied context [...] The question of listening with the ear is inseparable from that of listening with the mind, just as looking is with seeing. In other words, in order to describe perceptual phenomena, we must take into account that conscious and active perception is only one part of a wider perceptual field in operation." 

— Michel Chion, Audiovision (1993), Columbia University Press

Perspective

With a focus on how audio can evoke human experiences of absence, my research is circling around a contradictory topic of how technology can expand, but also constrict the way humans listen, perceive and engage with their surroundings. This schism has concerned artists and researchers, throughout the 20th century and still today. In the following section I made a little selection of quotes, that puts my research into this perspective: 

“Only a total appreciation of the acoustic environment can give us the resources for improving the orchestration of the world soundscape.” 

R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape — Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1994), Destiny Books

These resources that Schafer describes as a way to deal with polution (in general but espeicially of noise), are highly relevant in a time where human technology, on one hand, is at risk of harming peoples mental and physical health as well as Earth’s climate- and biodiversity, and on the other hand perhaps is a way to handle this crisis. Thus I feel a personal need to continually reflect and engage with this topic, to develop my own understanding of it’s impact. These reflections has in this project espeically been informed by Karen Barad's article TROUBLING TIMES AND ECOLOGIES OF NOTHINGNESS. As Barad also uses the ghost as a virtual character that illustrate her points, I have tapped into their ideas around this mythological phenomenon, and societal urgency that the ghost represents in their writings. 

I am interested in the ghosts as  that haunts the architecture and means of constrcution that the artificial sites such as Amager Bakke and Operaen’s parkinglot represents. As these buildings can examplify a part of technology which arguably polutes the enviroments, that they are placed in, I am interested in going into dialog with these places and explore what ghosts are haunting these sites. And here the ghosts are understood also as phenomenons that contains this quandary of technology. Donna Harraway writes about this quandary in her renowned book "A Cyborg Manifesto", and argues how imagination can help humans to use technology in a fruitful way: 

“I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.” 

Donna Harraway, A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Socialist Review

I am exploring the concept of ghosts, as a similar fiction to Haraway’s cyborg, as a mythological character that can suggest not only these "fruitful couplings” between human and technology, but also as someone who through their virtuality, can reveal what Harraway phrase as "an imaginative resource”. In Sworld this resource is represented by the concept of absence, which by it's complex nature of existence  suggests that this is not only imagination, but also something that perhaps aren't visually present, but can be evoked out of it's own void. As Barad puts it:

Through their ariticle Barad  contributes to a general discussion within today’s social sciences on how humans can live sustainable lives if they cannot imagine values of ghosts and other  more-than-human beings. Barad argues that we should understand the world’s contemporary political and environmental crisises as a crisis of  history, spirituality, memory and imagination. And as they write in the quoted article to heal this crisis we shall remember our common imaginaries and collectivly connect to these, as oppose to "colonial practices of erasure and avoidance" of the past. Barads ideas of this kind of healing and the quandaries that lies within this process is aswell a central element within Sworld.

A similar topic is also present in the film Yumen by Xiang Huang, J.P. Sniadecki & Routao Xu. At least according to my memory of the film, that I only saw once when it was screened in Copenhagen's Cinemateket around 2010-ish. In the film we are following the filmmakers and a crew of fellow artists walking around in something that looks like an abandoned town. If I remember correctly it is taking place in a southern state of China. Remains of an everyday life is still present. Cars parked in the street. Inside a house a table is set for a family dinner. I remember how one of the artists is doing a beautiful choreography in front of the an empty townhall. A movement through a landscape stuck in the past. It isn’t explained why everyone has moved out of this town, it is just the reality that the film portraits. The film ends with a kind of plot twist, where one of the artists again is dancing through the empty streets. The camera is smoothly moving backwards filming them frontally moving forward. After a while a chicken appears in the frame, and shortly after a child runs after a ball. Then some people appear. Then more animals. And suddenly a whole environment of open street shops, people, animals and vehicles folds out. The camera keeps walking backwards paving the way for the dancer moving into this lively environment. The film’s sound design is used to embody this transition. In the abandoned part of town, there isn’t any sounds at all, not even a fly or anything. A totally silent environment. Just the sound of this crew walking around and maybe only a tiny gust of wind in the microphone. And when they walk into the lively part of town the sounds suddenly appears as if the camera somehow penetrates a membrane that prevents sounds to travel between these two places. And this is where the credits starts to roll over the screen— No explanation of this phenomenon, just this transition between these parallel worlds.