Soundwalking
The terms sonic environment and soundscape are used inconsistently within different historical eras, academic and artistic disciplines, and can even vary among researchers in the same field over time. To avoid confusion within this document, the term sonic environment is used following a historically consistent definition to objectively describe, “all sounds present at a location regardless of how (or if) they are physiologically and psychologically perceived”. Using this definition, sonic environments are ever-changing, location and time-specific, and independent of any given organism’s perception of those sounds. Unfortunately, in the mid to late-20th century, the term ‘soundscape’ concurrently used this same definition in many writings.
To address this ambiguity, while providing a more descriptive definition for discussing his research, R. Murray Schafer in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World proposed an alternate definition for soundscape in 1977. For Schafer, soundscape is a subjective term where the psychological element of how humans perceive and mentally process the sonic environment constitute the definition. As Schafer’s definition is well suited for our purposes, this document defines soundscape as “the sounds which an individual personally hears and their psycho-acoustic and psychological perception of those sounds”.
In the 21st century, the definition of soundwalking is nebulous as its use varies from field to field and researcher to researcher. To establish a definition for use within this thesis, we will compare the definitions proposed by two founding members of the World Soundscape Project. The World Soundscape Project is a highly influential research organisation that has incubated the foundation from which many contemporary soundwalking variations derive. R. Murray Schafer, the primary founder of acoustic ecology and leader of the World Soundscape Project, makes a distinction between soundwalking and listening walking in his writings:
Listening walk: a listening walk is simply a walk with a concentration on listening.
Soundwalk: an exploration of the soundscape of a given area using a score as a guide.
While adopted by many, Schafer’s definitions can confuse our later discussions as they exclude many examples of well-known and influential works that are widely recognised as soundwalks. For example, this definition excludes recorded soundwalks that exist purely in a digital form as there is no traditional score for the walker to follow. For the majority of my own publications, Schafer’s definition is too narrow. Instead of Schafer's definiton, I usually adopt a broader definition of soundwalking that was proposed by another World Soundscape Project member Hildegard Westerkamp. In the influential 1974 paper Soundwalking, Westerkamp describes the practice as, "any excursion whose main purpose is listening to the environment". Furthermore, I acknowledge as noted by Westerkamp “no matter what form a soundwalk takes, its focus is to rediscover and reactivate our sense of hearing”.
Hyper-Soundwalking
Within my PhD reseach, I coined two terms to describe some works I discovered in my literature review as well as my own research: hyper-soundscape and hyper-soundwalk. The prefix hyper in these terms references the existing term hyper-instrument. Representing a popular research topic within the field of music technology, a hyper-instrument is a musical instrument that has been augmented with sensors and actuators to expand its capability for musical expression. This thesis explores the idea that sonic environments can be augmented with sensor and actuator technology similar to musical instruments to expand the environment’s capacity to support novel listening experiences. Thereby, the term hyper-soundscape is defined as, a sonic environment that is augmented with sensor and actuator technology to encourage in-situ listening
While a hyper-soundwalk is: a soundwalk conducted through a hyper-soundscape with a focus to rediscover and reactivate the sense of hearing Due to its focus on natural sonic environments, this document explores hypersoundwalking through outdoor natural locations such as forests, deserts, and mountains. However, the concept of a hyper-soundscape and the practice of hyper-soundwalking are not limited to outdoor natural locations as nearly any sonic environment can be augmented with technology to create a hyper-soundscape, including those inside, outside, urban, suburban, rural, and natural.
Listening Walks of Artists and Musicians
Similar to the installation art movement, starting in the late 1960s, many early soundwalks can be considered conceptually informed by John Cage’s seminal composition 4’33”. The importance of 4’33”, concerning the origins of soundwalking is the composition’s dramatic declaration that in-situ environmental sounds are worthy of the same intent listening as notes performed by an orchestra. This sentiment is well-described by Alan Licht in Sound Art Revisited: With 4’33”, Cage designates himself as a listener experiencing sounds of a given environment rather than composing them himself, whose role as a composer is to direct the audience’s attention to the sounds that are already there. The composition 4’33” has influenced the creation of some listening walks in the 1960’s which originated from the disciplines of music composition and sound art. The first two artistically-motivated soundwalks were created in 1966 independent from each other by the composers Philip Corner and Max Neuhaus. Corner viewed his 1966 walks as “the ultimate consequence” of 4’33”, participants are given the instructions, “just listen to the sounds as given as if at a concert (with that attention)”.
Concurrent to Corner’s first listening walks in 1966, Cage’s friend and percussionist Max Neuhaus, developed his own artistically-motivated soundwalk. LISTEN (1966), which coincidentally is Neuhaus’s first opus as an installation artist, was created in reaction to personal observations Neuhaus experienced while performing avant-garde compositions with extended periods of silence where, “most members of the audience seemed more impressed with the scandal of ‘ordinary’ sounds placed in a ‘sacred’ place than with the sounds themselves, and few were able to carry the experience over to a new perspective on the sounds of their daily lives”. Neuhaus’s solution to this frustration was to take people out of the concert hall and into the environment where natural sounds originate. Neuhaus’s listening walks began with stamping the hands of participants with a small rubber stamp containing the word “LISTEN” in all caps. After branding the participants with the score (the stamp), Neuhaus would lead the group through Manhattan in New York City. Neuhaus described the experiences as “Lecture Demonstrations” where the rubber-stamp was regarded as the lecture and the walk the demonstration. Cage did more than just influence the work of Neuhaus and Corner with his compositions and writings, as he conducted his own soundwalks. In the Fall of 1971, during a guest lecture at the University of Wisconsin, Cage led a group of about 300 students on a ninety minute chance-determined listening walk through the campus. The outing Cage titled Demonstration of the Sounds of the Environment and in Cages words, “we were to walk silently, so that we would hear the sounds of the environment. Then came back to the hall and talked briefly about what we’d heard. I gave sort of a lecture”.
Corner and Cage guided participants through their guided walking excursions following distinctly different methodologies. While both works were silent, and guided by the facilitator within an artistic context, Neuhaus used a form of technology in the form of a rubber stamp for LISTEN as a prompt to help remind walkers of the excursion’s sole purpose. Alternatively, within an educational context, Cage utilised chance proceedings to determine the walking path and did not rely on technology or tools. While technology- and tool-free soundwalks are as prevalent as technologically-facilitated variants, these initial experiments by Cage and Corner provided a foundation for other individuals to modify and adopt to their work. Soundwalking’s focus on careful observation that originated from composers and artists during the late 1960s provided ripe opportunity for a wide range of academic disciplines to emerge starting in the mid 1970s which adapt soundwalking to support their individual research objectives.
Soundwalking within Academic
Emerging from movements in the 1960s within music composition and installation art, the organisation World Soundscape Project academically formalised soundwalking as a practice which they developed into an indispensable research tool. The World Soundscape Project was established in Canada by Raymond Murray Schafer and included many academics who became important figures in soundwalk discourse including Hildegard Westerkamp and Barry Traux. The institution’s members captured and curated hundreds of hours of soundscape recordings. The World Soundscape Project incubated an innovative approach to soundscape research and appreciation which manifested academically with the founding of the field of acoustic ecology and several books, articles, and essays. Their work inspired numerous soundwalk and soundscape researchers in the remainder of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries where soundwalking has been adopted by a range of varied academic disciplines.
Along with its initial use within the field of acoustic ecology, soundwalks are implemented by other disciplines as an evaluation technique, research methodology, and artistic platform. For example, urban planning researchers such as Dick Botteldooren, Rebecca Cai, Antonella Radicchi, Dietrich Henckel, and Paul Jennings, use soundwalking to gather data about city soundscapes to guide urban planning. Soundwalks are commonly used within a pedagogical context to teach students about objective listening, history, communication, and recording technology. The field of Soundscape Ecology, founded in 2011 by Bryan Pijanowski, Bernard Krause, and others, seeks to combine elements of spatial ecology, bioacoustics, acoustic ecology, and psychoacoustics. Soundwalking can be found in publications within the fields of social science, feminist theory, ethnomusicology, pain management, and cultural geography. Removed of academic discourse, soundwalking has been proposed as a platform for auditory tourism, meditation, architecture, and even to guide dreaming.
There are several soundwalking characteristics which contribute to the practice’s wide adoption within academic disciplines as a research methodology. While centred around environmental listening, soundwalking is an inherently multimodal activity that can be leveraged to research the effects ocular, cochlear, olfactory, and tactile qualities have on the overall perception of the soundscape. In addition, soundwalks do not cause any perceived environmental harm, can be conducted in nearly any location, and generally do not require approval from governing bodies to realise. Soundwalks usually do not require extensive set up and dismantle times and can easily scale. Furthermore, soundwalks are usually cost-effective, demonstrate minimal social barriers to participation, and are capable of generating both subjective and objective research data. However, one could argue the attribute that most contributes to soundwalking’s adoption into a broad range of disciplines is the practice’s adaptability to new exhibition scenarios. One of the most common and effective ways soundwalking is adapted to new applications is through the use of technology.
As demonstrated by related works introduced in this discussion, soundwalking has been adopted in numerous academic disciplines as a research tool from the 1970s onward. There are numerous examples of technology-free soundwalks that are artistically and historically significant. At the same time, the basic methodology of soundwalking has commonly been supplemented with technology to expand the soundwalking experience. In the interest of informing and contextualising the development of the Hyper-Soundwalk installation scenarios introduced in this thesis, the following discussion investigates a survey of soundwalks that promote environmental listening by using electronic technology.
Projects Inspired by This Topic
Please see the Hyper-Soundwalking section of this website in the Navigation Menu for an overview of my PhD research concerned with fusing together components from the practice of soundwalking with sonic Installation art. An overview of the projects created from this research can ben found HERE