no tours
The proposal of Escoitar.org is to rediscover the city while analysing the value of sound as a form of engaging with today’s society. From an approach to the listening experience and to the problems historically affecting sound, this workshop will focus on the composition of a sound cartography of the city realized in a sound-walk with GPS technology. The workshop will conclude with the production of a work to be included in the exhibition The Past in the Present.
no tours
The idea behind Escoitar.org’s No Tours workshop is to rediscover the city while analysing the value of sound as a form of engaging with today’s society. Focusing on the listening experience and the problems historically affecting sound, this workshop will examine the composition of a sound cartography of Cimadevilla (a district in the city of Gijón) made during a sound-walk with GPS technology. The workshop will conclude with the production of a work to be included in the exhibition The Past in the Present.
This activity is organised by LABoral in collaboration with Gijon City Council’s Municipal Culture Foundation.
Time: from 4 to 8 pm
Enrollment: free
Targeting: people interested in new ways of sound experimentation
Programme
25th March, 7 pm, Sound: That Great Mystery, Chiu Longina, escoitar.org, Galicia
Our first contact with the world as human beings is through our hearing. Our first stimuli come from our mother’s voice, whose amniotic fluid amplifies the outside noises, producing the first emotional bond. Our ears do not have lids like our eyes, so we cannot stop hearing mechanically (like we do when we close our eyes and stop seeing). Thus, we are forced to listen, and our ears work round the clock throughout our whole lives; we listen uninterruptedly, even while sleeping. But to complicate things unnecessarily, and according to many studies, when we die the cells that stop working last are those associated with hearing. Therefore, we are born listening; we live listening and die listening. But... Why has such an important organ in our life always been pushed into the background? Why is there such a strong dominance between the eye and the ear? Why don’t history books include an audio CD with the sound imaginary and soundscapes of the places described? Isn’t it common sense that a recording made in 1920 of a unique square from our location would give us more clues about our forefathers? Why aren’t there any such recordings despite the existence at that time of the appropriate technology (just like photography)? This conference will attempt to discern some of the hidden aspects of sound which can help us to readdress this imbalance, this hierarchical relationship between eye and ear.
26th March, 6 pm, A sound-walk. Gijón/Karlsruhe, Juan-Gil López, escoitar.org, Galicia
Noises unsettles and disturbs us while at once setting in place invisible bonds. Some sounds are embedded in our memory, linking us to the territory, and informing the soundscape of every town at every moment. The work developed by the collective Escoitar in Gijón just under a year ago and recently continued in the German city of Karlsruhe, will be used as the premise to explore significant sounds, the accompanying resonant energy, acoustic landmarks, sirens and bells, as well as to examine listening as a form of knowledge and representation.
27th March, 6 pm, The space of sound (or how musicians stopped running through forests), Enrique Tomás, telecommunications engineer and researcher in sound art, Futurelab, Linz, Austria
Despite being invisible and impossible to weigh or measure, sound does take up space. When a sound is produced in a room or inside a large hall in a building, it takes up every space in it: each corner, each cm3, even the space inside keyholes, everything is full of sound. In the history of listening many artists and musicians have been involved in this idea of “total space”. This conference, given from the perspective of an engineer and sound artist, will take a brief overview of the history of sound in space, from antiphonal singing to soundscapes through Xenakis, Stockhausen or Michel Chion’s “l’art des sons fixés”. All this using and introducing concepts such as the delocalization of sound, levels of listening, the sound non-place, multi-channel systems or location techniques of sound (surround or ambisonic sound).
