Robin Parmar

University of Limerick, Computer Science and Information Systems, Faculty Member

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Robin Parmar explores the phenomenology of place and the poetics of memory using a cross-disciplinary practice of non-narrative film, sound installations, environmental composition, photography, and text. Research interests include soundscape composition and acoustic ecology, psychoacoustics, field recording, audio synthesis, visual music, and epistemologies of nature. He has released twelve albums, on Silent Records (USA), Gruenrekorder (Germany), and his own Stolen Mirror (Ireland). His film “The Swerve” premiéred at Light Moves: Festival of Screendance 2018. Awards include the Invisible Places residency (The Azores, 2017) and an Arts Council Bursary (2017). He was selected for the national showcase Just Listening – Ireland Calling in 2011 (curated by the National Sculpture Factory) and was an invited artist at EVA International, Ireland’s Biennial of Contemporary Art in 2010 (curated by Elizabeth Hatz).

Robin has a doctorate in Sonic Creativity from De Montfort University (Leicester, UK) and is Lecturer in Video, Film, and Visual Communication at the University of Limerick (Ireland) where he currently directs the BSc. in Music, Media and Performance Technology. He is Vice-President of the Irish Science, Sound, and Technology Association (ISSTA) and was guest editor for the last issue of Interference: Journal of Audio Culture. His recent book Listening To Places (Void Gallery, Derry) sold out its first printing. Visit robinparmar.com.
Phone: +353 87 2862678

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Constantine E Verevis

Monash University

Eirik Askerøi

Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

Rubén Valdés Miyares

University of Oviedo / Universidad de Oviedo

Steve Taylor

Leeds Beckett University

Benjamin Fraser

University of Arizona

Independent Scholar

Flinders University of South Australia

Noel McLaughlin

Northumbria University

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Platial Phenomenology and Environmental Composition

doctoral thesis, 2019

This study concerns field recordings, location audio gathered from unscored and unexpected sounds... more This study concerns field recordings, location audio gathered from unscored and unexpected sounds, which retain an indexical relationship to their origin in the natural world. The term “environmental music” describes aesthetic works that use field recordings as primary material. This practice requires an engagement with the ontology and phenomenology of place, but such relationships have remained under-theorised. This study addresses this lacuna by developing a rich vocabulary of place that can aid both the practice and analysis of environmental music. The historical development begins with the multiplicity of concepts of place known to the Ancient Greeks. One of these, Ptolemy’s geos, based on a God’s-eye view of the world, has dominated understandings of the world and its effects, hence the term “geography”. This perspectivism was reinforced first by Alberti’s optics, which placed a viewer in a strict topological relationship to the object of their gaze, and then by Cartesian rationalism, a philosophy that reduced place to mere secondary characteristics of an ordered, homogeneous space. Against this background, alternative models of place will be discussed. Topos, exemplified by tales like “The Odyssey”, emphasises the perambulations of an individuated subject, foregrounding the experiential nature of the journey. The klimata of Ptolemy models place as psychic zones of influence on the Earth. Plato’s khoros is both receptacle and material, a generative site of instability and unknowability. Taken together, these concepts assert the primacy of place as milieu, a responsive context that shapes, and is shaped by, being-in-the-world. The word “platial” is proposed to encompass this understanding. This thesis is supported by the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as interpreted by Tim Ingold and Edward Casey. Analysis of the environmental music of Dallas Simpson, Robert Curgenven, and the author illustrate how platial thinking can provide deep insights into a variety of creative sonic practices.

Robin Parmar

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