Broadcasts from Empty Rooms and the Edges of Radio

In this article I discuss how people, as listening bodies in urban spaces, both passively (hearing) and actively (listening) engage with sound and unwanted noise. The uneven generation and perception of sound presents us with an important set of spatial, social, and physiological impacts. Our bodies are guided, damaged, invited, and otherwise shielded by invisible yet powerful forces. These forces have a broad patterning, what might be termed the sonic order of the city. Within the walls of homes, offices, and streets our experience is shaped both by natural sound and, more often, by orchestrated commercial practices such as in-store radio, muzak and the flows of rush hour traffic. This aural stage management takes places through the planning and relative containment of socially, commercially, and industrially sourced sound. This article discusses the broad relationship between these urban soundscapes and their influence on the trajectories of the human body to ask how sound and noise shape our experience and movement through the city.

2020

This thesis chronicles the practical and theoretical research that has been undertaken in conjunction with, and in support of, the creation of a portfolio of original works. The portfolio comprises five works of sound art: two are sound installations, and three are what I call ‘mobile sound walks’. All five works are site-specific, meaning that they have been designed for a specific space, in response to a specific social and environmental context, and take into account the cultural, historic and political significance of the hosting site. The first half of this thesis is dedicated to an in-depth discussion of the work of six artists with whom I align my own creative practice. These include the composers Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and R. Murray Schafer, who are noted for their use of everyday sounds as compositional material; the sound installation artists Max Neuhaus and Bill Fontana, who create site-specific, environmental sound art works; and Janet Cardiff, a pioneer of mobile sound art. In the second half of this thesis I provide a detailed analysis of my own work, with a particular focus on my mobile sound walks, which use location-aware technologies as a means to map sounds across a landscape. Such technologies have received little attention through existing sound art discourses. This thesis addresses this lack, by offering conceptual perspectives and methodological tools for understanding and producing what I call ‘locative soundscape composition’. Throughout this thesis I draw upon a range of critical theories and methodologies both from within, and from outside of, sound art studies, which help to shed new light on sound as it relates to, for example, the city, the politics of everyday life, the production of space and place, and the relationships between site-specific art, urban environments, and social actors.

2009

This paper explores the use of a combined installation and Internet strategy for gathering qualitative and quantitative data for practice-based research in the field of soundscape studies. It is focussed around the Sounding Shore project (www.marcusleadley.com) which was run by the artist as part of the Whitstable Biennale satellite programme in 2008 and the approach is being adopted as part of the practice methodology for the PhD. The installation used a Max/MSP patch to recontextualise field recordings, gathered along a stretch of coastline, into a randomised soundscape composition. This was played back, at the same location, using a wireless headphone network to create a seamless transition from the real to the mediated experience. The work was designed to interrogate the interstices between hearing and listening and explore the perceptual impact of separating aural and visual cues. The provision of an online resource before, during and after the event was invaluable for promotion and documentation.

2018

Our goal is to study the shaping of audiences formed by radio listening, and their behaviour vis-à-vis the notions of territory, identity, language, and private and public space. To this end, it becomes important to study listeners’ relation with the radio sound object, the space where that relation fuses and how it comes about. Sound, when listened to as radio aesthetics (voice, music, effects and silence), sometimes fuses the private and public spheres. A negotiation is struck between the power of a mass medium and the interests that constitute the listeners’ private spheres. Through broadcasting, in particular, what was of the private domain became collective. It is in this context, fed by the dubious relation of what is private or public, that the relation between listener and medium-broadcast sound object is solidified. One of the ways of understanding this relation, created through radio in the 1930s, involves understanding the relation between the listener and the voices/ cha...

This report aims to explore how sound art can create an alternative perception of space in urban and public places using a range of contemporary artworks as case studies. This investigation is motivated by a desire to acknowledge and highlight the benefits of sound art as a vital medium in creating urban public spaces. Often subjugated by visual art and music, creative sonic experiences are still not fully understood or considered when it comes to encouraging social interaction beyond commercial or privatized use of the urban environment. Hearing is a constant condition of social being and yet it is only a public issue when there are concerns with negative noise or commercial profit. This study aims to highlight how sound, and more specifically, different qualities of noise, can encourage more social-political interaction within urban public space.

2022

During the second lockdown and while writing this text, a radio station in Berlin is advertising with the slogan "Hör Dich glücklich" ("Listen yourself happy"). While this tagline captures both an inherent connection of sound, pleasure, and affect, it also inadvertently points to one of the few activities still possible. But isolated listening is not the same as collective listening. "You can only narrate loneliness acoustically," claims filmmaker Christian Petzold (Diederichsen & Ruhm 2010: 220). What sounds can be heard in the rooms that have been emptied due to COVID-19 precautions and restrictions? Berlin and other cities have become quieter than ever before in some regards, while noise from private parties in neighboring apartments or in public parks may have gotten louder and more frequent than usual. Jace Clayton's rhetorical question "Where is the party?" in his review of famed DJ Carl Craig's installation in New York in spring 2020 hit a nerve. Like several other artworks, Craig's Party/After Party seemed both to anticipate and to comment on the uncanny situation of the present, almost acting as a seismographic forecast. As Clayton outlines, "The sweaty social contract invoked by the art of the DJ-according to which the relationship between performer and crowd is a self-modulating loop wherein the kinetic energy of the latter informs the aesthetic choices of the former and vice versa, resulting in a communal momentum powerful enough to shape the subsequent creation of more musicis underwritten by a sonic axiom: Amplified music sounds terrible in empty rooms" (Clayton 2020). Usually, dancing or standing clubgoers' bodies act as a filter to the raw sound. Without them, not only does the music sound terrible, but the mutual energy, the overflow of affect, and the rapport between DJ and audience is missing. Since all spaces of collective listening, the clubs and venues, opera houses and bars, have been closed for most of 2020 and are still closed in 2021 at least until Easter, some people use their car as a substitute for the club, cranking up the volume to the maximum. At least in the car, they are moving through the city, are seen and heard by passersby, and the sound reverberates differently. // Marietta Kesting Kesting is part of the publishing collective b_books, Berlin since 2004 and has become a member of the editorial board of FKW journal for visual culture and gender studies in 2017. A recent publication is '[Dream]

2009

This paper explores the use of a combined installation and Internet strategy for gathering qualitative and quantitative data for practice-based research in the field of soundscape studies. It is focussed around the Sounding Shore project (www.marcusleadley.com) which was run by the artist as part of the Whitstable Biennale satellite programme in 2008 and the approach is being adopted as part of the practice methodology for the PhD. The installation used a Max/MSP patch to recontextualise field recordings, gathered along a stretch of coastline, into a randomised soundscape composition. This was played back, at the same location, using a wireless headphone network to create a seamless transition from the real to the mediated experience. The work was designed to interrogate the interstices between hearing and listening and explore the perceptual impact of separating aural and visual cues. The provision of an online resource before, during and after the event was invaluable for promotion and documentation.

In different ways, works of art conceived for specific places lead us to consider the audience’s presence, or in a wider sense, the presence of the individual, within the space of the work. For this reason, in this chapter I analyse sound installations in urban environments using a historical and multidisciplinary approach, and focusing on their reception by the “city-citizen” (a term that recognizes the reciprocal influence of the dynamic space of the city and its urban inhabitants). When site-specific artworks include sound as a material, they also incorporate or reinforce ideas of temporality, simultaneity and dynamism and these same qualities are inherent to the modern city. Drawing on 1960s research by urban planner Kevin Lynch, I will discuss the impact of urban sound installations by Max Neuhaus, Bernard Leitner, Bill Fontana and Bruce Nauman. I will argue that all these artists create works that, by immersing the citizen in sound, change and enrich his or her perception of the city.

WI, Journal of Mobile Media, Vol. 9, No. 2, April 2015, Ed. Mobile Digital Commons Network (MDCN), Concordia University Montreal, York University Toronto. http://wi.mobilities.ca/ , 2015

We shape the environment that shapes us. What we discern as an auditorium and a listening space is now overflowing the specific physical structures and architecture (concert halls, venues, etc.) towards enlarged sensory enveloping forms. It appears as a hybridisation of actions and spaces where tactics such as collective-driven, individual weavings, embedding mobility and spaces/places visits, all contribute to the everyday experience. When we collaborate and oscillate with the environment, within mobility, by modulating and interacting with sonic expanses and continuities of the properties of the places, we listen to more than what we hear. It is not merely a question of positions and of trajectories of presences and bodies in an environment (visual, sonic, animated, landscape, ambiance, venue, concert hall, at home, with earphones, etc.). It is continuous and immediate actions of attention through mobility or of mobilised attention (to act in the now, to be aware of the now), of lithe, flexible, and absentminded exchanges and weavings with the fields of the sensible; of mobile versus immobile reality; of oscillations between the “possible” and the “real”. This generates aesthetics of experiential situations and creative, participative spatialisation experiences in our sonic environment. Thus, we need to explore and to consider a larger notion of auditorium that we are modulating and playing.