Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Walking as method allows for multi-sensory engagements with urban landscapes that can generate perceptual and embodied understandings of environmental issues. This paper explores the role of sound during sensory walks that focus on the perception of climate change. The research presented in this paper is part of a larger project that examines the notion of sonic fictions as a sensory dimension to explore, imagine, and eventually reinvent our environment through sound. Drawing from a workshop featuring a walk about coolness and heat perception on the Descartes campus of Gustave Eiffel University in France, emphasis is placed on the soundscape of the areas visited and its speculative potential. Participants observed the urban area through listening, focusing on the sounds of the environment and their sources in relation to other factors such as the built environment, flora, fauna and light. The soundscape was recorded to capture the overall sound environment and individual sound elements in a layered and immersive manner. The recordings were further edited and diffused to the participants after the walk to establish a dialogue between perception and speculations. Approaching climate perception through listening revealed connections of temperature with human and non-human sound sources, cultural associations with sounds and their sources, as well as sound qualities including loudness, density and frequency variation. These insights are then employed to develop sonic fictions to explore fictional and sonic discourse between climate change prediction models and subjective individual and collective perceptions.

Presenters

Eleni-Ira Panourgia
Teaching and Research Fellow in Art/Sound, Department of Letters, Arts, Creation, Technologies, LISAA Research Lab, Gustave Eiffel University, France

Guillaume Dupetit
Lecturer, Music and Audio Engineering, University Gustave Eiffel, Seine-et-Marne, France