From Soundscapes: A Historical Approach
Sound not only controls space and memory, but the routine that brings about these sounds themselves. It is a feedback loop, to a degree. The sound of the bars vs the sound of the factories. "Let's stay with Week-End. It reflected the transition from a working day to a holiday, Sunday in the open air with the languor so far removed from the return to work on Monday." Art Remus, etc. What do sounds signify? It must be more than order. It is. It is a complexity of values and emotions.
"However, one of Schaeffer's particular obsessions was to create a "solfa of sound objects" in his Traité des objets musicaux, to recognise these objects as realities which could be abstracted beyond the "sound-producing body" which generated them. This explains his anger when one listener, upon hearing his Étude des chemins de fer, remained on the surface, delving no deeper than a recognition - still possible - of the whistling of a locomotive or its clattering on the tracks." -- NEED TRAIN SOUNDS of Specific Trains!
At the same time I create rhythm, I want to throw the listener off.
R. Murray Schafer shines through my research more than I considered: his goal was ethical - to create and preserve acoustic environments. Am I not doing the same thing here? Imagine a soundscape that instead of categorically preserving sounds, told a story instead: used sounds to understand space and memory. This is essentially where sound studies has moved from Schafer. And it is more honest than a preservation - it recognizes that we choose our sounds to tell meaningful stories. Essentially, it follows the historiographical trajectory in academic history from the 1970s to the present day.
Schafer's influence is in recording sound in space to reproduce for others, as well as creating an archive of sounds that exist within spaces. Yet I want to posit that sound studies does not have to be about recording and reproducing sound. The audio recorder is magnificent. But that method of mechanical reproduction does not necessarily need to be the only way to experience sound. I know how counterintuitive it sounds that sound need not be heard to be experienced. Yet think about how much there is to sound: physically, vibrations; regarding memory, though, sound encompasses a complexity of feelings and imagination. We can talk about sound too - we can describe it to others. We can tell them the feelings we experienced hearing those sounds. The sound of a battlefield in a war film - whizzing bullets, explosions, screaming - may sound 'cool' to a child playing war, but to a veteran these sounds could elicit strong feelings of anxiety and terror. In this way we can begin to understand the entangled soundscapes of our world. By listening to others rather than experiencing the sound solely for ourselves. And when no voices exist, by imagining the possibilities of that soundscape, encompassing a myriad of other soundscapes floating in and our of existence. (This is my rationale for the oral component to this soundscape.)
Sound visualization is another element to experiencing sound. Stuart Eve created visual sound maps of how topography effects sound location in an environment. A windy hill may block the sound of a farm on the other side of that mound. These examples share an important face that we cannot shake from Schafer: experiencing sound in space in order to reproduce it.
But what of my website and visualization? It is designed that the user does not input any action back to the source code. There is no echo. This is not a limitation. But we must remain aware of this. There is no two way data binding. I could have created an Angular directive to let the user effect the page. Maybe I am just playing on sonic metaphors in programming: echoes, objects speaking to each other, etc.
"On the basis of these considerations, all the authors of this genre present composed images, and ultimately use the sounds of the acoustic environment as the richest, most plural synthesiser possible. Even if they use complete, apparently unmanipulated sequences - remember the work for radio Wolf Music (1997), by R. Murray Schafer, in which a group of musicians spend a whole day playing his scores in a Canadian nature reserve - the manipulation lies in the way the microphones are set up and specific venues chosen. In short, it is a kind of sound mirage: an acoustic image which may aim to represent the reality in question, while actually presenting a distorted reflection which, at best, captures the aroma of the original. Only by deliberately erasing the memory of that original can we embark on a composed soundscape with any probability of success. We could go as far as to say that in these works, memory appeals to forgetfulness to endow the work itself with aesthetic meaning." Is forgetfulness bad, though? Or is there storytelling to forgetting and remembering? Meaning is constructed through forgetting and remembering. To remember everything is not only impossible, but does not allow for the nuances of memory changing to environment, feeling, emotion, etc. No memory is ever the same. It changes each time.
"By the trompe-l'oeil and, more importantly here, in our concern with sound, by the trompe-l'oreille which present us with a clichéd yet inconsistent image of the world. An image which serves as a description but is not operative, as it does not provide us with the tools to construct this world of reference. It is like memory: it allows us to remember and organise personal experiences, but not to live any similar experiences or those on which it draws"
It's as if there is no recording, we cannot use it or it becomes an unfortunate loss. But if we have people, use people to comment on experience. If we have no people, use phenomenological approaches to space. But it comes down to space! Go there. If the space no longer exists, try your best to 'reconstruct' (though I have no idea what this means practically and theoretically/methodologically).