Workshop on roosters and sound preferences
Text: Heikki Uimonen
On Wednesday 5th we visited Björkskolan to conduct the sound preference test.
The pupils were asked about their favourite and least favourite sounds and later interviewed in groups about their use of smartphones and music.
After introducing ourselves, we prepared our audience with a story about the roosters that kept us awake on our first night here. Our sentiments were duly noted, as the students had also had their share of these agricultural signals. Presumably they were not the same roosters.
The ubiquitous sound of passing and relatively loud trains was over-represented in the written answers. Later, the lively workshop discussion was enriched by listening to sound samples from earlier recordings of the Five Village Soundscapes and Acoustic Environments in Change studies: the brewery steam whistle now axed and sounds of transportation.
The responses to this seemingly playful sound preference test revealed more serious themes such as rootedness. We asked the students to write down what they thought Skruv would sound like when the researchers came back in 25 years’ time. Aside from the perhaps more expected answers (“vet inte”, “bilar”; “don’t know”, “cars”), one line caught our attention. It read: “I don’t know, because I’m not here anymore” (“Jag vet inte för att jag kommer inte vara här efter 25 år”). Later in the evening, a local interviewee told us that a few years ago there was a group of refugees in Skruv, most of whom have now left village to live in other parts of Sweden – and now reflected in the answer.