Another listening walk after quarter of a century
Text: Heikki Uimonen Listening walk is sensory evaluation of the environment. It can be carried out in several different ways. I have tried to combine both quantitative and qualitative approaches: categorising sounds heard and at the same time jotting any potentially interesting sound events constructing the environment. While conducting ethnographic observations, it is advisable to document […]
Chasing sounds in Dollar (on an empty stomach)
Text & pictures: Kaj Ahlsved We have now arrived in Dollar, and our ears are slowly but surely starting to get tuned in to Dollar’s sonic environment. When meeting people, we usually point out that its they – the locals – who are the real experts on their sonic environment. We, the researchers, don’t have […]
Acoustic and Imagined Communities
Text: Heikki Uimonen On Saturday 3rd May at 04:00, we started the traffic count and 24-hour recording with our colleagues from Cresson. We were determined to categorise all the vehicles and people in the centre of Lesconil: cars, boats, bicycles, pedestrians, etc., in order to detect any changes in traffic flow compared to the studies […]
A Foreign Language in the Ear—Reflections on listening, language, and soundscape research en route to Lesconil
Train to Quimper, Brittany. On the journey from Paris toward Quimper, I listen to archival recordings from the fishing village of Lesconil, made in 1975 and 2000 as part of the Five Village Soundscapes (FVS) and Acoustic Environments in Change (AEiC) research projects. These sounds come from the very fieldwork site we are now headed to with the SOMECO project. Two of the recordings document a fish auction. I know this because the information is provided in the descriptions of the recordings (Schafer 1977/2009, 401; Järviluoma et al. 2009, 414). I don’t understand a single word of the language spoken.