
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.