Valley Soundscapes Near and Far
Text: Heikki Uimonen A hiking trail from Cembra to Lago Santo is accompanied by the sound of a stream running through the nearby gorge. Before reaching the woods above the village, the hiker is greeted by the sound of the revving engines of mopeds, which can be heard clearly from the valley and for miles […]
“You hear more dogs than children”: Workshop on sound and change in Cembra
Text: Kaj Ahlsved, Heikki Uimonen, Meri Kytö As a method of eliciting information from the expert listeners of the villages – the villagers themselves – SOMECO team organises public workshops during our fieldwork. Apart from that, we are aiming to present our project to those interested and to bring back the earlier research results to […]
How Not to Be Seen: Digital Ethnography and Visibility
Text: Heikki Uimonen ‘The camera is a tool for idlers, who use a machine to do their seeing for them. To draw oneself, to trace the lines, handle the volumes, organise the surface… all this means first to look, and then to observe and finally perhaps to discover…’ (Le Corbusier in Kortan 1997/2005, 28). Le Corbusier’s […]
Echoes of Cembra: Village Soundscape at the Turn of the Millennium
In 2000, the AEiC (Acoustic Environment in Change) project ventured into the picturesque Cembra Valley in Northern Italy to explore its unique sonic environment. The blog texts produced during this time offer a fascinating snapshot of a community nestled amidst steep hills, where sounds reflected off ancient stone walls seemed to echo a history shaped by both human activity and the constraints of nature.[1] Revisiting these texts today allows us to reflect on the transformations in Cembra’s sonic landscape—particularly when compared to earlier periods, such as 1975, documented in the Five Village Soundscapes study (Schafer 1975/2009).
Illness, Isolation, and Perceptions of Bells in Bissingen
What does it mean to experience a place from a single point of listening? During a field trip to Bissingen, Germany, illness confined me to my room — and offered an unexpected perspective on church bells, isolation, and the fragile rhythms of time. This personal reflection explores how soundscapes are not only heard but embodied, manifesting through the listener’s states of body-mind and creating shifting relations to community and place.
Listening to the Memory on the Street
Text: Carolin Müller Walking may be just as important to scholars of sonic environments as the sounds encountered in motion. Central to this is the relationship between the human body and the ground it touches while moving through space. Frauke Berendt (2018, 251) notes that soundwalks represent a specific form of human mobility, characterized by […]
On Silences
Text: Heikki Uimonen Having started the SOMECO fieldwork, it is gratifying to note two recent publications on village environments. The one dealing with Lapland, Finland shows how experienced silences indicate the lack of vitality of the village, and how sounds considered meaningful by the community and individuals have disappeared. Another publication presents the abandoned mine […]
50 years is a long time
Text: Meri Kytö & Kaj Ahlsved Rhythmanalysis in soundscape studies has dominantly meant looking into circadian, daily rhythms. This project opens up a much longer span of time, practically of two generations. Last Sunday happened to be “Goldene Konfirmation”, that is, the 50th anniversary of the confirmation of the Spring 1975. The mass started with […]
Signals of Change and Continuity: Coahoma County and Bissingen
Text: Heikki Uimonen Twenty years ago, in my ethnomusicological dissertation on sonic environments, I quoted Alan Lomax. Lomax writes that the musical history of Coahoma County, Mississippi had three periods, each signalled by a characteristic sound: a steamboat blowing for a landing, a locomotive whistling on a three-mile grade, and a Greyhound bus blaring down […]
Sensory Experience of Glass and Brass
Text: Heikki Uimonen Sensing individuals are affected by their culture and personal history. Nevertheless, cultures are not just filters of sensory experience, as anthropologist Tim Ingold concludes. People are informed by their senses as they move through particular cultures, which themselves have particular materialities. (Bijsterveld 2000, 14.) So, what is then the cultural study of sound […]