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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
Human soundscape, strange weather, and methodologies
Text: Heikki Uimonen, Anne Tarvainen & Kaj Ahlsved On Friday morning, the Someco research team sat down for a coffee at the Peppes Café in Lessebo to wait for the train to come and to reflect on the field work. The first thing we noticed was how friendly the people were and how positive they […]
Human Voice – A Delicate Creature of the Sonic Environment
In the field, human voices appear to be particularly sensitive to the presence of a researcher—more so than most other environmental sounds.
Scholars on the beat: qualitative and quantitative sensory perception
Text: Heikki Uimonen The 24-hour field recording combined with the traffic count started on Friday at 6 am on Storgatan and Gamla vägen. Samples of 10 minutes were recorded every full hour. The method differed from the listening walk presented here on 5 February in that it was stationary and headphone-based. The first three rounds were […]