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 […]
Småland Acoustemology
Text: Heikki Uimonen Steven Feld was interviewed by Tom Rice in the article “Questioning Acoustemology”. A highly recommended read on acoustemology, culture and individuals’ specific ways of relating to the sensory environment. Their discussion provided food for thought for the SOMECO pre-fieldwork reflections that took place online at the end of 2014: how anthropologists of […]
Music for millions
Text: Heikki Uimonen There is an antique shop on the north side of the railway line through the village of Skruv. The shop covers an area of five hundred square metres. It sells second-hand furniture and household items: tools, bolts, crockery, textiles, and so on. In the far corner is a section filled with books […]
Silence, Expectations, and the Seasonal Rhythms of Skruv’s Outdoor Life
Text: Kaj Ahlsved Eduardo Galeano’s book Soccer in Sun and Shadow contains a famous passage about silence and places for sporting activities: “Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than […]
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 […]
Awakening of a village
Text: Heikki Uimonen Tuesday was well spent walking and listening. The SOMECO team divided the village into three areas, following the documentation of the listening walks in 2000 (see picture). We visited the areas five times a day, starting at 07:00, following the same route repeatedly. Each walk took about 30 minutes. Pencil and paper […]