QUIET URGENCY: DESIGNING SONIC ECOLOGIES

Workshop Days 6-7 June 2024

Camley Street Nature Reserve

Organised by Gascia Ouzounian, John Bingham-Hall & Diana Ibáñez López
SONCITIES in partnership with CSM MA Cities

Following on from the symposium day on 5th June, the workshop days gathered together symposium participants for two days of experiments in sounding and listening informing a set of design responses by students of the CSM Spatial Practices and Product Design programmes.

Catherine Clover – Languaging with the Birds of Kings Cross St Pancras
Sound and location are deeply intertwined for birds as for all species including ourselves. Responding to this observation, Clover led an informal, inclusive, participatory voicing action in the Camley Street Nature Reserve using a score based on the voices of the local birds. Starting with an introduction to some of the migratory songbirds that can be found in the reserve, drawing attention to the ways their calls are shaped through distantly-connected localities in both Europe and Africa, she led the group in an improvised voicing using texts transcribed from these calls.

Alex de Little – Tentacular Listening
Tentacular Listening is an extended listening and reading walk. It engages cross-pollinating practices of collective reading and extended listening. After a series of warmups derived from Deep Listening, of which De Little is a registered practitioner, the group explored Camley Nature Reserve whilst attempting to listen beyond a usual anthropocentric aural perspective by using the hands to tune into what might be audible beyond the surfaces of plants and materials.

Jacek Smolicki – Soundwalking
This presentation based on Smolicki’s book Soundwalking: through time, space, and technologies surveyed the implications of various soundwalking practices and some of its urgent environmental, ethical, social and technological challenges. He led a demonstration of a soundwalk work using live transmission from a mix of microphones (contact, geophonic, etc) to receivers enabling participants to sample the sound sources live and create their own works.

Sven Anderson – Sound Frameworks
In response to Smolicki’s presentation, Sven Anderson gave a critical response drawing on his project Sound Frameworks, discussing issues around the integration of creative sound and soundwalking practices into more mainstream urban design processes. This led to a critical discussion around framings of noise in the field of acoustic ecology in relation to contemporary acoustic standards for planning policy.

Countersonics: Radical Sonic Imaginaries: Conversation between Gascia Ouzounian & KMRU
This live conversation addressed ways in which the work of sound artist Joseph Kamaru (KMRU) engages with questions of ecology. It explored his work on environmental listening and sound recording; on engaging as an artist with the voices of nonhuman others; the ethics of field recording and the problematic histories of the ethnographic ear; and sonic practice and listening as worldmaking, particularly in times of environmental crisis and ecocide.