These maps describe our synchronised listening experiences. We’re used to listening and then vocalising an immediate interpretation of a place together with groups but this exercise allowed us to listen and map in silence.
We’d done some exploration of various spaces with different resonances on the way to the listening site, like the Uni cloisters but chose this spot for it’s elevation, which gave us a far reaching soundscape flanked behind by the imposing Uni Bell tower and opening out in front over Kelvingrove Park towards the Clyde and Govan and stretching way out to our left & right sides.
We’d set out to listen and vocalise but somehow without talking about it began to make soundmaps instead.
The action of documenting something as mutable as a soundscape brings into play a lot of cognitive processes causing an inherent delay between hearing & making the mark. Between hearing and interpreting sound to colour, shape, texture, word; between hearing and deciding how to translate the duration and location of the sound. How to describe the field of listening in which to locate all these sounds, how to bring the sense of immersion in the immense layers of time and space as a non-linear experience, each element of sound inextricably linked in that moment to the others, the shifts as one sound drops out or an extra one arrives. We took different approaches to map making which really helped us to understand, share and analyse the processes we’d gone through while sitting side by side pushing our listening limits.
Opening up your ears to profound listening is one thing, neither of us has yet found a method of de-sensitising them so we returned to our soundproof room to look at and instrumentalise our maps.
We’d both been thinking about the construction or architecture of a sound work while we were mapping, and particularly with this inherent delay in recording our listening experience.. how to compositionally integrate the information in terms of musical flow..writing or scoring in order for them to play within their realm of experience and for it not to become stop-start-this-noise-that-noise; and what types of sounds have what effect – pitch rhythm, volume, stasis, sustain, decay. What information to keep what to leave out.
Claire intended her spherical map to be a straight forward representation of actuality – metal things, trees etc.. through which she could push her listening, she found there was a block (possibly a building?) at around 2/3rds.. Jane felt a need to do several overlaid layers of transparent maps to get closer to 3 dimensions, feeling a frustration in having to record everything on one page as recording each new piece of sonic information in 2D risked obliterating earlier marks in the urgency of responding to the immediacy of the soundscape. Whether a sound happened for a second or 20mins it all ends up on the map.
These maps were a great aid to describing how & what each of us hears and how our disciplines affect that. Combining our perceptions got us much closer to getting inside sounds.
