Felicity Ford (UK) & Valeria Merlini (IT): ‘Listening to Brussels from within and without’
25 – 28 March 2013, Kaaistudios
Felicity Ford and Valeria Merlini will work with you to explore the sonorities of the city. Together we will create a radio show to give listeners who do not know the city some sense of its aural character. These workshops will lay a foundation for Tuned City in June, celebrating the sonic identity of Brussels in advance of the festival. This first workshop series in March will lead to the production of a radio show for framework:afield.
The theme for this radio show will be « Listening to Brussels from within and without », as we will focus on both interior and exterior spaces; individual vs. collective experiences; and the differences between how residents and visitors hear a city.
Christina Kubisch (DE): ‘Electromagnetic movements’
25 – 28 March 2013, okno
Participants get special designed wireles headphones , which are able to make audible the otherwise hidden electromagnetic fields of the city. These sound are of great variety: rhythmic structures, hums, thick layers of multiphonics etc.
The participants make guided and/or individual city walks and explore the fields.
They make a map of their itineraries and discuss the sounds and the places they come from.
Participants should develop together with me a practical work about these experiences. This can be a visual or acoustic work.
The result is a public presentation in a public space which is based on the electromagnetic mapping of Bruxelles.
Nikolaus Gansterer (AT), Mira Sanders (BE), Annelies De Smet (BE), Leslie Burm (BE): ‘slow listening – speed interpretation models’
25 – 27 March 2013, Sint-Lucas Architectuur
‘slow listening – speed interpretation models’ proposes a modelling workshop in order to train specific ways of listening and gain awareness of multiple ways of designing. During the workshop we make personal interpretation models that can be interpreted by others endlessly. The approach is based on the work of John Cage. His oeuvre offers us slow listening and concrete mechanisms for (re)interpretation. The whole set is a playground in-between (urban) space and sound. The goal is to imagine modelled and concrete translations of this approach.
Will Schrimshaw (UK): ‘The Tone of Prime Unity’
25 – 28 March 2013, Sint-Lukas Transmedia
This workshop explores the subliminal influence of acoustic space upon citizens. Participants will explore the city as a material practice of ideology. Forming a roving pedestrian laboratory, through the use and construction of open tools and methodologies, the frequencies at which the city insinuates itself into the mind will be charted and mapped. This workshop will focus specifically upon the existence of an international “tone of prime unity” posited by R. Murray Schafer:
”In the Indian anahata and in the Western Music of the Spheres, man has constantly sought some prime unity, some central sound against which all other vibrations may be measured […] It is, however, only in the electronic age that international tonal centers have been achieved; in countries operating on an alternating current of 60 cycles, it is this sound which now provides the resonant frequency, for it will be heard (together with its harmonics) in the operation of all electrical devices from lights and amplifers and generators.” (1994, 98-9)
Schafer’s tone of prime unity describes the determination of a collective sonic unconscious through the acoustical impressions of electricity. Schafer optimistically interprets this as the foundation of a community of listening subjects bound by fundamentals established by the `electric revolution’ (Schafer: 1994, 89-99). This workshop begins with a more ambiguous interpretation of Schafer’s discovery of the “tone of prime unity”, understanding it to be an example of the influential capacity of acoustic space, its ability to subliminally inform and individuate.
This workshop will make use of the following methods:
Pedestrian Research: A mongrel, undisciplined practice combining philosophy and computing in the pursuit of a concrete epidemeology of concepts on foot.
Archaeoacoustics: the decoding and study of acoustical events and utterances impressed upon physical artifacts.
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