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XXVIII Congresso da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música – Manaus - 2018
Applying Feminist Methodologies in the Sonic Arts: the Soundwalking as a
Process
MODALIDADE: COMUNICAÇÃO/SIMPÓSIO
SUBÁREA:
(tamanho 12, espaço simples, itálico, alinhamento à direita) Nome do 1º Autor
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ou instituição dos autores]
Abstract: This paper proposes the use of soundwalking as a feminist
methodology within the sonic arts and music technology. The paper will outline
potential methods within this methodology including deep listening, sound
mapping, and embodied performance practice, discussing the potential of each to
support a feminist methodology. Finally, we propose that this methodology can
support embodied examinations of socio cultural spaces, which consider senses of
place and decolonial perspectives. These embodied perspectives, traditionally
linked to feminist’s methods, will then find a place to support the creative arts and
the sonic arts.
Keywords: Soundwalking. Feminist Epistemologies. Artistic Research.
Título do Trabalho em Português: Aplicando Metodologias Feministas nas Artes Sonoras: o
Soundwalking Como um Processo
Resumo: Este trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar o soundwalking praticado pelas mulheres
como uma metodologia feminista para as artes criativas e sonoras. Para observar suas
possibilidades, apresentamos as características de escuta profunda, mapeamento sonoro e
soundwalking, discutindo as diferenças entre essas três práticas. Queremos propor o soundwalking
como um processo e uma metodologia que pode ser aplicada às artes criativas e às artes sonoras,
considerando-as desde as perspectivas de um conhecimento corporificado, as construções de um
sentido de lugar e as perspectivas decoloniais.
Palavras-chave: Soundwalking. Epistemologias Feministas. Pesquisa Artística.
XXVIII Congresso da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música – Manaus - 2018
1. Introduction
In this paper we will explore the potential of soundwalking as a feminist
methodology in the sonic arts.
As female researchers within the sonic arts and music technology our perspectives
have been shaped by a strong engagement with feminist studies and feminist practices (one of
us in Brazil, and another one in the UK), and have worked to develop this concept and a new
type of sonic arts practice since October 2017.
In this process, we have been talking, discussing and investigating about feminist
methodologies in creative and artistic sonic projects, and the soundwalking has been
highlighted to us as an interesting process to be discussed and applied.
First of all, we started thinking about the soundwalking practiced by women as a
feminist methodology to be used in sonic arts because it puts the women in the centre of
creative process.
While walking and listening to the sounds, we are always making choices about
what will be on the backstage and what will be on the first stage, and this puts our attention on
the process of making decisions.
Lucy Green has argued that the creative music industries are historically
gendered; what is defined as socially acceptable work for women lies in the areas of
instrumental and vocal performance, and the teaching of music. Whereas composition, a
largely male dominated field, is defined as a space for "imagination, exploratory inclinations,
inventiveness, creativity" talents "explicitly described as lacking" in women (1997:196).
Additionally, we can argue that the structure of musical language has contributed
to making women invisible in the creative process, affirming the authority of the score as
something distant from the performers and putting performance in a step below composition,
remembering that composition is a prohibited field for women.
The history of soundwalking is a contemporary one, contributed to by a mix of
artists from, Andra McCartney to Hildegard Westerkamp and Murray Schafer. As a tool for
composition it allows the artist to connect to spaces they are familiar with, to pay attention to
the environmental and social soundscape, to reflect on the listeners connections to these
XXVIII Congresso da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música – Manaus - 2018
sounds and to " lift the environmental sounds out of their context into the context of your
composition" (Hildegard Westerkamp, in "Soundwalking", Sound Heritage 3(4), 1974: 25).
In this way we consider that soundwalking does not contribute to validate the traditional
system of art as a code and a language, and it does not contribute to validate the imaginary
museum of musical works, in Lydia Goehr’s words: by choosing our own sounds, after
listening to the world and how it sounds, you can create your own poems, texts and story
telling’s.
In other words, soundwalking puts the sound production’s goal on your own
creative process, and not on service of a previous coded and structured language that we must
achieve before thinking about sound creation.
The soundwalking focuses on the sonic space, on the sound itself, on your body
on the space and how you signify the sound.
If we consider that a women’s body is perceived in a specific form by the
environment and by the social context, it brings a process of listening possibilities that are
conditioned by this body itself, so we can talk about embodied knowledge and embodied
listening.
A key asset of soundwalking, particularly for female composers and performers, is
the number of female role models who have used this methodology in their practice. The next
section will explore the contribution of some of these women placing them in their historical
context and highlighting the importance of their contribution to the fields of contemporary
composition and the sonic arts. This then allows us to construct an argument for the potential
of soundwalking as a feminist methodology.
2. Deep Listening©1, Sound Mapping and Soundwalking
Thinking about the methodologies or philosophies that work with sounds and
places in a creative way, we must consider and think about the differences between the Deep
Listening method, sound mapping and soundwalking and the ways they can be linked together
to create a deeper awareness of the body in space.
The Deep Listening methodology was created by the composer Pauline Oliveros
as part of a sonic mediation practice Oliveros that
"Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no
matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life,
1 The founder of the Deep Listening Method, Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening organisation have
copyrighted this term.
XXVIII Congresso da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música – Manaus - 2018
of nature, or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening
represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a
composer I make my music through Deep Listening" (Oliveros, Website).
Pauline Oliveros abandoned composition/performance practice as it is usually
established in order to erase the subject/object or performer/audience relationship by returning
to ancient forms, which preclude spectators. She was interested in communication among all
forms of life, and especially interested in the healing power of Sonic Energy and its
transmission within groups. We can immediately see the links between sound walking and
Deep Listening, with an argument for paying attention to the sounds of the everyday. Deep
Listening focuses primarily on a form of 'non-judgemental perception', whereas the listener
takes in all sounds and sees the potential for the world’s rhythms in a composition. This is
perhaps where feminist sound walking differs; the feminist walker must pay attention to the
environment reflecting on what impact sounds heard or produced have on her body in space.
Sound is not ephemeral and without social context, it is like any other construct shaped by
societal and cultural norms and rules.
Sound Mapping
The use of sound mapping as a technique allows artists and researchers to "
explore how one understands or places soundscapes within geographic territories, by
designating spaces of sound, noise, or ambiguous soundscapes" (O Keeffe 2015: 23). Sound
mapping, or as Thulin (2016) calls it 'cartophony', can and has become a composition
technique for artists such as Ximena Alarcon who has mapped a variety of socio-geographical
experiences and then presents these works as telematic performances. Her work Sounding
Underground asks users to interact with the soundscape of three underground systems in
London, Paris and Mexico via an online site of mapped journeys through sonic recordings of
commuter’s memories. Her work, like many other sound artists and sound studies researchers
recognise the limitations of traditional cartographic approaches to mapping space which
flattens spatial experiences ignoring the sensory subjective of three dimensional space.
Another element of sound mapping is its ability to make visible to stories and socio-cultural
rhythms of a space, often ignored by city planners.
In Sara Adhitya’s Sonified Urban Master plan for Paris she argues that sound in
space is both temporal and polyphonic and can assist in the "in the representation of the
multiple temporal flows which contribute to the urban dynamic of a city" (2014). Leandra
XXVIII Congresso da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música – Manaus - 2018
Lambert in her project Experienced Sonic Fictions, works in tandem with the sound walking
and Deep Listening method. She collected objects, sounds and stories from three distinct
Atlantic sites: the Atlantic Ocean, the Atlantic Forest, and the Avenida Atlântica (Atlantic
Avenue) in Brazil and creates what she calls intersensorial cartographies, "mappings that are
not restricted to vision and language and that also seek to highlight the infra- and supra-
sensorial dimensions of a soundwalk" (Lambert 2014). For Lambert the sound walk allows
the listener open up to all sensorial information in a space and to reflect on the body as it
moves through these spaces. The maping technique allows for the potential to document these
intersensory moments.
Sound Walking
It is possible to link sound walking to autoethnographies as defined by Carolyn
Ellis, she argues that it is necessary to have a socio cultural connection to spaces and places
we examine because we have internalised connections to these areas that give deeper meaning
to the findings. As an autoethnographer the researcher becomes the focus of the research, you
research your activities, feelings and emotions in some depth within particular cultural
contexts. An autoethnographers practice includes documenting personal memories,
chronicling events close to their happening, maintaining detailed reflective journals and
documenting exterior and interior events through audio/video recordings, poetry, drawings
and music.
Sound walking then fits quite easily within this collection approach to observing
and understanding environments through the personal subjective experience. Where sound
walking expands this research and ties it closer to feminist methodologies is the potential to
emancipate the walker in space. For McCartney "Decisions about the location, style, content,
and montage of sound in a soundwalk have political, social and ecological consequences"
(2014:212), and has a long historical connection to the act of walking as a means of knowing
space such as de Certeau's flâneur, who parcels the city into knowable spaces, and Ruskins
rural walker, who walks the natural environment to understand ecological and land
management processes.
Listening to a space is not necessarily about paying attention to sounds, but
widening our perceptual and sensory approaches to space. In listening to a space we gain a
deeper understanding of community happenings and relationships to space that are often seen
as ephemeral, hard to capture. Also, listening to a space gives us a sense of the architecture
and top down structural design of spaces, as sound often highlights the shape of space through
XXVIII Congresso da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música – Manaus - 2018
reflections and absorptions. Listening to the city means being informed, knowing what is
going on and understanding the rhythms of the city (Lefebvre 1992). It also highlights
routines and social and cultural practices, some of which may reveal deeply entrenched values
and societal norms, which form to exclude women from socio-spatial practices such as simply
feeling safe to walk a space. Listening opens the listener to the subtle forms of exclusionary
languages, which reveal who is defined as belonging or not belonging to a space (O Keeffe
2013).
3. What makes a feminist methodology?
A feminist methodology is concerned with the construction of new knowledge and
often located with within a grounded theory approach, as the goal is first and foremost in the
production of social change. Interviewing is one of the most "frequently used data collecting
methods in Women’s Studies"(Ikonen and Ojala 2007:82), it is seen as a pivotal within social
studies of collecting the woman's point of view.
Since the early days of feminism there has been a movement to challenge and
transform methodological approaches and epistemologies of social science research; a long
term goal of challenging the production of knowledge.
Key to these challenges is a concern with power relation between the researcher
and the researched. Feminist researchers sought to find ways to empower the researched
through emancipatory methods. The emancipatory process is “the placing of control in the
hands of the researched, not the researcher” (Oliver 2002:18); it is allowing the researched a
type of ownership of the knowledge they produce. Feminist methodologies argue that we
must take into account “the observer’s standpoint, a direct challenge to universality and
objectivity” (Schwartz-Shea 2006:89). Participatory methods such as photo voice, a method
developed by Wang and Burris (1997) involve giving participants a camera to document their
daily experiences. This has been used to great effect in a number of research projects, most
notably Holtby et al's ((2015)) research on the experiences of queer and trans youth where
issues of representation are central to the research question. In developing a feminist
methodology researchers make central the concerns of "the interests and desires of our
societies’ most economically, socially, and politically vulnerable groups" (Harding and
Norberg 2005).
XXVIII Congresso da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música – Manaus - 2018
4. Sound walking as a feminist methodology
The goal of the feminist sound walker is examining spaces through an embodied
approach using listening as the primary sensory engagement as listening often reveals the
hidden contexts and meaning of place. The design of place is located within patriarchal
systems of the social and structural design of space, which historically have excluded women
in the conversation. In other words, we live and operate in spaces that do not include the
voices of the marginalised in their design. Women therefore have found new ways to adapt or
alter spatial use through imaginative means. Women traditionally occupy public spaces more
than men for a variety of reasons, from child rearing - parks, gardens and public streets, to
stay at home parents, living in and occupying homes built and designed by men. This is a very
small example but it is still significant.
Mags Adams (2009) has used soundwalking to bring designers, urban developers
and architects through spaces prior to design projects so that they might have an
understanding of the spaces they intend to reconstruct. This method presupposes a disconnect
with the everyday use of space by particular social groups such as designers, planners and city
managers, who in the main tend to be middle class white men. If we consider what we know
about positions of power, we can make a supposition that most organisational hierarchies are
dominated by men, which means that they have the larger say on the shape of society.
This takes into account ideas about feminist methods which are concerned with
participatory processes; “feminist researchers have long advocated that feminist research
should be not just on women, but for women and, where possible, with women” (Doucet and
Duignan 2012). In soundwalking methods conducted by O Keeffe (2015, 2017; 2015), all
participants take a key role in listening, walking, mapping and discussing place and space.
The sound walker is not new to a space; rather they already have a connection, one that is
embodied through historic, socio-cultural connections, and in some instances, economic ties.
Lefebvre argues that the traditional model of exploring space is one of a body occupying an
empty space. This places the space and the body as ‘indifferent’ to each other therefore
“anything may go in any ‘set’ of places” and again “any part of the container can receive
anything” (1974:170). However, a sound walking method encourages listeners to pay
attention to familiar spaces and locate “ synchronized and regularized sound that follows
social patterns and activities” (O’Keeffe 2015:12).
XXVIII Congresso da Associação Nacional de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação em Música – Manaus - 2018
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Referências: (inclua apenas as fontes citadas no trabalho; fonte Times New Roman, tamanho
12, espaço simples, justificado, sem identação, sem linha em branco entre cada item. As
referências não devem ser subdivididas em itens).
Modelos de referências:
Livro
SOBRENOME, Prenome(s) do Autor; SOBRENOME, Prenome(s) do segundo Autor (se
hover). Título do Trabalho: subtítulo [se houver]. Edição [se não for a primeira]. Local de
publicação: Editora, ano.
Artigo em Periódico
SOBRENOME, Prenome(s) do Autor do Artigo. Título do Artigo. Título do Periódico, Local
de publicação, número do volume (v.), número do fascículo (n.), página inicial-final do artigo
(p.), ano da publicação.
Trabalho em Anais de Evento
SOBRENOME, Prenome(s) do Autor do Trabalho. Título do trabalho. In: NOME DO
EVENTO, número do evento. (3.), ano de realização, local. Anais... Local de publicação:
Editora, ano de publicação. página inicial-final do trabalho.