Episode Details

(Jacek Smolicki)

The ultimate question I'm asking is how can we move away from soundwalk as a kind of framed aesthetic experience or artistic experience and turn it into an existential practice or basically something that is just ingrained in our everyday life and we don't have to frame it anymore. It's just basically part of our way of living. 

(Claude Schryer)

Can you give an example of that? 

(Jacek Smolicki)

An academic example would be the concepts developed by Steven Feld, acoustemology, where basically listening, a kind of sonic way of being in the world is part of your culture, part of existence. You don't tell yourself, okay, I will listen to the world more carefully from now for another hour, and then I can just return back to my everyday life but you basically just keep listening, right? A kind of sonic sensitivity is one of the most important ways of understanding the world as opposed to being pushed to the background and only lifted up during those kinds of frame situations such as a soundwalk. 

(Claude Schryer)

I've been sound walking in an analytical way, so I'll try to make sense of the sounds and where they are and what they're about but there's also an absorption factor where you allow the sounds to speak to you in their own language, right? As opposed to sort of rationally figuring them out. So, if we stop here and listen, what are you hearing? 

(Jacek Smolicki)

I hear a coexistence of culture and nature and at the same time a kind of friction between two realms that in fact are just one realm and we kind of try to maybe separate them. We talked a little bit about this positionality and we hear the whistle of the train. From one perspective, we heard some people here referring to that sound as being very calming and reassuring, but if you think of indigenous people, that sound might mean a completely different thing. It's a form of bordering and creating, some kind of a division, of cutting the land and deciding how the land is to be traversed and utilized. So it definitely has a violent connotation if we look from that perspective and if we listen from that perspective. I think that this is some kind of sensitivity that I'm aiming at, also, while teaching, to be able to also take that thought into consideration when we try to value or kind of assign value to different sounds. I think Dylan Robinson is talking about oscillation. I think he calls it to be able to constantly oscillate, to move from one way of understanding sound to another. And basically by doing that it destabilizing certain certainties that characterizes our way of listening and, and by doing that, becoming open to those other understandings and perceptions… 

(Claude Schryer)

And asking questions. You know, we were on a panel together a few days ago (Stetson University) when we were asking the question, how can listening help the world that is in crisis? and it's an open-ended question because with listening everybody has their own way of listening, but there are certainly deeper ways of listening that we can learn and unlearn as we work our way through these issues. 

(Jacek Smolicki)

Exactly and that we've been talking a lot about hope. We've been talking a lot about how this openness is almost inherently good. I have that feeling. People talk about if we open up our listening and if we invite other perspectives, then we are doing something good. But I think that opening comes with certain responsibilities too, right? I like to think of it in a way that the more open we become to those different perspectives, the more troubled, actually, we should become more concerned rather than content and calm, so there's this disruptive aspect to listening that Hildegard Westerkamp has been writing about, but as we open ourselves, as we include other perspectives, we at the same time disr