Sounds that cling: situated experiences of the sound phenomena of a coastal territory

Abstract

This reflection is rooted in a research-creation project on the northern coast of France. This project explores the habitability of the world and is organized through collaborative residencies between artists, researchers, local partners, and residents. It is within this framework that a sound artist meets a social science researcher. The intertwining of their on-site perspectives reveals a plurality of relationships, sometimes familiar, sometimes strange, between sound perception and the environment.

The first practices ethnography and attempts to document the soundscape of the field, microphone in hand. But his recordings only capture detached sonic snapshots. So he takes up the pen again to describe what escapes sound recording in the situations he listens to and observes, focusing in particular on the colonization of acoustic territories by the sonic styles of tourism and gentrification.

The second uses contextual recordings, drawing the material for its creation from the vast dune landscapes he explores and listens to for the project. He creates a multi-layered sound installation that recounts these landscapes by integrating the recordings into an acousmatic composition. Participants appropriate the installation by connecting it to their own experiences of the coastline and narrating them within a poetics of inhabiting.

We propose to reflect, from the interstices between the aesthetic experience opened up by musical creation and the "failures" of sound ethnography, on the ways in which sonic phenomena contribute to shaping a relation to the world. We particularly emphasize the ecology and ethics of situated experiences—in artistic practice, in ethnography, or in the familiarity of living—from which the meaning of sonic phenomena is constructed. It is in this way that the gaps and knots of research-creation allow us to grasp the recurring themes and ways of inhabiting a territory "in crisis."