The Unheard Walks: A Shared on-site Experience of Landscape Listening

Abstract

Starting from a reflection on the soundscape understood as a dynamic attentional space in which caring for listening becomes essential, this article explores how a relation with places may be cultivated through a headphone-based landscape listening experience, inviting a community of listeners to weave their attentions together in situ through augmented listening walks.

We seek to bring to light the issues related to landscape within the Les Marches Inouïes dispositif, while also describing what is made audible in, through, and across the headphones: how these devices connect us to the sonic environment at the heart of a vibrant sphere of listening, and invite us to inhabit shared and lived landscapes differently, together, and through conscious immersion.

This article aims to move beyond the observation of a possible “an-aesthesia” of “techno” listening, too often considered disconnected from the sonic environment to which only a “bio” listening could supposedly remain attuned and complicit. A phoNographic writing, porous to the sonic milieu, will serve here as a means of returning to the field, to the “real” (and its double?), through both reframing and displacement.