Publication: Embodied Sonic Memories of Commuting Undeground

My article “Embodied Sonic Memories of Commuting Underground” was published in the Industrial Archeology Journal! Grateful https://www.sia-web.org/publications/ia-journal/ia-volumes-41-present/

Last 8 days online! Listen to Sounding Underground

Enjoy navigating in SOUNDING UNDERGROUND while it lasts until Dec 30, 2020, as Flash support will end in browsers. After 11 years of life online, I am now Working hard to keep it live!

Sounding Underground is a virtual environment that invites users to interact with the soundscapes of three underground public transport systems: London, Paris and México City. Commuters’ memories and imaginations are represented in sounds and images that have been selected by volunteer commuters through an ethnographic process. These sounds are assembled in a sound score that acts as a multimedia user’s interface. The score contains sonic features unique to each metro, as well as some shared sonic spaces. Sounding Underground also invites you to write memories in text, produced by listening. These memories are being published randomly in the “Listening and Remembering” page.

http://soundingunderground.org/

What is it to Sound Underground? in Sound Passages: Passaggi di Suono

Very honoured of being part of this Symposium with the CRiSAP team and in collaboration with the Doctorate in Architecture, City and Design at the University Iuva di Venezia.

Symposium Abstract: “Sound moves: it drifts and coalesces, it is reflected and it is absorbed, it shifts in meaning and register. And we are moved by sound, too: we are startled or seduced, sound orientates us or disorientates us. As part of a broader ‘sensory turn’, sound is becoming the focus of investigations into our experiences of place and space. In “Sound Passages: Passages of Sound”, researchers will present different approaches to sound – as a map, as a junction between perceptual fields, as trigger for memory and imagination, as abstract and quotidian, as material for composition and installation, as a way in which we are located and dislocated in the contemporary.”

My talk is called “What is it to Sound Underground?”

Abstract of the talk:

Immersed primarily in sound and moved by machines, underground commuters embody daily a rich mixture of sonic contemporary spaces, which evoke memories of listening that involve ancient caves, industrialisation, human migrations, sound technologies, urban architecture, and infrastructure technologies. During research conducted between 2003 and 2009, in London, Paris and Mexico metros, commuters engaged in listening to their routine journeys exploring metaphors that reflected on their life, triggered by the complexity of sounds and the ritual of going underground. The journey became a social path for individual meditation.

Sounding Underground, the derived Internet-based multimedia artwork, appropriates the web platform as a digital social interface to link unique and shared sonic metro spaces. The interface invites the online listener to experience a defamiliarisation of something quotidian. By listening to real and imagined spaces, within the mixture of three cities, the listener can explore a new journey through in-between sonic spaces that interweave human/machine relationships, and urban cultures of sounding, evoking deep social, cultural and political feelings from the inner experience of sounding underground.

Symbiosis: sound, vision and the senses – ASA 2015

Performing ‘Sounding Underground’ yesterday in the Panel “Film, audio and multimedia programme: symbiosis: sound, vision and the senses” at the Association of Social Anthropologists UK and Commonwealth Conference at Exeter University
Other great sonic works such as “The Mouth of the Cave and the Giant Voice: sound, text and voice in Okinawan war memory” by Angus Carlyle and Rupert Cox and “Govindpuri Sound: an ethnographic audio documentary” by Tom Rice were also there. Great time for exploring relationships between sound, text, image and the ethnographic experience!

NetArt Citizens

Exhibiting at NetArt Citizens!