Our May 2023 release, an entry in the “Gothic Everyday” series, works with doubling – a classic gothic technique – layering multiple soundwalks on top of each other in order to bring out the uncanny of everyday routines and mundane spaces. The results are not especially eerie or unsettling. Instaed, our two guest contributors work in a subtler mode to think about the everydayness of place in terms of presence, absence, and the haunting of the present by the past.
Track 1, “A Doubled Soundwalk” by Sophie Morgan, layers together urban and natural soundwalks, in both cases engaging with everyday noise and rhythm in the spirit of “playful-constructive behaviour” (Debord 176; Paquette and McCartney 137). Morgan writes: “This research-creation project is a ‘double soundwalk’ that combines two soundwalks: one in downtown Kitchener, Ontario and another at Mount Nemo in Burlington, Ontario. The sound bites feature a city-walk along with various sounds from a hike, including crickets, footsteps and cawing crows. This ‘double soundwalk’ considers the valuable role of both noise and rhythmic movement in everyday built and natural spaces.”
Track 2, “Dominion Glass Audio Drift” by Michael Veenstra, is inspired by Michael Gallagher’s “audio drift,” a soundwalk technique that layers recorded sounds over the present soundscape in order to capture the multiple temporalities of ruins, and as a means of “amplifying the haunted and uncanny qualities of places.” Veenstra writes: “In Hamilton, Ontario, urban renewal is a hot topic. Slogans of ‘art is the new steel’ plaster our burgeoning arts scene, even as our industries continue to crumble and be replaced. One such space of ongoing replacement is Brightside Park—a public green space development on the site of a former glass factory. Prior to the expansion of Hamilton’s north-end industries, the Dominion Glass lands were residential, home to workers and their families until the 1960s, when the homes were demolished for industrial expansion. In 2015 the factory buildings were demolished to prepare the site for park development. The park is scheduled to begin construction in 2024. The purpose of this research-creation exercise is to record the sounds of present-day Brightside Park (an empty brownfield) and superimpose the sounds of Powell Park, a vibrant neighbourhood park approximately one kilometer away, overtop. In doing so, I hope to create an audio experience that reflects the site’s past, present, and future.”
Further reading:
Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive.” The Improvisation Studies Reader, Routledge, 2015, pp. 194–98. doi: 10.4324/9780203083741-36.
Michael Gallagher, “Sounding Ruins: Reflections on the Production of an ‘Audio Drift,'” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1474474014542745
McCartney, Andra. “Soundwalking: creating moving environmental sound narratives”. The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, vol. 2, edited by Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, 2014, pp. 212-237.
David Paquete and Andra McCartney. “Soundwalking and the Bodily Exploration of Places.”
Canadian Journal of Communication, vol. 37, no. 1, 2012, pp. 135-145.
Image credit: adapted from a photograph by MelkiaD, licensed under CC-BY-2.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
The Gothic Listening Project 