All photographs courtesy of Liz Lee – event details archived here.

photo: Francisco Meirino

This document is the brief for a UBC Geography methods assignment that I've developed that leverages the USE platform in a critical context.

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What is Phonography?

The simple answer is that phonography (literally “sound-writing”) refers to field recording. This entails the capture of any event that can be reproduced or represented as sound. Auditory events are selected, framed by duration and method of capture, and presented in a particular format and context, all of which distinguishes a recording from the original event during which it was captured. In this respect, phonography is analogous to any other form of recording. It is distinct from recording in general only to the extent that the capture of sound is privileged over its production. This bias reflects an attempt to discover rather than invent… – Yitzchak Dumiel

Geographers have long noted the importance of sound to the understanding of culture, environment and society. Much less understood is the role geographers can play as researchers in the pursuit, apprehension, and production of sonic landscapes. In dealing with the technologies of acoustic capture, recording, and representation – i.e. field recorders, maps, databases, MP3s – this collaboration offers a new way of approaching the question of how ‘sound matters’ to geography. In this project, you will work collaboratively, using field-recorders, maps, and digital sound editing tools to ask questions fundamental to the discipline. The exact question that you pursue for your group to develop through a critical engagement with the scholarly literature but some suggestive possibilities include: How is the notion of gender spatialized in the city of Vancouver? How can we understand the spatiality of social difference and exclusion through the methodology of sound-writing or recording? In what way are vibrant urban ecologies ignored or missed by everyday pedestrian movements? How do we capture experientally the ongoing transformation of the city’s maritime economy?

Usually, we tackle such questions with text and visualization, or through interviews, surveys or archival research, that is to say, with words and pictures, graphs and other visual referents. In this project, we focus on sound. Teams of students (3-5) will explore the production of a particular sonic landscape by recording ‘sound-walks‘ – passages of focused listening through the urban environment. Each team will use digital field recorders—simple MP3 recording devices—to record walks and develop a sonic archive. Any environment, at any time of day or night, can provide space for sound-walking: your job is to critically assemble a series of sound-walks that conveys the geographical reality of your theme. Someone looking at ‘gentrification’ might consider the sounds of condo construction in Yaletown, of morning delivery trucks unloading gourmet food, of pan-handlers juxtaposed with retail stores. Someone looking at ‘migration’ might consider the Burnaby-bound flights of ravens at dusk, the buses that carry housekeepers on long morning commutes. Scholarship from sound studies, cultural geography, and social science methods will provide you with some insight and some context.

The goal with these walks is not to spy on others or voiceover your walks with juicy narrative detail; rather, it is to find a way to let the spaces articulate themselves meaningfully. To assist with technical details and to offer feedback, each team will be assigned a sound-walk veteran – a graduate student who offers personal experience about field-recording in an urban setting. This individual is a resource and not a team leader – recording times and locations are to be principally determined by the team, as will the sound-files that will feature in the final presentation. The spatial component is thus one that you will have to think carefully on. Using Urban Sound Ecology teams will then upload their ‘walks’ (i.e. the digital MP3 files) to an on-line map that geo-references the sound-files to an urban location. This uploading process is quite simple: step-by-step instructions are available on the web-site. As each team undertakes field-work and revision – editing out failed sound-walks and uploading successful ones, considering new sites and discussing their overall import – a thematic geography will begin to emerge. Your team map—the lines and vectors of your individual sound-walk—will begin to tell a story of your theme – where you think it is most manifest, what it sounds like, what relationship these sounds have to other aspects of the urban.

The outcome of these exercises will be three interconnected documents:

1. the archive of MP3 sound-walk files – which will be subsequently organized into a single thread for a final listening presentation;
2. the associated series of walks displayed on the geo-referenced sound-map – hosted on the USE website via a specifically designed ‘UBC page;’ and a written-reflection piece produced by the group that contextualizes their project and reflects on the nature of its collaborative undertaking (successes and failures etc.). There is a very good chance that the Western Front, a media arts space near Main St. and 8th Ave., will play host to the final work. This would give different audiences a chance to see your sound-maps and listen to the field recordings; it would also give you an opportunity to hear some senior academics reflect on the project, and its greater implication with social scientific research.

Outcomes/Goals

While we expect that you will teach us many insightful things about Vancouver’s sonic geography, research methods, and this project in particular, there are a few core considerations that must inform your effort and will feature in our evaluation of it:

• How to work rigorously on a new methodology of collaborative urban research.
• How to evaluate some of Geography’s foundational questions within and across different media and modes of representation.
• How to creative creatively organizing and presenting acoustic cartographies to an academically diverse (and possibly non-academic as well) audience.

A few final notes:

• This is an experiment. With some obvious limits (i.e. nothing physically dangerous), you will be free to decide where to go, when to go, what ‘counts’ as a relevant sonic content. While this should make it creative and fun, it also means you will encounter difficulties. As with all field-work exercise, you will have to accept that not everything you gather is sufficient, sometimes the sound-quality is poor, other times the content is simply unconvincing. Almost certainly, you will have to adjust your thematic parameters once you have gone into the field.
• This is a collaboration. With an unusual combination of grad students, supervisors and fellow students. You have to learn how to divide the tasks, how to ensure that every member has a defined and valuable role. There is flexibility here: One person may concentrate on background research, while another focuses on doing walks, or you can blend the two. The project supervisors can and will provide feedback and assistance; if it seems overwhelming and overly ‘techie’ at first, be assured that you will have plenty of resources to get you through.

Earlier this month Urban Sound Ecology was invited to be displayed in the Hack Space at the DIY Citizenship conference held at the University of Toronto. In addition to the expected academic proceedings, DIY Citizenship also featured a Hack Space which brought together research, project and prototypes by a range of activists, interaction designers, urbanists and educators – it was an honour to be displayed alongside such exciting work (check the full Hack Space participant list here). Reaction to USE was great and I saw several dozen of people don headphones and dive into a moment of solitude scored by one of our archived walks. Many thanks to Matt Ratto for the invitation to participate, Jordan Hale and Cyrus Irani for the assistance setting up and tearing down and Tom Kuo at Foundation Creative Studio for the assistance with our exhibition design.

USE has been making the rounds on twitter lately, and that is exciting, but one tweet in particular brought a huge smile to my face. The fact that the fabulous Shocklee brothers (of The Bomb Squad fame) would spend a single moment looking at/listening to this project utterly blows my mind. I guess I have to revisit Fear of a Black Planet now...