workshops

UP IN THE VALLEY

Listening Interventions in Mountain Locations

The workshop takes place on the mountains of ValSabbia (Brescia) each year around end july/beginning of august. Registrations open in may/june.

Presenting a series of listening pieces and exercises specifically designed for the location, the workshop explores the propagation of sound in space and the interaction between sound, space and body.

During the 4 days of the workshop, basic acoustic principles and sound effects such as reflection, absorption and filtering are staged and performed live.

Focussing on the position of the listener, the distance from the sound source and the threshold of audibilty, the workshop investigates the potential of the listener to perceive and produce sound.

The activities are exploration-based and run under a performative frame that refers to notions of relation, presence, and touch.

All the activities are site specific and take advantage of the affordances/constraints of the place. Mountain locations serve as unique setting providing specific qualities such as high silence/noise ratio, long-distance acoustic horizon and multiple reflecting surfaces.

The pieces/exercises are presented as part of a series of walking excursions. The average time of each excursion is 6/8 hours including breaks.

DOCUMENTATION
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE DOCUMENTATION FROM THE PAST EDITIONS OF THE WORKSHOP

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Listening/Intervention

Listening Workshop
listening workshop

What
The workshop is open to anyone concerned with the possibility of interaction between sound, space and listening.

Through a series of pieces and exercises that stage specific acoustic phenomena, the workshop encourages the active role of the listener and his/her own potentials to perceive and engage with sound.

The main aim of the workshop is to offer a wide range of listening experiences in order to lead participants to recognize sound as a concrete presence that puts the listener in relation with space, materials and other people’s bodies.

The workshop resembles to an extended performance where participants becomes actively involved in the creation/experience of the proposed activities. Far from being confined to the sonic domain, Listening/Intervention introduces concepts and principles that can easily be appropriated and applied to other research fields. To this respect, the workshop functions as a stimulus for interdisciplinary practice and as a context for experimentation.

List of possible activities
Your footsteps in the room; closed-eyes walk to the wall; touch the others with a microphone; someone is listening from inside a cardboard box; “anolog” filters and white noise; ears at the wall; hit the microphone with a slingshot; try to avoid any feedback to occur while walking to the amp; find the spot where two different sounds are perceived at the same loudness; walk away from the sound source up to the point where you cannot hear it anymore; participants’ bodies functioning as absorption panels,…

Duration
The activities of the workshop are developed in relation to the given space and are distributed over a duration time of min 3 hours and max 18 hours (6 hours a day for 3 days).

Technical needs
A silent room with windows and warm floor
Sound system + mixer + 50/100 meters xlr cable + 2 dynamic mic
Access to the space and rehearsals 1 day before the workshop

Documentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52_f4094wD4
https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidetidoni/albums/72157650976176766

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Soundstorming

Sound Interventions in the Outdoor

soundstorming

Soundstorming is an exploration walk that invites participants to develop site specific interventions. Echoing the process of brainstorming, the workshop functions as an informal exchange of collective experiment with sound and listening.

Soundstorming begins with a semi-structured walk that interesects a certain area or territory. Participants stop the walk and start working whenever they find a potentially interesting location, whether it is an abandoned building, a construction site, or an area under transformation. The fundamental parameters for choosing where to stop relate to the spatial affordances of the place, its configuration and acoustic quality as well as to the freedom of movement it provides.

Participants bring to the walk their own technical equipment. Everything must be compact and easy to carry around. Bent electronics, small analog/digital sound instruments, sound generators, portable loudspeakers, megaphones, pre-recorded sounds, contact mics, sound playback/recording devices and found objects are some of the tools for developing interventions and situations.

Besides being a direct process for fast prototyping of outdoor interventions, Soundstorming provides a context in which participants acquire emotional and practical knowledge about some of the most debated issues concerning the notion of place, the role of the context, the definition of private/public, the abandoned, the act of trespassing, the production and reappropriation of space.

DOCUMENTATION
CONCEPTS from the workshop at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
IMAGES from the workshops at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
VIDEO from the workshop at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
VIDEO from the workshop at IMM, Dusseldorf, 2011

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