Soundwalking: a method for investigating contested city space
- Submitting institution
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Nottingham Trent University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 48 - 970308
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
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- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- N/A
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- July
- Year
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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A - Artistic Research Centre
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The research uses primary sources that were complex and difficult to access. Brown has responded to contested sites, which he has explored through soundwalks over a number of years in a range of countries at different types of sites. Examining cities in transition and aspirational rhetoric of utopian plans for modernism, he applied a unique site-specific methodology ‘sound arc’ to reveal the lived realities of these urban landscapes, once the intended notion has failed. He has conducted field work with participants in a number of cityscapes in European countries, (France; Germany; Norway; UK).
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This body of work is a series of soundwalks in different international contexts that evolves a unique site-specific methodology for investigating questions around contested city space.
The enquiry focuses upon the city in transition, drawing attention to contradictions between the aspirational rhetoric of urban development (from the utopian plans of Modernism and post-war optimism to contemporary regeneration initiatives) and the lived realities of urban experience once these progressive visions falter or fail. Brown has refined an original ‘soundwalk’ methodology for highlighting such contradictions: his distinctive soundwalks involve a narrative arc where a group of participants are led through the city, their live experience of the immediate environment over-layered with a sound-score listened to through headphones.
Brown’s method collides seemingly incompatible approaches: the sound walks begin with direct experience and heightened sensory engagement, which is gradually unsettled through tactics of destabilisation and rupture, before culminating in a socially/ politically oriented confrontation that foregrounds histories and presences that might otherwise be ignored or pass unnoticed.
Brown’s methodology has developed through repeated testing (e.g. Returns/ Topographies of the Obsolete, 2015; In the Flow conference, Norrköping, 2015), and is best exemplified by the soundwalk he was invited to compose for the international sound festival, Mobile Audio Fest, Aix-en-Provence (2015).
The capacity of this method to be applied to different ‘contested sites’ was advanced within international projects (e.g. Spaces of Uncertainty, Stuttgart, 2016) and public events (Artnight, London, 2018). Recognition of the significance of Brown’s method for activating questions around changing city space is evidenced through invitation to contribute to the international conference, UrbanTOPIAS: Discussing the Challenges of Changing Cities, Berlin, 2016; and his journal article Soundwalking: Deep Listening and Spatio-Temporal Montage(Spatial Bricolage, Humanities, 2017).
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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