Sound Fields: Mapping Acoustic Territories :: September 23-25, 2010 :: Brooklyn, NY :: :: Call for Submissions — Deadline: September 1, 2010.

image: alvaro_olivares

Exhibition to take place in a massive industrial space in Brooklyn. Sound Fields is about sound and the city, different acoustic territories and the control of them. In public places one wanders in a field of sounds that are ambient and discrete, loud and soft, which form intermittent relationships withone another. This acoustic mise en scène is often deemed distracting or cacophonous, leading to the marginalization of sound that is judged to be noise. Think of the subway, the library, or the church. Certain sounds are considered desirable while others are not. Noise is seen as a nuisance, and the decision to exclude it is made by those with the privilege to make aesthetic judgments for others. However, sound escapes attempts at isolation and infiltrates space, combining with other sounds and shifting their meaning. The fluid nature of sound evades all but the most extreme measures to confine it and spills over into spaces both public and private.

The acoustic properties of the urban environment have a powerful psychological impact. While the auditory system attempts to localize what is heard, the colliding waves of urban sound overwhelm attentiveness toward any single source. When sounds share spatial or temporal proximity, their meanings change. If the sounds appear in a chronological sequence, the initial one often becomes a reference for the meaning of those that follow. Another way that sounds interact and change their meaning is dependent upon the path they travel. Two different types of sound encountered by a listener can determine the distance of sources and inform their visual counterparts: direct sound, which arrives at the listener’s ears without being reflected off a surface, and reflected sound, which has been redirected before arriving at the listener. Listening is an act: it is a way we engage with pre-existing fields of sound to construct meaning from the environment.

Constructing acoustic boundaries by listening allows us to recognize sounds and utilize them to navigate the city. This is at the core of Sound Fields: Mapping Acoustic Territories. Critical awareness of sound is an important tool for perception and the production of meaning. The exhibition will allow the participants to forge their own path through shifting landscapes of sound.