Mapping The Soundscape

Mapping The Soundscape: Electro-acoustic Composition and Place-making in Interactive Sound Maps
by Ely Rosenblum

Abstract:
"With the recent availability of open source application programming interfaces for digital mapping, programmers have been able create applications that literally put music and sound on the map. Since the mid-2000s, sound artists, electroacoustic composers and archivists have been able to use digital resources to map their field recordings, most popular of which has been Google Maps. Many of these maps allow for users to upload their own recordings, creating maps with thousands of sound clips. This presentation aims to explore the possibility of musicological scholarship concerning practices of digital mapping of music and sound on computers, tablets and smartphones.
This presentation will provide a history of sound mapping as used by sound recordists and composers.  Beginning with Tony Schwartz’ sound documentary form which examples of this New York 19 and The World in My Mailbox, I will explain how these recordings establish a sense of place. Schwartz’ recordings influenced the members of the World Soundscape Project to develop their own sound maps for their series The Music of The Environment. I will also review the uses of the twenty-two largest participant-interactive online sound maps, including the Toronto Sound Map, The London Sound Survey, The Göteborg Sound Map, and the Tactical Sound Gardens. Additionally, I will discuss my own use of sound maps as a musicological teaching resource, working on projects with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, MIT Media Lab professor Tod Machover, and for the University of Alberta/Cape Breton University project “Celebrating East European communities and cultures in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia”. All of these examples of contribute to the use of digital sound mapping as an ethnographic research tool and a teaching resource."

http://www.academia.edu/4025846/Mapping_The_Soundscape_Electro-acoustic_Composition_and_Place-making_in_Interactive_Sound_Maps

Music in The Medium: An Ecomusicological Analysis of Field Recordings

by Ely Rosenblum

Abstract:

In this paper I propose that ecological frameworks of listening can be employed as a relational practice within musicology; a training of the ear and aesthetic valuation of recorded works in contexts outside their time and place. Ecomusicology is a duality of perspectives on musical meaning, especially pertinent to a discussion of field recordings and soundscape composition. Alexander Rehding (2011) discusses two approaches to ecological studies within musical meaning: an apocalyptic mode - music that references a human-impelled destruction of the environment - and the nostalgic imagination derived from musical works and performances. While interest in an ecologically minded musicology is developing, so too is an ideal committed to interdisciplinary relationality. Nicholas Cook encourages studies of performance that employ empirical analyses of musical works by other means. A relational musicology’s potential solution to the inherent ephemerality of performance practice is through empirical scholarship surrounding recordings: a practice by which the means of documenting musical events is made possible. The ability to document acoustic environments and musical information simultaneously has caused a reformation in compositional practice, exploring the connections between music and environment (Schafer 1977; Schwartz 1983). What might compel composers to record the ‘natural’ sounds, how field recordings and soundscape analyses connect music, the social and the environment, and what inherent musicality lies within the recorded form is explicated through a relational, ecomusicological analysis of soundscapes. The Kantian notion of ‘nature’s rule to art’, which Rehding (2011) suggests in an ecomusicological framework is our primary means of comprehending our surrounding environment through expressive practice, is itself a form of relationality. I will discuss the manner in which field recordings demonstrate the duality of ecomusicology by reaching out to our sonic environment, meaning to organize it for the elucidation of musical and communicative understanding.

http://www.academia.edu/3567914/Music_in_The_Medium_An_Ecomusicological_Analysis_of_Field_Recordings




 Ely Rosenblum:
 http://artefactpublication.com