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Uncanny Soundscapes: Towards an inoperative acoustic community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2011

Iain Foreman
Iain Foreman*
Affiliation:
Department of Communication and Arts, Universidade de Aveiro, Campus Universitário de Santiago, 3810-193 Aveiro, PORTUGAL
*
E-mail: iainforeman@ua.pt
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Abstract

Drawing on field research carried out in the abandoned villages of the Ara Valley, this article seeks to readdress notions of acoustic community and communication in terms of a ‘haptic aurality’ in which listening, as a mode of touch, approximates a figure of spacing, fragmentation and withdrawal in contrast to more conventional communicational models of intimacy, presence and exchange. Arguing that soundscape compositions present an ‘acoustic ontology’, the article explores a form of belonging and being that is, following Jean-Luc Nancy, singular plural in which sound signals ‘unwork’ collectivities through the processes of ‘sharing’ and ‘splitting’ (partage) characteristic of listening and recording. Referring to the work of writer W.G. Sebald (1944–2001), whose hybrid ‘literary ethnography’ was the impetus for my own soundwalks and fieldwork, and considering the role of soundscape composition within the discipline of Trauma Studies, the article scopes out to consider the possibilities of soundscape composition as a form of testimony in light of Agamben's (1999) insistence that testimony is necessarily incomplete. As a form of ‘myopic witnessing’ (Jenckes 2010), the sonic memories of ruined soundscapes are presented as spacings and absences, fragments and lacunae, that are themselves characteristic of both the ontology of ruins and those of testimony.

Type
Research Article
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 16 , Issue 3: Sound, Listening and Place I , December 2011 , pp. 264 - 271
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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