By Bryce Tellmann
Most semesters, I teach at least one section of Introduction to Humanities (HUM 100). In order to anchor the class’s exploration of such a potentially broad topic, I choose one or two topics to guide our semester-long inquiry into the human experience. This semester, those two topics are place and sound. On the one hand, they are nearly universal categories of human experience, as we inhabit location and experience vibration every day. But on the other, they are infinitely variable. One person’s experience and understanding of a place, or of a particular set of sounds, may be entirely different than another person’s, even if that place and sound are outwardly identical.
One way that my students are exploring the possibilities of sound and space is by experimenting with an artform called “audio walks.” Popularized by artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, these mobile art installations ask the participant to go on a walk, retracing the artist’s footsteps as they listen to an audio recording of the artist’s walk. The artist will often comment on their surroundings, including exact navigation directions for the listener. Inevitable differences in the artist’s recording of their walk and the listener’s own environment (different people passing by, different vehicle sounds, even different times of the day or seasons) draw attention to the differences between the ways we represent experience and our actual experience. This, in turn, helps students appreciate the ways that media technologies affect how we experience, understand, and value the world around us.
Some audio walks are straightforward, presenting an ostensibly “authentic” recording of what the artist experienced on their walk. However, the artist may also choose to more actively compose their audio walk, either by preplanning events to be captured during the recording or by editing the recording after the fact. Such additions amplify the disjuncture between what listeners hear in the recording and what they experience as they retrace the walk.
Eden Otten, a freshman Civil Engineering major, captured the contrast well in a discussion board reply:
I think a sense of community in sound is more fleeting than one in place. We still shared the same trail to Boneyard, and I was in the same place that this audio tour gave meaning to. However, many aspects of sound that gave the walk uniqueness were gone in the days between capturing it and listening to it. We experienced the place the same, but the unique sound couldn’t be a shared experience, as I could hear your contributions to the soundscape, but you couldn’t hear mine.
Below are links to download some of the students’ audio walks. If you’re on campus, I encourage you to download one or more to your mobile device and go on the same walk that the artist did! Walks are best experienced with headphones.
The Novum 