Output details

OA#1: Listening and Mapping the Sonic. Plurality and Wayfaring: Writing the Opensound Project

OA#1 is an innovative online artwork re-framing through research the act of writing about sound. It reflects upon the collective experience of the Opensound project - a two-year European sound network of seven organisations (funded by Grundtvig EU120, 000). Taylor's key research interests are in the historical rupture between ontology and epistemology, proposing that sound practices are well placed to renew the debate around embodied experience and its relation to knowledge.

The research explored a pan-European articulation of contemporary sonic practice framed by discourses of open-source technologies. Participants were a diverse range of creative practitioners including researchers, academics, composers, musicians and sound artists. This nexus produced cross-cultural and interdisciplinary questioning of the role of sound in contemporary Europe. The project enabled mobilities between participating organisations over the two year period. Each partner organisation hosted an event during which a variety of activities took. Accordingly, participation in the whole series manifested a unique sampling of the variable practices and discourses occurring around sound in each geographical location. OA#1 was derived from the first of these encounters - an international festival of electronic art hosted by project partner Antitesti (Live!iXem 2011, Sicily, December 2011).

The practice of inscribing sound as a historical media object (e.g. musical score, wax cylinder, phonograph, CD, mp3) operates differently according to its temporal and cultural location. This submission remediates the Opensound project in three forms – as online artwork, written text and digital sound composition. This original assemblage reflects upon the experience of the Opensound project through a practice-based method informed by sound studies, performance theory and media archaeology.

Conclusions suggest that the technicity of contemporary society is influential in producing digitally mediated conceptions of sonic experience and that an experiential approach to sound offers an alternative strategy.