This essay explores cultural, environmental, material, and political testimonies of the Gleiwitz radio tower constructed in the 1930s near the border of Germany and Poland (today Gliwice). As the tallest wooden structure of its kind in Europe, the mast has over the last century witnessed several turbulent geopolitical transitions. Those, in turn, have systematically redressed its functions to serve various, often radically competing intentions: from spreading Nazi propaganda before and during World War II to jamming frequencies of West European radio stations during the communist era. Recently, the site has become subject to conspiracy theories related to 5G infrastructure allegedly installed on the mast’s no-longer-functional structure. Attending to the concept of pharmakon that pertains to inherently mixed properties of a medium, this essay traverses these diverse historical trajectories and explores a disparate range of reverberations, events, and effects that this radio mast and its unique material affordances have over time instigated not only across human but also other-than-human realms, scales, and temporalities. Understanding media as mediations, while drawing on the case of the Gleiwitz radio mast, I take an approach in which radio becomes an instance of radiant mediation and hence radiation. This move enables us to see radio as an event that is always-already implicated in and informed by a specific climate and its transformations: environmental, social, and geopolitical, to name but a few. Consequently, the article puts forth a reading of pharmakon as a highly relational and unstable phenomenon, never an intrinsic feature of a given medium or media infrastructure. Traversing the complex history of the Gleiwitz radio mast, the essay brings to the fore key moments during which this relational reading of pharmakon of interest here becomes particularly illuminated.

This chapter suggests that soundwalking, a seemingly trivial combination of walking and listening, is a complex activity that always comprises and entails some form of composition, recomposition and decomposition. Building on the term soundwalk compositon  I suggest that when soundwalking, we are traversing to some degree already composed territories and soundscapes. Moreover, in order to unfold and be conducive to certain experiences, those territories (and our mobility within them) neccesitate decomposition of other environmental, geological and cultural realms and, consequently, their soundscapes. In the proposed, expanded and critically revised approach to soundwalking, what we walk through and listen is not merely the here and now, but a much wider spatio-temporal territory that spans the past (even deep, geological time) and extends into the unknown future(s). Combining diverse technological and conceptual modes of field recording, mediating and broadcasting precomposed material and sounds from the immediate vicinity, soundwalking compositions presented in this chapter bring attention to particular locations: Vancouver's intertidal zones and Swedish most and least polluted lakes. While opening up to imperceptible aspects of those geographies, these pieces are simultaneously and, perhaps above all, exercises in (re-)composing one's ethical position within a mesh of scales, agencies and temporalities that constitute each and every site. The chapter concludes with a series of propositions for how to engage in critical, careful and caring forms of composing with soundscapes. 

Soundwalking brings together a diverse group of contemporary scholars, artists and thinkers in one of the first comprehensive studies of soundwalking – the practice of moving through space while carefully listening to what it has to say – to address urgent challenges and concerns of an environmental, ethical, social and technological nature.

Besides gaining insight into the historical development of soundwalking as a scholarly method and artistic genre, the reader will have a chance to learn from emerging voices concerned with this practice, of many different backgrounds and positionalities. Soundwalking demonstrates how attentive listening and walking might help with more careful and responsible navigation through the complex dimensions of our shared environments and entangled histories, often imperceptible on a day-to-day basis. The book encourages scholars, artists, and also those unfamiliar with the concept, to engage with it in their respective fields and subjects of interest as an interdisciplinary method of critical inquiry and a creative mode of communication.

This book inspires readers to discover anew the potential of walking and listening, and will be of interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the areas of studies directly concerned with sound and beyond, including environmental humanities, arts, design, landscape architecture, media, and cultural studies.

This article attempts to rethink some problematic ways and motivations for engaging in (field) recording and working with recorded sounds. Interweaving reflections from my long-term soundscape archiving initiative undertaken in Stockholm, with projects of others aiming at preserving cultures through sound, I reflect upon ethical challenges that emerge against the prospect of second and following lives and deaths of recordings. Does the second life of a recorded event risk replicating power relationships that the original recording was enmeshed in? What can be gained and, more importantly, lost while conceiving a second life of a recorded sound? This article intends to open up an array of such questions which, as I suggest, need to be taken into consideration already before and during the recording process. As a discursive tool that does not resolve those concerns but instead creates space for critical reflection, I propose a concept of acoustethics. In a nutshell, acoustethics, as this portmanteau of acoustics and ethics suggests, is an ethically informed approach to the world’s soundscapes. I argue that any kind of engagement with the auditory world through recording technologies requires careful consideration of multiple agencies contributing to the recorded sound. As a reflective attitude to the sonic realm, acoustethics acknowledges that any recording takes place within already existing fields of relations and simultaneously generates new links between subjects, histories, worldviews, technologies, and other forces. In other words, any recording is intrinsically field recording.

I propose this essay as conceptual hearing aids for a better attunement with arboreal sonorities. This term should not be read literally as pointing towards acoustic qualities that trees and forests generate throughout their lifespan. At least, it is not to be reduced to that aspect only. The acoustic life of trees is not limited to producing sounds. It also includes their ability to communicate and listen. To vibrate and respond to vibrations. Consider recent studies on roots of trees and other plants proving their capacity to locate water sources by sensing vibrations generated by water currents in underground infrastructures, such as pipes, even in the absence of moisture (Gagliano et.al). This intricate technique of listening to the surrounding world and responding accordingly radically expands not only our understanding of the trees’ agency as living and acoustic entities but also the very notion of listening. But the term arboreal sonorities is not put forth here as to help us discover anything ground-breaking about trees. Instead, it gestures towards re-gathering and reconnecting with already existing knowledges about trees and the trees’ very own knowledges. It prompt to realize our sustained reduction of aural capacities to the domain of an ear. Or differently put , it is to make us aware of boundaries we set around the ear, preventing it from cross-fertilization with other senses; an impedence of possibilites for engaging in more syncretic ways of sensing the world, but also acknowledging such among other species.

In Invisible Cities, through the character of Marco Polo, Italo Calvino introduces us to fifty-five poetic descriptions of life in a city.[1] Despite the depiction of space, architecture, and everyday life practices as greatly diverse and incomparable to each other, within the course of this highly imaginative novel the reader gets a strange feeling that all stories might in fact pertain to a single city, Venice, Marco Polo’s hometown. Inspired by the story, in Inaudible Cities I explore the suburbs of Stockholm, where I live, to create a series of short stories describing diverse facets of city life from the perspective of what we have conveniently accepted to call “urban peripheries”. Through a series of soundwalking excursions to those peripheries, I ask what stories about the city can be revealed if the focus on the “sonic infra-ordinary” replaces our addiction to the “extra-ordinary”?

Book Abstract:

An anthology that traces the long legacy of interdisciplinary experimentations at the intersection of walking, listening, and soundmaking.Since the 1960s, the act of walking has provided a way for artists and musicians to escape the formality of the concert hall or institutional venue, engaging with shifting public spaces, natural environments, and the social and political sphere. Walking redefines notions of composer, performer, public, and music itself, while opening new modes of perception and action. Going Out addresses these developments by exploring the relationship between walking, listening, and soundmaking in the arts—from the first soundwalks and itinerant performances in the 1960s to today's manifold ambulatory projects. The book consists of an extensive essay by Elena Biserna followed by an anthology of historical and contemporary contributions in the form of documentation, essays, interviews, manifestos, scores, narratives, and reflections. Through the variety of these contributions, the book makes an argument that at the intersection of walking, listening, and soundmaking there is both a long legacy of interdisciplinary experimentations and a broad field that resounds with urgent issues in critical spatial thinking and practice.

Gdzie leżą granice między tym co ludzkie a światem zwierzęcym? Jaką rolę odgrywa w tym kontekście dźwięk i skomponowany pejzaż dźwiękowy? Czym jest pejzaż dźwiękowy jako forma stworzona z myślą o zwierzęciu jako odbiorcy? W tym eseju punktem wyjścia do próby zaadresowania powyższych pytań jest urządzenie o tajemniczo brzmiącej nazwie UOZ1, czyli Urządzenie Ochrony Zwierząt. Jest to system głośników rozmieszczanych wzdłuż torów kolejowych w celu generowania bariery dźwiękowej odstraszającej zwierzęta leśne. Chroniąc je przed kolizją z nadjeżdżającym pociągiem, ten graniczny pejzaż dźwiękowy jednocześnie zabezpiecza infrastrukturę i interes człowieka. Dźwięk staje się medium jednocześnie uwypuklającym granice między światem ludzkim i zwierzęcym, jak i je rozmywającym. Projekt jest również powodem do dyskusji na temat działalności zmarłej 14 lat temu profesor Simony Kossak. To jej badania i lata spędzone w Puszczy Białowieskiej, gdzie poświęciła się pracy nad zrozumieniem psychologii dzikich zwierząt, przyczyniły się do opracowania tzw. „atrapy bodźców kluczowych”, czyli sekwencji alarmująco-informacyjnych sygnałów dźwiękowych inspirowanych naturą i wykorzystanych w UOZ1. Ten wątek działalności prof. Kossak pozwala nam uznać jej pracę jako nie tylko pionierską w dziedzinie akustyki ekologicznej w tej części świata, ale również sugeruje konieczność przemyślenia koncepcji pejzażu dźwiękowego w kontekście rosnącej potrzeby kontestacji idei granicy między kulturą człowieka a naturą.

Intertidal Room is a soundwalk composition developed for Vancouver coastline near Stanley Park, unceded territory of Coast Salish peoples - Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lõ and Səlīlwəta?/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəýəm (Musqueam) Nations. The composition invites the listener to embark on a soundwalk during a period of slack water. It is a moment when the tide is at the lowest point and soon about to return. By attending to the fugitive nature of intertidal zones, this soundwalk intends to provide a temporary room for increased aural attention to the ways people have been cultivating, affecting but also disrupting various, also imperceptible layers of these complex environments.

This exploratory essay introduces selected sound recordings along with notes and observations from Minuting – a practice of sonic journaling I have performed daily since July 2010 in numerous locations and settings. I weave these observations together in a way that resonates closely with the idea of repetition, in multiple forms: protest, automation, cycle, and ritual, as well as the repetition inherent to my acts of recording. While introducing sounds from the archive of Minuting, I reflect on how this constrained and systematically enacted form of listening, recording, and re-listening leads to a transversal type of sonic reflexivity. It is a form of alertness to sound that stretches beyond the immediate resonance of the 'now' – towards spatially and temporarily distant, yet to some extent intertwined, objects, subjects, events, and environments. The text evolves across three interrelated layers: annotated recordings from the project's archive, a set of thoughts and associations triggered by re-listening to the material, and a discursive analysis that opens up the project to a dialogue with other thematically resonant debates and practices. Drawing on perspectives from media studies, the philosophy of technology, sound studies and durational art, I discuss Minuting as an art work, a creative constraint and a transversal listening practice. Lastly, I propose it as an existential media technique for composing critical and reflective positions towards one's surrounding space, experience of time, and use of sound technologies.