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| Ximena Alarcon presenting at Visiones Sonoras organised by the CMMAS in Morelia – México. Image from the Sounding Underground blog. |
This week Ximena Alarcon will be sharing her expertise with us. Ximena has prepared an interview for a community radio station in Devon (England) with Ariane Delaunois. It's a very detailed explanation of Ximena's Sounding Underground project.
Abstract of Sounding Underground:
Sounding Underground
year of production: 2009
used technology (software etc): Flash CS4 Actionscript 3.0
required plug-ins: Flash Player 9 or 10
Short work description
Sounding Underground is a virtual environment that invites users to interact with the soundscapes of three underground public transport systems: London, Paris and México City. Commuters’ memories and imaginations are represented in sounds and images that have been selected by volunteer commuters through an ethnographic process. These sounds are assembled in a sound score that acts as a multimedia user’s interface. The score contains sonic features unique to each metro distributed into: Entrance, Tickets, Corridors, Platform, and Carriage, correspond to the identifiable spaces recognised by any commuter, as well as some shared sonic spaces: Amplified Voice, Steps, Doors, Trains Arriving. Each metro has a unique space: Paris (air sounds), Mexico (street vendors), and London (announcements). This environment allows commuters, through interactive options, to experience a process of listening and remembering, provoking the expression of an aural urban collective memory, through the narrative of an underground journey.
Interactivity
Each category contains a sequence of sounds that can be triggered by the user. S/he is invited to interact at his/her own rhythm and to feel free to navigate the spaces. In the interaction, sounds overlap both within categories and spaces, creating a sonic texture derived from the humans’ and the machines’ counterpoint of daily life.
In the graphic interface, each category contains a sequence of images. Although they change each time the user triggers a sound, they may not be directly associated with the sounds. They are close-up pictures of the textures from the metro spaces. Most are abstract images allowing one to focus attention on the sounds, which resembles the activity of wandering (as if lost in thought). The graphic spaces overlap to create the feeling of being in a common space that changes because of the movement of sound in space and not because of its graphic structure: the latter is fixed, and serves both as a score and as a user interface.
Sounding Underground also invites you to write memories in text, produced by listening. These memories are being published randomly in the "Listening and Remembering" page.
Sounding Underground is the result of a practice-led research project studied commuter’s perceptions towards their daily life soundscape in underground public transport systems, taking the case studies of Paris and México City as counterparts of the London Underground. Sixteen commuters in Mexico, and sixteen in Paris, contributed to the creation of the environment, and their experiences were linked to the original project in London, in which twenty-four volunteers participated.
Linking urban soundscapes through commuters’ memories invites us to acknowledge symbolic, social, economic and political issues of mobility in contemporary cities, from their perspective. This approach strives to make commuters contributors in the creation of these environments, and furthermore performers (as non-musicians) and narrators of their commuting experience.
Before listening to the interview, "play" with Sounding Underground.
NOTE: the audio files are available in BlackBoard, there's a link from the home page.
The questions that are covered:
1. From start to now (and future project). How did the art piece
(materially) took form?
2. How is the experience on the ethnographic aspect? on the
interdisciplinary aspect?
3. As a sound artist has the experience changed you and your sound
awareness/consciousness?
4. How was it as a sound specialist?
5. How was your artistic journey? Are you happy of the form it took
and what further development do you want the project to take?
6. How did you choose the cities you located the project?
7. How do the locations link to your life?
8. How was your own experience of sound when you travelled?
9. How rich was the inter relation between participants and you?
10. What interested you in collective memory, interactivity, in the
link between people and technology?
11. What have you understood of the reflective potential of
respondents? Are you satisfied of the experience representation of
your participants?
12. Are you reworking on your installations?
13. What will be your next direction/step after this research?
Please post any questions to Ximena here as she'll be checking back and will add her responses in the comments.
