Session 1: Multisensory Experiences
Milena Droumeva . Kate McLean . Aki Pasoulas . Jackie Walduck
Date: Tuesday 12 April 2022 . 10am – 6pm
Event Reservation:
Location: Universities at Medway (University of Kent), Royal Dockyard Church, The Historic Dockyard, Chatham, Kent, ME4 4TE.
Access: Royal Dockyard Church has step free access and accessible toilets.
Attendance: All events are free to attend. Maximum attendance: 40 people.
Events include a combination of in-person and online events.
Booking is essential for in-person activities.
Online events may be watched live on YouTube (no booking needed).
Please wear face masks when attending in-person activities, unless you are exempt.
We advise taking a lateral flow test before attending.
Reservations are prioritised for PhD researchers at CHASE affiliated universities.
The public are welcome to make reservations after 10th March 2022.
Overview:
10.00 Welcome and introductions
10.30 Milena Droumeva, (Simon Fraser University)
‘Cityscape: Creating urban sonic solutions’ (online presentation)
11.30 10-minute break
11.40 Jackie Walduck (University of Kent)
‘Can you taste sound and colour? Miso Kitchen and cross-modal perception’ (In-person activity NB. includes audience participation: tasting miso soup)
12.30 Aki Pasoulas (University of Kent)
‘Multisensory experiences as an approach to composition’ (In-person lecture)
13.00 Lunch break and networking
14.00 - 17.45 Kate McLean (University of Kent)
‘Smellscapes and Smellmaps’ (in-person workshop NB. includes audience participation)
17.45 - 18.00 Conclusion
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Activities
10:30 - 11:30
Milena Droumeva
Cityscape: Creating urban sonic solutions
Think of a typical urban soundscape: people talking and walking; the omnipresent drone of car traffic close and distant; a variety of soft hums from vents and machinery; all punctuated by intermittent bird calls and smartphone jingles. Yet there is a system to the chaos; including and excluding moments for soundmaking; an emergent ecology of sorts (Atkinson, 2007). This system has been uniquely affected recently by the effects of the global pandemic: a jubilation of bird life, street life, and a general slowdown of industrial sound. Yet the city is buzzing with impatience to resume its hectic roar. How do we stop to listen, reflect, and perhaps heed new models for thinking about urban sound? How do we envision new processes for cultivating the sonic identity of cities and fostering sustainable livability? Cityscape is a unique and first-of-its-kind attempt to bridge acoustic ecology with city planning in a game format. Since the late 60s the SFU School of Communication in Canada has been a leader in soundscape research, yet despite R.M. Schafer’s aspirations for acoustic balance in the modern city, a meaningful process for incorporating sonic considerations in architecture, city planning, and policy hasn’t yet emerged. As a knowledge artefact, this soundscape simulation game is poised to bridge these disconnects and make a unique contribution to urban soundscape literacy and applied theories of city planning.
This game project will offer a wider public the chance to learn about acoustic ecology in cities and practice possibilities for repairing some of the health and community damage that urban noise has incurred for decades. Its approach to auraldiversities is unique: rather than focus on individual listening positionalities, the game asks the player to assume the identity of an interest group and 'play' to create specific infrastructure and thus, soundscape. That makes Cityscape different from other current initiatives that engage communities in listening, recording, and composing city sound (Fornstrom & Taylor 2019) given that the player doesn’t manipulate individual sounds towards a composition, but changes aspects of the built environment that result in a particular city soundscape.
11:40 - 12:30
Jackie Walduck
Can you taste sound and colour?
Miso Kitchen and cross-modal perception
Miso Kitchen is a multisensory performance by Jackie Walduck and Chloe Cooper, in which the taste of miso soup is modulated by colour and sound frequencies via the media of water marbling (Suminigashi) and live electronic sounds.
Jackie will present the ideas behind the piece, including Charles Spence's work on cross-modal perception (2021), and current notions of sound and present-centred consciousness (Herbert, 2011) and strategies for audiences to engage in different ways with the performance. A recording of the piece will be shown, and miso soup, oil and soy sauce will be served. Those watching online will be invited to make miso soup at their geographic location.
Herbert, R., (2011): Everyday Music Listening: Absorption, Dissociation and Trancing Routledge, London and New York.
Spence, C., (2021): Sensehacking, Penguin Books [Viking imprint], UK.
12:30 - 13:00
Aki Pasoulas
Multisensory Experiences as an Approach to Composition
This presentation will give an overview of one of my compositional methods, based on the interpretation of information received through all our senses as gestural and textural activity in the aural domain; it attempts to map our experiences from a number of systems (visual, gustatory, olfactory and haptic environments) to another (aural space). The presentation will detail how I use information collected through multisensory walks, including environmental recordings and sensory maps as starting points to create layers of sound material.
14:00 - 17:45
Kate McLean
Smellscapes and Smellmaps
Dr Kate McLean, a specialist in the emerging field of Sensory Communication Design, will discuss her approach to smellscapes and the creation of smellmaps. Kate will lead a workshop that includes a smellwalk in the area of Chatham Dockyard. Participants will commence the creation of sensory maps, which will be brought together for a discussion at the end of the day’s session. They will also be encouraged to use their memory and imagination to reach echoes of past sensory experiences to enrich their sensory maps.
Biographies
Milena Droumeva is an Associate Professor of Communication and Glenfraser Endowed professor in Sound Studies at Simon Fraser University specialising in mobile technologies, sound studies and multimodal ethnography, with a long-standing interest in game cultures and gender. Milena has worked extensively in educational research on game-based learning, as well as in interaction design for responsive environments and sonification. They are a sound studies scholar, a multimodal ethnographer, and a soundwalking practitioner published widely in the areas of acoustic ecology, media and game studies, design and technology. Their current projects explore best practices for soundscape design in cities and civic participation approaches to storytelling with sound. Milena is co-editor of a recently published edited collection “Sound, Media, Ecology” with Palgrave Macmillan which updates practices and theories of acoustic ecology through the work of contemporary researchers.
Dr Kate McLean works at the intersection of human-perceived smellscapes, cartography and the communication of ‘eye-invisible’ sensed data. To achieve this, she leads international public smellwalks and translate the resulting data using digital design, watercolour, animation, scent diffusion and sculpture into smellmaps showcasing the invisible world of smells. Educated in Boston, USA, the University of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Art in London Kate previously led the BA Graphic Design programme at Canterbury Christ Church University before joining Kent in 2021. Kate is frequently invited to contribute as speaker and smell advocate at International workshops and conferences across a range of fields from Landscape Architecture to Design, Olfactory Heritage to Sensory Studies. She also works to promote understanding of anosmia and parosmia for international charitable organisations.
Aki Pasoulas is an electroacoustic composer and the Director of MAAST (Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre) at the University of Kent. He is the Principal Investigator of the research project ‘Sonic Palimpsest’, which explores our experience of heritage sites through sound; and a Co-Investigator of the project ‘Liminal Spaces’ seeking to interrogate the concept of remote or desolate places by revealing the hidden voices and activities that occur within them. Aki’s research interests include acousmatic music, time perception in relation to music, psychoacoustics and sound perception, spatial sound and soundscape ecology especially in relation to listening psychology. He has written for instruments, found objects, voice, recorded and electronic sound, composed music for the theatre and for short animation films, and organised and performed with many ensembles. His scholarly and music works are published through KPM/EMI, ICMA, Sonos Localia, Stolen Mirror, Gruenrekorder, HELMCA, Pinpoint Scotland, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Aki received honourable mentions at international competitions, and his music is continuously selected and performed at key events worldwide.
Jackie Walduck is a composer and percussionist, whose work explores the meeting points between composition and improvisation, and between sound and touch, sight and taste. She has performed across the UK, Europe and in the Middle East, with musicians as diverse as the Philharmonia Orchestra, Sinfonia Viva, Kala Ramnath, and the Royal Army Band of Oman.
Recent compositions include the multisensory Miso Kitchen (online and live, Chatham, 2021), the audio-visual Diagnosis: Drifting, Dreaming, Waiting (2020) installed in waiting areas at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, her tactile score Shoreline (2018) has been performed in London at the Vortex Jazz Club, Sheffield, Chatham and Gothenburg) . The Migration Game (2016) was a game opera for Spitalfields Winter Festival in which the audience were players, and in Sensing Nature (2017), a blindfold audience was led through different woodland locations at Thornham Magna in Suffolk, to hear music created in response to the sounds of stridulating insects, birds, bats and weasels. Sensing Nature was performed by Jackie’s ensemble Tactile, bringing together blind, VI and sighted musicians, exploring tactile composition and non-visual communication in music.
Jackie is a Lecturer in Music in the Department of Music and Audio Technology at the University of Kent.
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