Sound Exercise #3: Soundscape

In "The Soundscape," R. Murray Schafer writes, "To give a totally convincing image of a soundscape...a new means of description would have to be devised" (99). This assignment builds on ekphrasis, a classical exercise in description that challenged rhetoric students to describe something so vividly that it was brought before the eyes of their audience. Your task, in short, is to practice "a new means of description" in order to bring a place before the ears of your audience.

More specifically, your task is to create a soundscape of a physical location on Belmont's campus. As sound artist Brandon LaBelle puts it, "soundscape composition aims to stimulate a conversation between environmental sound and musical work, wedding the discovery of place-based sonority with acute listening" (Background Noise 198). In other words, a soundscape takes a physical place or environment and represents it in sonic form. In doing so, a soundscape should call listeners' attention to aspects of a space that the eyes might overlook. A soundscape can rely on recordings of a place's actual soundsto try to create as accurate a representation as possible, or it can draw on absent or possible sounds to try to imagine what a place might sound like under different conditions.Consider, for example, David Al-Ibrahim's Calling Thunder," a soundscape project that allows listeners to walk around Manhattan while hearing what the island might have sounded like prior to European colonization.

Your soundscape can make use of the field recordings of your chosen location and/or sounds gathered from sites like freesound.org. While it can include the sound of human speech, it should not include a voiceover or other forms of explicitly descriptive language. It can emphasize your location's actual sounds or be more speculative. The scope of your chosen location is up to you. It can be a single room, the whole building, a picnic table, or a parking lot.

Your final soundscape should be 2-4 minutes long and submitted as an .mp3 or .wav file on Blackboard. In addition to the sound file, you should include a 250-word reflection that identifies your chosen location and explains why you chose it. Then explain the approach you took in creating your soundscape.

Due: Friday, April 6th