The final section will examine ‘experiential sound’, a reflection on performance practices that envelop the spectator in a curated and participatory soundscape made possible by the development of mobile sound technologies. Looking at two of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s audio/video walks (‘Forest Walk’ and ‘The Telephone Call’), we will examine how new portable devices – in the first example, the Sony Walkman and, in the second, a small digital camera – took sound performance (and its audiences) out of the theatre building into other performance spaces. ‘Experiential sound’ relies on the availability of headphones, an apparatus that Michael Bull describes as transforming ‘the users’ relationship to the environment’ and creating ‘sonic privacy’ (2013: 529) – their adoption proliferating to the extent we now recognize a genre of ‘headphone theatre’. Case studies will look at how oral histories, delivered through mobile technology, become sonic experiences that aim to compel their listeners to empathise with – and sometimes (re-)enact – those narratives. In this section, we will examine Shannon Yee’s Reassembled, Slightly Askew, a headphone drama about the author’s experience of a devastating illness and recovery, and Rimini Protokoll’s Situation Rooms, a peripatetic sonic adventure that asks its audience-participants to encounter the extraordinarily diverse conditions and impacts of the global arms trade. ‘Experiential sound’ will take up the common assertion that active listening converts sound into memory.
A coda to this final section will ask questions about the application of this book’s theoretical scope to those sonic elements that do not originate in Western ways of thinking about sound matters or of Western sound design for performance.
Reference:
Bull, Michael (2013). ‘iPod Culture: The Toxic Pleasure of Audiotopia’, in Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, 526–43, Oxford: Oxford UP.
