Hello everybody, this is Attila Faravelli.
I am an electro-acoustic composer and performer living and working in Milano, Italy.
I will curate the italian section of the blog and my first post here is about Davide Tidoni.
With a particular emphasis on listening modes and sound-space relations Davide realizes a variety of works that include site specific interventions, acoustic territory explorations as well as sound ethnography fieldworks and listening workshops.
A Balloon for Linz is one of the last Davide’s projects. The work brings to light the acoustic response of specific locations in Linz. The project was awarded with an honorary mention at the Ars Electronica Festival 2011. Watch the movie and listen:
A Balloon for Linz from davide tidoni on Vimeo.
What follows here is a short-but-dense exchange between me and Davide
Attila – It looks as if during recent years sound-walk practices are gaining some attention. Even if I am well aware that there exist so many ways to conceive a sound-walk, I also feel like these practices focus excessively on increasing people’s ability to listen per se. As a musician, I’m inclined to think that ‘passive’ practices, aimed at developing an ecological approach to hearing (we could define these as a form of ‘contemplation’), are not enough. I strongly believe that it is also necessary to develop more ‘active’ means to aurally ‘react’ to the environment we live in.
Davide – I think that propensity to contemplation should not be intended as a passive practice. Contemplation cannot be separated from direct interaction with the world. Contemplation is a sort of an innate tendency that resonates when our innermost energies and motivations match with a particular context or situation. It’s a self-recognition state that has to do with active participation and exploration.
A – I believe that the main risk for field recordings is to produce a separation between subject and object, in the same way as science does; therefore producing a severance between us and the world. By means of collecting and mapping sounds we might forget that the way we perceive sound is always situated and relational.
D – To record is to translate immediate perception into cultural construction. A synthesis of subjective feelings and socio-cultural assumptions. The act of recording is a sort of site specific performance that add always something new to the context. Field recording cannot be considered as an impartial and objective transmission of meaning. Recordings are complex events that cannot prescind from cultural implications, recordist’s emotional state, and sound technologies.
A – Accordingly, the Soundstorming Workshop you organize sound very interesting to me. The term ‘storm’ brings to my mind a chaotic and impulsive attitude, the exact contrary to a quiet and aesthetic contemplation. Looking at some of your workshop’s materials (pictures and videos) I was struck by the partecipated dimension of your actions. Would you mind hinting what’s going on during those so called sound-storms?
D – Soundstorming is conceived as an intensive walk (from 8 to 48 hours and more) which provides a freewheeling environment in which participants are encouraged to explore different acoustic territories and develop site specific interventions. After arriving at a destination, a debriefing session takes place. Each soundstormer presents his/her documentation and the experiential data gathered during the exploration to the group. The workshop echoes the design process of brainstorming. It comes from the necessity to share enthusiasms, skills and intuitions without forcing the interaction towards conclusive results and pre-programmed labels.
