Sound Design at Edinburgh Napier University

Category: Sound Art

  • What Happens When We Listen to a Place? Barry Truax on Soundscapes, Soundmarks, and Acoustic Ecology

    Professor Barry Truax

    What happens when we listen to a place?

    At first glance, the question appears surprisingly simple. Places are full of sounds. Traffic passes. Birds call. Church bells ring. Doors close. Voices drift across streets and public squares. Yet during his online guest lecture for Edinburgh Napier University, composer, researcher, and acoustic ecologist Professor Barry Truax suggested that listening to a place involves far more than cataloguing the sounds it contains. Throughout a wide-ranging discussion of soundscapes, field recording, acoustic communities, oral history, environmental awareness, and soundscape composition, he repeatedly returned to a central idea. Sound is never simply physical. It is social, cultural, historical, and environmental. To listen carefully to a place is therefore to learn something about the people who inhabit it, the history that shaped it, and the relationships that continue to define it.

    Truax’s own involvement with these questions stretches back more than fifty years. Arriving at Simon Fraser University in 1973, he joined the World Soundscape Project, a pioneering research group founded by the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. The project emerged during a period of growing environmental awareness. Yet whereas many environmental discussions focused on landscapes, pollution, or conservation, Schafer and his colleagues became interested in the acoustic dimension of everyday life. Their concern was not simply with noise. They wanted to understand the sonic environments people inhabited and the ways those environments influenced perception, culture, memory, and community.

    The term soundscape became central to this work. Although the word had appeared occasionally before Schafer popularised it, the World Soundscape Project gave it a more systematic meaning. A soundscape was not merely a collection of sounds. Nor was it simply an acoustic environment that could be measured scientifically. What mattered equally was how those sounds were perceived and understood by people living within that environment. The same physical sound might be experienced very differently depending upon context, culture, history, or personal association. Listening therefore became a study not only of acoustics, but also of human experience.

    Vancouver provided the project’s first major laboratory. During the 1970s, members of the World Soundscape Project recorded extensively throughout the city, documenting harbour sounds, trains, ferries, bells, industrial activity, public spaces, and everyday life. At one level, the work resembled a large-scale field recording project. At another, it represented an attempt to understand how a city expressed itself acoustically. Recording became a form of investigation. What sounds defined Vancouver? Which sounds carried social meaning? Which sounds connected residents to their history? Which sounds were disappearing?

    Several examples discussed during the lecture illustrated how these questions often led in unexpected directions. Vancouver’s harbour horns, train whistles, church bells, and the distinctive Canada Horn all emerged as sounds that many residents recognised immediately. Such sounds were not important solely because they were loud or distinctive. They mattered because they connected people to place. Schafer introduced the term soundmark to describe sounds possessing particular cultural significance within a community. The concept deliberately echoed the idea of a landmark. Just as certain buildings, monuments, or geographical features help define a place visually, particular sounds may help define it acoustically.

    The Canada Horn provided an especially interesting example. Installed as part of Canada’s centennial celebrations in 1967, it performs the opening notes of the national anthem each day. Functionally, it operates like a signal. Symbolically, however, it occupies a rather different role. Many Vancouver residents know the sound immediately. It has become woven into everyday life. Listening to it therefore involves more than recognising a horn. It involves recognising a piece of collective identity.

    What fascinated Truax was how such sounds often reveal broader histories. Discussions of harbour horns quickly lead towards transportation networks, migration, industry, and national development. Church bells raise questions about religion, settlement, and changing urban environments. Listening carefully to a city often reveals that sounds function as traces of social and cultural processes that remain largely invisible.

    Many of the examples discussed during the lecture also demonstrated how soundscapes change over time. One recurring theme of the World Soundscape Project involved documenting sounds that were disappearing, being replaced, or acquiring new meanings. Steam whistles gave way to electronic signals. Traditional foghorns were replaced by automated systems. Bell sounds that once travelled across large parts of a city became increasingly difficult to hear amid expanding urban development. Such changes are rarely documented in conventional histories. Buildings receive preservation orders. Photographs enter archives. Yet sounds often disappear without attracting similar attention.

    For Truax, this raises important questions about acoustic heritage. If communities value historic buildings, should they also value historically significant sounds? If a particular sound helps define a place, what happens when it vanishes? These questions do not always produce straightforward answers. Soundscapes are constantly changing. New sounds emerge while others disappear. Yet the discussion highlights an important shift in perspective. Once listening becomes a form of cultural enquiry, everyday sounds acquire a significance that might otherwise be overlooked.

    The lecture repeatedly demonstrated how listening can reveal aspects of history that remain inaccessible through other methods. One approach developed by the World Soundscape Project involved collecting what they called earwitness accounts. Residents described sounds they remembered from earlier periods of their lives. These accounts were not always precise. Memory rarely functions with the accuracy of a recording device. Yet they offered valuable insights into how people experienced changing environments. Through such recollections, researchers gained access not only to lost sounds but also to the meanings attached to them.

    One particularly memorable example came from the Scottish village of Dollar, one of several European communities studied by the project during the 1970s. There the researchers worked closely with David Graham, a former town clerk whose extraordinary memory allowed him to reconstruct entire soundscapes from decades earlier. Standing at locations throughout the village, Graham described railway sounds, station activities, signalling systems, machinery, voices, and routines that had long since disappeared. Listening to him was almost like hearing an acoustic map of the past being reconstructed in real time.

    The significance of these accounts extended beyond nostalgia. Graham was not simply recalling sounds. He was recalling relationships, activities, routines, and forms of social organisation. The sounds mattered partly because they connected people to particular ways of life. Once again, listening became a route towards understanding communities rather than merely documenting acoustics.

    Soundwalks developed as another way of exploring these relationships. Truax described soundwalks as listening walks in which participants move through an environment while paying deliberate attention to its acoustic characteristics. Although deceptively simple, the method encourages a profound shift in awareness. Many sounds that normally fade into the background become newly noticeable. Distances become easier to judge. Acoustic boundaries emerge. Patterns of activity reveal themselves. Places begin to sound different once listening becomes intentional.

    Closely related were memory walks, in which participants revisited locations associated with earlier experiences. Returning people to familiar places often stimulated recollections that might otherwise remain inaccessible. A particular street corner, railway station, church, or public square could trigger detailed memories of sounds, activities, and social interactions. Context helped unlock memory. The environment itself became part of the research method.

    What makes these approaches particularly interesting is that they position listening as an active practice rather than a passive process. Hearing happens continuously. Listening requires attention. Throughout the lecture, Truax repeatedly encouraged students to recognise how much of everyday life passes by acoustically unnoticed. Soundwalks, memory walks, and soundscape research all attempt to interrupt that habit and create opportunities for reflection.

    The final part of the lecture turned towards soundscape composition, a form of creative practice closely associated with Truax’s work. Traditional musical composition often treats sounds as materials that can be organised independently of their original contexts. Soundscape composition adopts a rather different position. Environmental context remains central. The sounds retain connections to places, communities, and experiences from which they originate.

    Truax described a continuum of approaches. At one end are relatively direct recordings that document environments with minimal intervention. At the other are heavily transformed compositions in which sounds are processed, stretched, layered, and reconfigured. What distinguishes soundscape composition is not the degree of manipulation but the continuing relationship between the work and its source context. Listeners are encouraged to recognise environmental references and reflect upon their meanings.

    Soundscape composition also reflects a way of thinking about recorded sound that has influenced many areas of contemporary sound design. Environmental recordings are not treated simply as raw material waiting to be transformed beyond recognition. Their origins continue to matter. A harbour horn, a railway station, or a forest path carries associations that listeners may recognise even after considerable processing. Sound designers regularly make similar decisions when balancing realism with interpretation. Recordings can be edited, layered, stretched, or filtered, yet they often retain traces of the places and experiences from which they came. Truax’s work encourages designers to consider not only how a sound functions within a composition, but also what relationships it continues to carry with the world beyond the loudspeaker.

    This emphasis on context creates an interesting contrast with many traditions of Western art music. Rather than treating context as background information, soundscape composition places it at the centre of the creative process. Environmental, social, historical, and psychological associations become part of the material with which the composer works. A harbour horn is never simply a sound. It carries histories of transportation, labour, geography, and identity. A church bell carries different associations. A train whistle carries others. The composer works not only with acoustic properties but also with layers of meaning.

    Truax illustrated this approach through examples drawn from Vancouver. Familiar sounds appeared first in recognisable forms before gradually being transformed through processes such as time stretching. The effect was not simply aesthetic. Transformation encouraged different forms of listening. Sounds that normally function as signals became objects of reflection. Their internal textures emerged. Musical qualities became apparent. At the same time, their connections to place remained intact.

    Underlying the entire lecture was a broader concern with acoustic ecology. Listening, in this context, is not merely a technical skill or an artistic technique. It is a way of understanding relationships between people and environments. Paying attention to sound reveals aspects of culture, history, memory, community, and ecology that often remain hidden. It encourages reflection upon what societies choose to preserve, what they allow to disappear, and how environments continue to shape experience.

    More than fifty years after the World Soundscape Project began, many of the questions raised by Truax and his colleagues remain unresolved. Cities continue to change. Technologies alter how people communicate, travel, and work. Familiar sounds disappear while new ones emerge. Yet sound rarely occupies the same position within public discussions of heritage and preservation as buildings, monuments, or landscapes.

    Throughout the lecture, Truax returned repeatedly to sounds that had vanished, sounds that survived, and sounds that communities continued to recognise as part of their identity. Harbour horns, church bells, railway sounds, industrial signals, and everyday activities all carried meanings that extended beyond their immediate functions. They connected people to places, histories, and shared experiences. Once lost, many could not easily be recovered.

    Soundscape research therefore asks a question that is both simple and surprisingly difficult. What should be remembered acoustically? Photographs preserve appearances. Written records preserve events. Recordings, memories, soundwalks, and earwitness accounts preserve something different. They preserve traces of how places were experienced by the people who lived within them.

    For Truax, listening is valuable partly for this reason. It draws attention towards aspects of culture and environment that often pass unnoticed. A soundscape is not merely what a place sounds like. It is one way of understanding how a place has been lived, remembered, and shared.

  • How Does a Whisky Glass Become an Orchestra? Trevor Wishart on Transformation, Imagination, and Sound

    Trevor Wishart

    How much can a sound become?

    Most of us think of sounds as belonging to identifiable sources. A glass sounds like a glass. A bell sounds like a bell. A voice sounds like a voice. Recording technology allows sounds to be edited, layered, stretched, filtered, and transformed, though we often assume that their essential identity remains tied to the object that created them. During his online guest lecture for Edinburgh Napier University, composer, author, and software developer Trevor Wishart challenged this assumption repeatedly. Drawing on examples from his electroacoustic composition Imago, he explored how a single recorded sound can evolve into something entirely different, revealing possibilities hidden within the material itself.

    The lecture centred on a piece whose title provides an important clue to Wishart’s thinking. Imago refers to the final stage of insect metamorphosis, the moment when an apparently unremarkable pupa becomes a butterfly. For Wishart, this process offered more than a title. It provided the conceptual foundation for the composition itself. The piece begins with an extremely modest source: two whisky glasses gently clinking together. From that brief event, lasting only fractions of a second, an entire musical world gradually emerges. Bells, birds, voices, gamelan-like textures, immense resonant structures, and oceanic soundscapes all grow from the same source material. The lecture therefore became an exploration of how transformation occurs, not only within music but within listening itself.

    Wishart explained that his compositions often begin with two parallel motivations. One is technical. He wants a problem to investigate, a process to develop, or a question that requires experimentation. The other is poetic. There needs to be a broader reason for making the piece beyond demonstrating a particular technique. Neither is sufficient on its own. Technical ingenuity without expressive purpose quickly becomes sterile, while expressive intentions without any technical challenge provide little opportunity for discovery. Much of his work emerges from the interaction between these two impulses. The technical challenge creates opportunities. The artistic idea provides direction.

    This relationship also helps explain why software occupies such an important place in his practice. During the lecture, Wishart reflected on the period when electronic composers often relied upon specialised hardware systems. Such equipment could be expensive, inflexible, and frequently superseded. Learning to program offered a different possibility. Rather than adapting ideas to the limitations of existing tools, it became possible to create processes tailored to specific creative questions. More importantly, software allowed entirely new forms of transformation to be explored. If a process did not already exist, it might be possible to invent it.

    Yet what emerges most clearly from Wishart’s account is that invention is rarely the final objective. Again and again, he described composition as a process of exploration. Sounds are transformed not simply to produce novel effects but to discover possibilities hidden within them. Certain experiments fail. Others reveal unexpected directions. Some transformations produce results that could never have been predicted in advance. Listening becomes as important as designing. The composer is not merely constructing sounds. The composer is searching for relationships, behaviours, and opportunities that emerge through experimentation.

    The opening of Imago illustrates this approach particularly clearly. The piece begins with isolated whisky-glass impacts separated by substantial periods of silence. The pace is deliberately restrained. Contemporary listeners, accustomed to rapid development, may initially wonder where the material is heading. Yet this simplicity serves an important purpose. If the work concerns metamorphosis, the listener needs to encounter the pupa before encountering the butterfly. The source material remains visible, or rather audible, long enough for its later transformations to carry meaning.

    What makes the whisky glass such productive material is the complexity concealed within an apparently simple sound. Strike a glass and a resonance emerges. Listen more carefully and the sound reveals an intricate internal structure. The attack contains numerous frequencies that appear and disappear extremely rapidly. Ordinarily these details pass unnoticed. The event ends too quickly for individual components to be heard. By stretching the sound in time, however, hidden layers become accessible. Frequencies separate. Tiny fluctuations become audible. A sound that initially appeared straightforward begins to reveal unexpected richness.

    One of the most memorable moments in the lecture emerged from a story about washing glasses. Wishart described noticing that repeated impacts between two heavy whisky glasses produced an unusual perceptual effect. As the impacts accelerated, there came a point at which they ceased to be heard as individual events. Instead, they fused into a continuous rising pitch. What began as a mundane domestic observation suddenly revealed a remarkable musical possibility. A sequence of impacts had become a tone. More importantly, it suggested a route through which one kind of sound might transform into another.

    Experiences such as this appear repeatedly throughout Wishart’s creative process. New ideas often emerge from moments that initially seem insignificant. A process behaves differently than expected. A sound reveals an unanticipated quality. An experiment generates an unexpected result. The challenge is recognising which discoveries deserve further attention. Throughout the lecture, curiosity appeared less as a personality trait than as a working method. Creative progress depends upon noticing what others might ignore. As Imago unfolds, the whisky glasses gradually begin producing sounds that seem increasingly distant from their origin. Resonances expand into bell-like structures. Repeated transformations generate textures that suggest birdsong. Elsewhere, spectral manipulations create sounds with distinctly vocal qualities, as though fragments of speech are beginning to emerge from within the glass itself. None of these transformations completely abandons the original material. Traces of the source remain present, even as new identities begin to appear.

    This ambiguity plays an important role within the work. Wishart is rarely concerned with creating perfect imitations. The objective is not to convince listeners that a whisky glass has literally become a bird or a human voice. Instead, he creates sounds that occupy a space between recognition and uncertainty. Listeners hear associations rather than direct representations. A transformed sound may suggest several different identities simultaneously. That tension between familiarity and strangeness gives many of the transformations their expressive character.

    The lecture contained numerous examples of this process. Through synchronised transpositions, simple resonances begin forming complex harmonic structures. Spectral blurring allows sounds to emerge gradually from dense textures, creating the impression of material coming into focus. Distortions generate new timbral characteristics that feel organic rather than mechanical. Spatial movement contributes to the sense of evolution, allowing listeners to follow streams of sound as they separate, merge, and transform across the listening space. Each process extends the possibilities contained within the original material.

    One particularly striking example involved a large gamelan-like passage that emerges later in the composition. Wishart was careful to explain that he had not set out with the intention of creating a gamelan ensemble from whisky glasses. The possibility emerged through experimentation. Once discovered, however, it became a major structural feature of the work. Earlier sections began functioning as anticipations. Later sections reflected upon what had been revealed. Relationships between different materials gradually became apparent. The composition developed not through the execution of a predetermined blueprint but through recognising patterns that emerged during the process itself.

    A similar principle governs some of the work’s largest sonic landscapes. Through extensive transformation, the original material eventually produces textures that evoke oceans and breaking waves. These sounds are not realistic recordings of the sea, nor are they intended to be. Their effectiveness lies in the way they balance abstraction and association. Listeners recognise qualities that resemble waves while remaining aware that they are hearing something more complex. The illusion never becomes complete, and that incompleteness is part of its fascination.

    Throughout the lecture, Wishart repeatedly returned to the importance of structure. Transformations alone are not enough. A composition requires relationships between events, phrases, sections, and larger formal shapes. To manage this complexity, he described working hierarchically. Individual sounds become events. Events become phrases. Phrases become sections. Sections become complete works. This approach allows material to remain flexible throughout development. Elements can be revised, expanded, condensed, or reorganised without losing their connection to the broader structure.

    An equally revealing observation concerned sounds that might initially appear unsuccessful. Students often assume that every sound within a composition must be remarkable. Wishart suggested otherwise. Certain sounds function primarily as connections. They establish continuity, provide context, or prepare the listener for future developments. Their significance lies not in their individual impact but in their contribution to larger processes. The value of a sound cannot always be judged in isolation.

    Looking back across the lecture, what emerges most clearly is not a philosophy of technology but a philosophy of listening. Software matters. Technical processes matter. Spectral transformations, distortions, interpolations, filters, and spatial manipulations all play important roles. Yet they ultimately serve a larger purpose. They create opportunities to discover possibilities hidden within sounds themselves.

    For students of sound design, composition, and audio production, this may be the lecture’s most valuable lesson. Creativity is often imagined as the ability to invent entirely new ideas. Wishart’s work suggests something slightly different. New ideas may emerge through paying closer attention to existing ones. A familiar sound may contain far more than it initially reveals. The challenge is learning how to listen deeply enough, experiment patiently enough, and remain curious enough to discover what it might become.

    In that sense, Imago is more than a composition about metamorphosis. It demonstrates a way of thinking about sound itself. Every sound contains unrealised possibilities. Given enough imagination, patience, and exploration, even the simplest of sources can become an entire world.

  • How Does Sound Change Meaning? Michael Begg on Context, Sound Art, and Listening

    Michael Begg

    A dog growling. A tram brake. A crowd. A gust of wind. None of these sounds are particularly remarkable on their own. Yet remove them from their original contexts, place them into new relationships, and they can become something entirely different. A crowd can become threatening. Machinery can sound ritualistic. Environmental recordings can acquire symbolic meanings. Familiar sounds can begin behaving in unfamiliar ways.

    Michael Begg’s guest lecture repeatedly returned to this possibility. Although the talk touched upon theatre, recording, installation, soundscape, listening, and sound art, a deeper question seemed to connect them all: how does sound change meaning when it is removed from one context and placed into another?

    As an Edinburgh Napier alumnus whose work spans sound design, sound art, theatre, installation, recording, and performance, Begg described a practice that resists easy categorisation. Throughout the lecture, sounds rarely remained fixed within the roles normally assigned to them. Recordings became artistic material. Environmental sounds became narrative devices. Ambiences acquired symbolic significance. Boundaries between documentation and invention, reality and fiction, atmosphere and storytelling repeatedly began to blur. Rather than treating these ambiguities as problems requiring resolution, Begg appeared to embrace them as opportunities for discovery.

    Conventional discussions of sound design often emphasise clarity. Sound helps audiences understand where they are, what they are looking at, and how events relate to one another. It can establish location, direct attention, reinforce emotion, and support narrative. Much of Begg’s work points towards a different possibility. Sound can also be used to create uncertainty. Rather than helping audiences settle into a stable interpretation of the world, it can encourage them to question relationships between sounds, places, memories, and meanings. Listening becomes less a process of receiving information and more a process of exploration.

    Underlying this approach is a simple observation. Sounds rarely possess fixed meanings of their own. A sound acquires significance through context. A growling dog heard in a park on a sunny afternoon communicates something different from the same growl heard through a wall in the middle of the night. A crowd may suggest celebration, protest, danger, belonging, anonymity, or threat depending upon where it is heard and what surrounds it. Even seemingly ordinary sounds become surprisingly unstable once they are removed from their expected environments. Meaning emerges not solely from individual sounds but from the relationships established between them.

    Beneath many of the lecture’s examples sat a recurring fascination with recording itself. Capturing a sound does more than preserve it. It removes it from the moment that produced it and makes it available for entirely new purposes. Once a sound has been recorded, it can be relocated, layered, manipulated, combined with other sounds, and assigned functions that its original source could never have anticipated. A recording ceases to be merely evidence that something happened. It becomes creative material in its own right.

    That perspective helps explain Begg’s interest in the early history of recording technologies. His discussion of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph was not simply a historical diversion. What appeared to fascinate him was the possibility that recording did not always imply playback. Sound could be captured without being heard again. Listening, memory, recording, and time were once connected in very different ways. Reflecting on those early technologies encourages a broader appreciation of how profoundly recording has reshaped human relationships with sound.

    For most of human history, sounds were inseparable from the moments that produced them. A voice existed only while somebody was speaking. A performance existed only while it was being performed. Once the event ended, the sound disappeared. Recording altered that relationship fundamentally. Sounds could survive their sources. Moments could return. Listeners could revisit events that no longer existed. This transformation changed more than preservation. It also altered memory itself. Human memory rarely reproduces experiences exactly. Memories fade, merge, distort, and become entangled with later experiences. A familiar place remembered from childhood often feels different when revisited years later. Recording introduced a different relationship with the past. A voice could remain unchanged long after the speaker had aged. A place could continue sounding as it once did despite having been physically transformed. A recording therefore occupies an unusual position between presence and absence. The original event has disappeared, yet traces of it remain available for repeated listening.

    Seen in this way, recordings are never simply sounds. They are fragments of moments that no longer exist. Once detached from their original contexts, however, those fragments become remarkably flexible. A recording may function as documentation, artistic material, environmental texture, historical evidence, memory, or narrative device. Meaning depends not only upon what the sound is but upon how it is encountered. The same recording may communicate entirely different things when placed into different environments and relationships.

    Place introduces another layer of complexity. Every environment possesses its own sonic identity. A railway station, a church, a forest, a city street, a factory floor, and a theatre foyer each encourage different expectations about what listeners are likely to hear. Sound designers often work by reinforcing those expectations, helping audiences orient themselves within a world. Much of Begg’s work appears interested in exploring what happens when those expectations become unstable.

    Sounds frequently carry traces of the places from which they originated. A recording made within a large reverberant space retains evidence of that architecture. Urban recordings contain clues about movement, infrastructure, and activity. Environmental recordings reveal information about weather, geography, and ecology. Once such sounds are relocated into unfamiliar contexts, listening becomes an encounter between multiple places simultaneously: the place where the sound was recorded, the place where it is being presented, and the imagined place being constructed within the listener’s mind.

    Environmental sound occupies a particularly important position within this framework. Rather than treating such material as a backdrop to more significant events, Begg frequently treats it as artistic material. A distant vehicle, birdsong, footsteps, fragments of conversation, wind, or the resonance of a particular space can all become meaningful elements within a listening experience. These sounds do not simply establish realism. They influence how every other sound is perceived. Context becomes expressive. Relationships become as important as individual sonic events. Sound design shifts from creating isolated sounds to shaping the conditions through which sounds acquire meaning.

    Black Sky White provided a particularly fertile environment for exploring these ideas. Long before working with the Moscow-based theatre company, Begg encountered their production Bertrand’s Toys during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The experience left a lasting impression. Years later, after eventually establishing contact with artistic director Dmitry Artyupin, he found himself contributing to productions that demanded precisely the kind of boundary-crossing approach that characterises his broader practice. Creative directions often arrived as poetic images rather than technical specifications. Symbolic ideas frequently took precedence over practical descriptions. Sound design therefore became a process of interpretation and exploration rather than implementation alone.

    The production Omega served as the lecture’s central case study. Describing the work in purely narrative terms proves difficult. Circus imagery, tarot symbolism, mythology, ritual, biblical references, apocalypse, and transformation all intersect within a highly stylised theatrical environment. Yet the production itself is perhaps less interesting than the questions it raises about listening.

    Central to Begg’s discussion was the idea of “total theatre”. In this approach, the performance does not begin when the lights go down and end when the audience leaves their seats. The audience’s experience starts much earlier. Sounds encountered while entering the venue become part of the work. Audio in bars and foyers contributes to atmosphere. Environmental details shape expectations before the formal performance begins. Sound therefore extends beyond the stage, helping construct an entire experiential world rather than merely supporting individual scenes.

    Consequences for sound design follow naturally from this perspective. If audiences begin constructing interpretations before the formal performance starts, then every sonic detail becomes potentially meaningful. The boundary between performance and environment begins to dissolve. A sound encountered before entering the auditorium may later acquire significance within the performance itself. Atmospheres established early continue shaping perception long afterwards. Such an approach feels particularly appropriate for a production such as Omega. Tarot imagery, mythological references, ritual structures, and apocalyptic themes thrive on uncertainty. Clear explanations often diminish their power. Sound therefore becomes a means of sustaining ambiguity rather than resolving it. Audiences are encouraged to inhabit a world that feels coherent without becoming entirely predictable. The experience resembles exploration more than observation.

    Another revealing aspect of the lecture was Begg’s description of collecting sounds without necessarily knowing how they would eventually be used. Several examples involved recordings, objects, or sonic experiments that remained dormant for months or even years before finding a purpose. A recording session therefore becomes something more than asset creation. It becomes a process of building a library of possibilities.

    This attitude feels closely connected to the broader themes running throughout the lecture. If sounds can change meaning when placed into new contexts, then a recording’s future significance can never be fully predicted at the moment it is captured. A sound designer may record a piece of machinery, an unusual object, a resonant space, or an environmental detail for one reason only to discover later that it functions far more effectively in an entirely different role. The recording becomes a resource for future reinterpretation.

    Viewed in this light, sound libraries begin to resemble archives of unrealised possibilities. Every recording carries multiple potential meanings. The creative challenge lies not simply in finding sounds but in discovering unexpected relationships between them.

    Sound collage offered perhaps the clearest demonstration of this approach. Dogs growling, rattling chains, distant crowds, machinery, storms, radio fragments, poetry, animal calls, and tram brakes all appeared within evolving sonic environments designed to produce uncertainty. None of these sounds are inherently unusual. Their significance lies in the relationships established between them. A tram brake normally belongs to a particular place and context. A crowd recording carries assumptions about social activity. Animal sounds imply specific environments. Once removed from their expected settings and combined in unfamiliar ways, these sounds begin behaving differently. Listeners search for explanations. They attempt to organise the material into a coherent world.

    The effectiveness of these collages does not arise from any individual sound. A chain heard in isolation remains a chain. A tram brake remains a tram brake. What matters is the moment when such sounds begin interacting with one another. A mechanical sound may acquire ritualistic associations when placed alongside spoken poetry. An environmental recording may begin to feel mythological when surrounded by unfamiliar textures. A crowd may initially suggest celebration before gradually becoming threatening. Meanings shift continually as new sounds enter the environment and alter relationships between existing elements. The audience is therefore not simply decoding information but repeatedly revising its understanding of the world being presented. Every new sound has the potential to reorganise the listener’s interpretation of everything that came before it.

    Listening itself consequently becomes a creative act. Hearing is often treated as a process of receiving information, yet Begg’s work suggests something more complicated. Listeners continuously construct explanations for what they hear. A crowd implies a location. A chain implies an object. A tram brake implies a city. Audiences unconsciously assemble these fragments into coherent worlds. Sound design can therefore work by providing information, though it can also work by destabilising information. Once familiar sounds appear in unfamiliar relationships, the listener’s confidence begins to erode. The world remains intelligible, though only partially. Listening becomes an active process of negotiation and discovery.

    Ambiguity remained one of the lecture’s recurring themes. Are particular sounds part of the fictional world? Are they symbolic? Are they memories? Are they environmental details? Are they artistic interventions? Such questions often remain unresolved. Rather than reducing ambiguity, the sound design actively cultivates it. The distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic sound therefore becomes especially important. Theatre, film, and television often depend upon relatively stable relationships between sounds that belong to the fictional world and sounds added for dramatic effect. Begg’s work repeatedly challenges that stability. Environmental recordings acquire symbolic meanings. Atmospheric textures begin behaving like narrative devices. Sounds migrate between functions. Familiar categories begin to collapse.

    Seen from this perspective, the connection to sound art becomes much clearer. Much sound art is concerned with context, perception, listening, and the reassignment of meaning. A sound heard in one environment may communicate something entirely different when relocated elsewhere. Meaning emerges not solely from the sound itself but from the conditions under which it is encountered. Begg’s work appears to operate according to similar principles. The sounds themselves matter, though their relationships matter just as much.

    What emerged most clearly from the lecture was a particular way of thinking about listening. Sound becomes less a collection of discrete objects and more a network of relationships. Recording, soundscape, installation, theatre, environmental sound, narrative, and abstraction all contribute to the same broader project. The objective is not simply to create sounds but to shape how audiences experience the worlds those sounds inhabit.

    A central insight running through the entire lecture is that the meaning of a sound is never fixed. Sounds acquire significance through relationships, environments, expectations, memories, and the other sounds that surround them. Remove a sound from one context and place it into another, and its meaning may change completely. A recording therefore carries more than acoustic information. It carries traces of places, moments, and experiences that continue shaping interpretation long after the original event has disappeared.

    Sound design, in this context, becomes more than the creation of individual sonic events. It becomes the construction of conditions through which listeners make sense of the world. Places overlap. Memories become entangled with present experiences. Familiar sounds acquire unfamiliar meanings. Audiences find themselves navigating environments that feel recognisable yet strangely uncertain.

    For Michael Begg, the most interesting creative opportunities emerge precisely within that uncertainty. Sound ceases to function as a background element supporting events occurring elsewhere. Instead, it becomes a medium through which relationships are negotiated, meanings continually shift, and worlds gradually take shape through the act of listening itself.

  • Speaking into Spaces: Lou Mallozzi on Language, Sound, and Public Architecture

    Lou Mallozzi

    We often think of speech as a way of transmitting information from one person to another. Someone speaks, someone listens, and meaning moves between them. Language therefore appears relatively straightforward. Words describe things, explanations clarify ideas, and speech communicates intentions. Yet speaking also does something else that often receives much less attention. Voices establish relationships. A person standing quietly in a crowded room occupies space in one way, though speaking suddenly reorganises that same environment. Attention shifts. Distances feel altered, while public and private boundaries become less stable. Speech does not simply move through spaces. It also changes them.

    This broader relationship between sound, language, and space formed a recurring concern throughout an online guest lecture delivered by Lou Mallozzi, a Chicago-based sound artist whose work moves across performance, installation, moving image, and public intervention. Although the projects discussed during the lecture varied considerably in form, common questions repeatedly surfaced beneath them. What happens once language stops functioning simply as communication? What happens when speech becomes material rather than message? How do voices alter relationships between people and places?

    Mallozzi described some of these ideas through the notion of an “architectonics of public speech”. Rather than treating speech as something moving cleanly between speaker and listener, this perspective considers speech as something capable of creating structures around it. Speaking establishes relationships, gathers attention, and reshapes environments around it. Architecture repeatedly appeared throughout the lecture, though not always in conventional ways. Buildings establish boundaries physically through walls, rooms, doors, and passages. Sound establishes different kinds of structures. Voices create temporary boundaries of attention, while amplified speech can reorganise atmospheres entirely. A room filled with silent individuals does not feel identical to one organised around speech. The physical dimensions remain unchanged, though experiences of proximity, distance, and social relationships begin shifting once voices enter the environment.

    These ideas became particularly visible in discussion of La Patria Patrisci Patri Partiti, translated as The Fatherland Gives Birth to Departed Fathers. The work emerged partly through reflections on Mallozzi’s father’s experiences growing up in fascist Italy before emigrating to the United States. Historical documents, fascist texts, and autobiographical material became intertwined within the work. Materials themselves were not simply presented directly. Mallozzi instead described subjecting language to processes of subtraction through the removal of letters taken from his own family name.

    Initially this process appears procedural, though the consequences become more complicated once language itself begins breaking apart. Certain words survive while others collapse into fragments. Meaning becomes unstable. Speech no longer functions simply as a transparent carrier of ideas. Language begins behaving differently once removed from its usual role. Words become sounds, rhythms, repetitions, and interruptions. Fragments acquire physical presence independent of straightforward meaning. Listeners are no longer simply absorbing information. They become aware of language itself as material.

    Performance introduced another layer to these relationships through carefully controlled microphone feedback generated from microphones positioned within the mouth itself. Feedback was not presented simply as an acoustic effect. Mouths function as resonant chambers, while rooms similarly become chambers of resonance. Internal and external forms of architecture begin reflecting one another. The body itself begins appearing as another form of acoustic space rather than simply the source from which speech emerges.

    Questions surrounding public space appeared again through works such as Outpost, Peers, and Didact, which approached different environments though repeatedly returned to similar concerns involving observation, attention, and collective listening. Outpost involved Mallozzi standing above public spaces equipped with a telescope and amplified microphone system while verbally describing individuals moving below in real time. Descriptions themselves often remained entirely ordinary. Someone reached into a pocket, adjusted clothing, or walked across an open area. Little of obvious importance occurred.

    Yet amplification transformed the situation entirely.

    Nothing new was being revealed. Individuals already knew what they were doing, while others nearby could already see it happening. Information itself therefore became almost irrelevant. Attention had become the important factor.

    Public spaces frequently depend upon a delicate balance between visibility and anonymity. Most of the time these arrangements remain unnoticed precisely because they operate so quietly. People move through stations, streets, galleries, and public squares while occupying an unusual position between presence and absence. We recognise that others exist around us, though frequently without examining them closely. Shared environments therefore involve a form of social agreement in which attention remains distributed and unstable. Outpost disturbed that agreement. Someone who had previously existed as part of the background suddenly became the centre of attention.

    Surveillance formed part of this discussion, though not entirely in familiar ways. Contemporary surveillance systems frequently operate quietly from concealed positions. Cameras observe without drawing attention to themselves. Outpostinstead exaggerated observation until it became impossible to ignore. The telescope almost became absurd in its visibility. Observation itself became public.

    Related works such as Peers and Didact returned to similar concerns through multiple simultaneous voices. Speech that would normally appear as private reading or individual statements instead became layered, collective, and unstable. Meanings drifted in and out of focus as voices overlapped, while explanations gradually became textures and descriptions became atmospheres. A single voice often carries assumptions of coherence and individuality. Multiple voices instead create shifting relationships where language repeatedly moves between intelligibility and abstraction.

    Later works extended these concerns into moving image and impossible tasks. Screenplay 1-1 involved watching films with the sound removed while attempting to verbally describe everything appearing on screen in real time. Such a task immediately creates difficulty. Language struggles to keep pace with visual experience. Camera movements, gestures, editing, and events unfold more rapidly than speech comfortably allows.

    Mallozzi described many projects of this kind as involving impediments or impossible conditions. Failure therefore ceases to become something requiring avoidance. Contemporary discussions surrounding creative work often assume that limitations are problems waiting to be removed. Better technologies frequently promise greater control, speed, and precision. The projects discussed throughout the lecture repeatedly suggested something slightly different. Constraints sometimes generate possibilities that unrestricted situations would never produce. Impossible tasks force unexpected decisions. Gaps emerge between intention and outcome. Material appears that nobody initially planned.

    Throughout the lecture, speech repeatedly occupied a position between structure and instability. Voices organise attention while simultaneously disrupting it. Language communicates while also becoming detached from communication itself. Sound establishes relationships while continually reshaping them.

    Perhaps one of the more striking ideas emerging from the lecture involved recognising that speaking rarely involves transmitting information alone. Voices connect bodies, spaces, histories, and listeners around them. Speech therefore becomes something more than information moving between individuals. Voices gather people together, establish temporary structures of attention, alter atmospheres, and occasionally make familiar environments seem unfamiliar again.

    Much of this activity normally passes unnoticed. Conversations emerge and disappear. Announcements briefly reorganise public spaces. Voices drift across rooms before fading into the background once more. Listening often feels passive, though Mallozzi’s work repeatedly suggested something rather different. Speaking changes environments, while listening changes our relationships with them. Spaces may appear stable around us, though many of the ways we experience them are continually being reorganised through sound.

  • Listening Between Worlds: Dr Ximena Alarcón on Deep Listening and Sonic Migrations

    Dr Ximena Alarcón

    Migration is often described through borders, journeys, and distances travelled. People leave cities, cross countries, settle elsewhere, and gradually build new lives. Less often do we ask what migration sounds like. Yet movement between places changes more than physical location. Familiar sounds disappear from everyday life while new ones slowly become woven into routine experience. Voices remain in memory long after people and places have gone, and certain sounds can unexpectedly return us somewhere we thought we had left behind.

    During an online guest lecture, Dr Ximena Alarcón explored these less visible experiences through sound, asking whether listening might reveal dimensions of migration that geography alone struggles to capture. Drawing on her own experiences of moving from Colombia to Europe, alongside years of artistic and research practice, she explored how listening can become a way of understanding relationships between people, places, and memory.

    Dr Alarcón is a sound artist, researcher, and Deep Listening practitioner whose work combines collaborative performance, sound art, memory, and digital technologies. Across these projects and reflections, one idea repeatedly surfaced: listening is not simply an act of hearing sounds that already exist around us. It can also become a way of tracing experiences, understanding relationships, and making sense of where we belong.

    Many of these ideas first developed through an apparently ordinary experience. After growing up in Bogotá and later encountering underground transport systems in European cities, Alarcón became increasingly interested in the environments created by these systems. Most people barely notice them. Announcements repeat endlessly, trains arrive and disappear, and routine eventually turns entire spaces into background activity. Daily commuting often becomes something we stop consciously hearing. Yet beneath that familiarity, people continue forming subtle relationships with the spaces around them, carrying emotions, frustrations, routines, and memories through these environments day after day. Alarcón became interested in what kinds of traces these repeated experiences might leave behind.

    This question developed into Sounding Underground, a project exploring underground systems in London, Mexico City, and Paris. Participants recorded journeys, selected sounds they considered meaningful, and reflected on the experiences attached to them. Rather than documenting transport systems themselves, the project explored relationships formed through listening.

    “What memories have people when they listen during routine journeys?”

    Responses revealed something surprising. Participants recognised common rhythms and textures across different cities while also identifying details that felt distinctive to each place. One participant described experiencing the three underground systems as though they formed a single connected network rather than separate environments. Sounds that would usually disappear into the background of everyday life suddenly felt more intimate. Mechanical noises, station announcements, and passing voices acquired emotional significance, becoming linked with memory and familiarity in ways that might otherwise remain unnoticed.

    Questions that initially centred on transport systems gradually grew more personal. Listening repeatedly to memories of movement raised another question that redirected Alarcón’s work entirely: “I would like to listen to my own migration.” Attention moved away from cities themselves and towards the experiences carried through them. The question was no longer simply how environments sound, but how memories, identities, and relationships continue shaping listening long after movement has taken place. This transition led Alarcón towards Deep Listening, a practice developed by Pauline Oliveros that encourages expanded awareness of sound, body, memory, and environment.

    Deep Listening extends beyond identifying sounds within a space. Listening becomes connected with silence, bodily awareness, dreams, movement, and relationships with others. Alarcón described keeping dream diaries as part of this process, recording fragments of dreams before they disappeared into waking life. Listening was no longer directed only towards external environments. It became a way of tracing relationships between memories and experiences that might otherwise pass unnoticed. Migration consequently began to appear as something more complex than movement between locations. Memories from different places continue existing alongside present experiences, while voices from the past remain present within current surroundings. Different versions of ourselves emerge over time rather than simply replacing one another.

    Language became an important part of this exploration. During the lecture, Alarcón reflected on the experience of moving between English and Spanish, describing how speaking different languages can sometimes feel like moving between different versions of oneself.

    “When you speak more than one language, you start to create a different personality when you switch between languages.”

    Many people who speak more than one language immediately recognise this feeling. Words change, though something else changes as well. Rhythm changes, gesture changes, and emotional expression often shifts in subtle ways. Certain ideas suddenly become easier to express while others seem to disappear entirely. Alarcón described this through the idea of the “nomadic voice”, suggesting that migrants often inhabit spaces that are neither entirely one place nor another. Instead, memories, identities, and experiences overlap and remain in motion, creating what she described as in-between spaces.

    Questions about memory and identity eventually expanded beyond individual experience. If listening could reveal something about personal migration, could it also create meaningful connections between people separated by geography? This question shaped projects such as Letters and Bridges and Migratory Dreams, where participants in different countries exchanged letters, shared dreams, recorded sounds, and developed collaborative sonic performances across distance. Unexpectedly, participants often described feeling close to people they had never physically met.

    One of the most memorable moments emerged during Migratory Dreams. Participants in Bogotá perceived London as sonically dense and heavily urban. During performances they instinctively introduced sounds of nature, almost as if attempting to return something they felt migrants living in London had lost. Across continents, participants were not simply exchanging sounds or creating performances. Listening had become a way of caring for distant people through shared experience.

    Although these projects emerged through experiences of migration, the ideas discussed throughout the lecture extend far beyond migration itself. Sound design often focuses on realism, immersion, and technical precision, yet Alarcón’s work suggested broader possibilities. Sound can preserve memory, support identity, and create relationships between people separated by distance.

    Migration, in this sense, may involve more than moving between places. Physical journeys eventually end, yet the quieter journeys shaped by memory, identity, and listening often continue long afterwards. Alarcón’s lecture suggested that people do not simply travel across spaces. They also continue travelling through experiences, relationships, and sounds that remain with them long after they arrive.