Performing sound in place : field recording, walking and mobile transmission

• Main Author: Chaves, Rui Miguel Paiva
• Published: Queen's University Belfast 2013
• Subjects: 709.040755
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.602470

This thesis deals with the constitution of a practice that is characterized as a performative demonstration of a process - the "making of place". This is framed by the presence of a sonic performer who explores the potential of gesture, text, technology and place in constructing a creative relationship with everyday life. This practice-based research consists of a written thesis and 12 original performance works in areas of work that have been designated as walking, field recording and mobile transmission. What does it mean to perform sound? As an artist who began his career creating sound design and improvising with performance artists, choreographers and theatre directors, I came to understand that every aspect of the construction of an event matters: body, text, place and sound. It is this interdisciplinarity - alongside the move from conventional performance spaces to outdoors - that prompts me to propose a post-medium approach, considering everything that happens in and around sound as significant to its ' performance. This approach concentrates on the ethics of constructing a site-specific interaction between place, performer and sonic experience; that focuses on sonic performance as a relational site of encounter instead of reception; explores the intersubjective, multi-sensorial and creative potential of the subject; and considers the 'noise' of thoughts and existence not as a distraction from entering a sonic experience, but ultimately as an essential part of listening. Performing sound thus complicates traditional separations between music and sound art, as a result of medium specificity or context , and becomes a process in which the expression of performance is, at its core, a reflection of how to present sound. This reflection is crucial to very expansion of the notion of performance in everyday life.