Thursday 15th March 2012
Door Times : 8pm
£4 on the door
Maps are systems for ordering and orienting ourselves within a landscape. Visual maps shape our ideas of both the physical and virtual world, but they can also distort perception to fit the agendas they serve, whether economic, cultural, religious or political. Maps reinforce borders and carve up and colonise public space and activity. They obscure and misrepresent, as much as they explain and illuminate, the stratified contours of 21st century topographies.
Sound maps sidestep the compromised schematics of visual mapping by prioritising the sonification of urban and rural environments, dissolving artificial borders and reasserting the audio dimensions of the public sphere.
Using techniques developed by field and location recordists, and combining them with online and mobile communications technologies, sound maps correct our perception of the world and reveal new realms of sonic activity. Where visual maps erase sensorial information, dividing space into discreet zones that isolate human experience, sound maps shake apart that zoning, paving the way for a new generation of DIY cartographers, architects and artists to expand our understanding of urban communities, the natural world, even historical epochs, outer space and the forces of globalisation, by perceptualising data as sound.
In this edition of The Wire Salon, artist Kathy Hinde, Ian Rawes of the London Sound Survey, and Joseph Kohlmaier of London Metropolitan University’s Department of Architecture and Spatial Design will debate the philosophies and practices of sound mapping, exploring both its limits and potentiality. The discussion will be illustrated with audio and visual clips.
Plus: a special audience-participation sound map quiz. Prizes will be awarded!
"[A sound map] reaches across the city's geographic, economic, educational, cultural and racial divides. It is at once a historical record and a subjective representation of the city. It is what each user wishes it to be and it is ever growing, ever changing and totally interactive." – NY Sound Map
"Amongst the urban hubbub there's information about who lives here, what they get up to, how they enjoy themselves and what they believe in. Sounds come in fashions from singing canaries and windchimes to car horns that play Old Dixie. They announce developments in technology, the city's growth, and social and demographic change. They tell us of shifts in the make-up and scattering of London's wildlife. Listening to a recording of the sounds of a place or event gets the imagination working and recreates some of the sense of being there.” – London Sound Survey
London Sound Survey
Kathy Hinde's Echo Location project
MUSARC
The Wire Salon is a monthly series of events, hosted by The Wire magazine, dedicated to the fine art and practice of thinking and talking about music. The events consist of talks, panel discussions, film screenings and DJ sets.
The Wire website
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