Nothing connects us but imagined sound

Mitchell Akiyama

pp. 113-129

in: Milena Droumeva, Randolph Jordan (eds), Sound, media, ecology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Abstract

Listening to a well-executed field recording, one can feel uncannily transported to another time and place nested in the here and now. Field recordings' capacity to seemingly open a window onto elsewhere and else-when seems to grant them a power to stand as evidence, as proof, as documentation that something happened somewhere. This chapter addresses the function that field recordings have played in media practices aimed at creating and sustaining communities. It does so by way of focusing on the work done by the Vancouver-based World Soundscape Project in the 1970s, specifically attending to the form they called the 'soundscape composition."