Jordan Lacey

Sound Cartography Approaches to Urban Soundcape Research : CitySounds and Sites-of-Respite in the CBD of Melbourne.

This paper describes two related projects completed at SIAL Sound Studios at RMIT University. The first is the CitySounds project which was an interactive 3D Audio-Visual Cartography environment holding a community soundscape survey. The aim of the project was to investigate attitudes and awareness to a range of sounds and acoustic environments in Melbourne’s CBD. The virtual environment and survey also contained propositions for future acoustic design interventions, particularly for sites-of-respite. The second project describes a recently completed pilot study, seeking suitable locations in Melbourne’s CBD for actual Sites-of-Respite, using a combination of sound recordings, studio analysis and spatial analysis. While research approaches have been informed by listener-centered interactive representational mapping, speculations are made on future research to be informed by performative mapping, particularly emotional mapping, to augment sound design interventions to recompose the homogeneity of the striated soundscape.

Sonic placemaking: three approaches and ten attributes for the creation of enduring urban sound art installations

This article investigates the approaches and attributes of publicly situated sound installations which have achieved the status of permanency, and have attracted ongoing local, and even international, visitors. The article draws on international fieldwork in 2015 that documented several enduring sound installations in the United States, UK and Europe. Through an inductive process including listening exercises, sound recordings, observations and interviews, the analysis identifies three approaches to creating sound installations and ten attributes of operative sound installations. It is argued that by encouraging public listening, the discussed sound installations successfully establish a sensory connection between people and their environments. By extension, it is argued that this emergent sense of place is commensurate with the installations capacity to augment a pre-existing spirit of place. These findings culminate in a sonic placemaking tool for situating sound art installations in urban spaces. It is suggested that urban planners and designers can apply the presented sonic placemaking tool to augment a sites spirit of place, thereby affecting new experiences in everyday urban life.

contain yourself: technology, the city and atmospheric intervention:

This article considers how a creative intervention can augment and embellish the atmosphere of an urban industrial site. It builds on recent scholarship on atmospheres in human geography and architecture and on the potential for creative practice to investigate spatial and sensory experience by way of close attunement. To do so, it presents an account of a temporary public art installation, contain yourself, in two shipping containers on the Maribyrnong River in January 2015, a site adjacent to a heavy freight rail bridge and a Port of Melbourne container yard. The artwork was the result of experiments at a live test site of practice by four collaborators to sketch a responsive work in neon, sound, vibration and projection that took inspiration and content from its surroundings.