íchos

Ìchos |  sounds on the sidelines is a project entirely hinged on the concept of sound and the marginality of sound that took place on May 26,27 and 28, 2023 in Taranto, southern Italy. In the press release I called it “a non-project” in a somewhat provocative way because often in the past it has seemed almost necessary to have to design something to sustain its existence. If the purpose of a project is the project itself we are faced with a cosmic vacuum in terms of content.
We do not live in order to be able to tell the lives of others but we should tell the lives of others with the purpose of being able to have a relationship with these people. What matters, therefore, is interaction.

For all these reasons Ìchos navigates without scientific placement between workshop, art residency and alternative vacation.

Ultimately, we are talking , as is customary on this site, about soundscape, but in a somewhat broader sense, also including the effects of anthropic elements within the environmental context analysed. Effects not only directly attributable to the environment (urban, rural) but also to the very condition of the inhabitants of the areas analysed, in a perpetual cycle of human conditioning on the environment.

The working group consisted of myself and the photographer Roberta Trani, as well as the project participants: Vincenzo Fortunato, Luigi Massari, Serena Bertola, Vito Campobasso, Riccardo Sacco, Stefano Bonifazi,  Francesco Napoleoni, Vittorio Gervasi.

We are talking about a coastal lagoon that stretches for just over 20 square kilometres and which we were able to visit for a small stretch, first in the countryside behind and then near the entrance to the so-called WWF Nature Oasis ‘Palude La Vela’ .

The naturalistic sounds in this second location seemed somewhat sacrificed in the first half of the stretch, due to the proximity of the road and thus the passage of cars. As you get further in, the situation improves, but the feeling is that the acoustic richness is probably related to the transit of the different animal species (flamingos, herons above all) and that they were not present at the time we were there. However, the wide dynamic range of the place was audible through headphones, there was no wind but a slight hissing sound that occasionally caressed the ears, perhaps carried by the sea that could be seen in the distance.

By contrast, the experience in the countryside behind gave a visual impact that was perhaps slightly less poignant but more certainly generous in terms of sound variety. We travelled along the stretch of a long dead end track that connected the Taranto arsenal to Buffoluto more than 50 years ago, an area designated as a military settlement for the storage, management and logistics of naval munitions.

In this part of the journey, the rustic sounds of an early summer (dictated by an unexpected heat given the previous rainy days) prevailed, offering a bit of everything one would expect from the catalogue: insects and buzzing for all palates, abandoned dwellings and their resonances, more muffled sounds captured in the dense vegetation down the slopes of a blade.
An undoubtedly high-fidelity dynamic picture that gave us the opportunity to distinctly hear all the recorded elements.

The isolated island

The Old Town has been pushed to the margins over the years from a social point of view, isolated one might say, when it was already endowed with its own intrinsic isolation, the actual conformation with which it was born already being that of a small island connected to the (new) town by the swing bridge on one side and the stone bridge on the other.

The acoustic isolation on the other hand sometimes results, in the recordings made near the central areas above all, in an interesting phenomenon of (almost) cancellation of the sea and harbour areas (despite being only a few metres away), and the various ruins scattered here and there sometimes act as a sounding board for urban voices. Metaphorically, it might be useful to imagine this phenomenon as an urban diaphragm, as if the old city wants to show itself alive and breathing.

I experienced a similar phenomenon in Trieste city some years ago, where I could see how the sound of traffic along the seafront completely shielded the city from the possibility of hearing sounds of the port, the sea, and seagulls.

Proximity, in essence, is not a sufficient factor to guarantee high-fidelity listening to a sound source, even if it is clearly present.

Variables such as architectural barriers or invisible barriers must be taken into account. Roads are not barriers in the eyes of many but to the ears they are in fact, through the constant flow of cars they acoustically separate 2 adjacent areas.

audiovisual synthesis

In the audiovisual montage below, I have attempted to bring together all the work done in those days at the end of May 2023. From the video footage of my friend, photographer Roberta Trani, to the field recordings captured by the working group, which I thank.

This work is a kind of synthesis of about 9 minutes with respect to the live electroacoustic performance of no less than 40 minutes on the evening of 28 May, in the hypogeum of Palazzo Ulmo and with a sold-out audience of about 70 people (!) – which for an electroacoustic performance is truly something miraculous and which I will remember fondly!

The piece is constructed using several layers, represented by the environmental recordings, and in some cases having a mere descriptive function. Often these ambient sound layers are not in sync with the overlaying video clip, but rather are part of the same thematic cluster. In several cases there are musical inserts that I have realised by means of guitars, synths, piano and the reworking of the same layers by means of granular synthesis. The attempt was to render a representation that was in balance between the bare and raw listening part and that more dictated by the suggestion induced also by the visual part.

by Roberta Trani

click to enlarge