Urban Soundwalking in the Natural and Built Environments of Chicago
Friday, February 14, 2020: 9:50 AM
Lake Erie (Hilton Chicago)
Aural Architecture: Hearing is the Other Half of How We Know and Hear Below: Listening to Chicago Underground are two urban sound and public engagement projects undertaken by NON:op Open Opera Works and Midwest Society of Acoustic Ecology that amplify our subjective experience of community and our surroundings. In both of these projects the goal is to transcend the static outer visual experience of our surroundings by actively engaging with the dynamic and immersive features of the natural and built environments. Because what we see is always “outside” ourselves, it is up to our ears to complete the experience. In this presentation I will talk about Hear Below.
Jonathan Rabin in Soft City, an account of London life in the early 1970s, writes: "The city was more like a theatre, a series of stages upon which individuals could work their own distinctive magic while performing a multiplicity of roles." Hear Below provides an opportunity to experience the diversity of the city in an underground environment. While the city above is not mirrored directly below, the microcosm of the Pedway, with its seemingly endless maze of corridors and labyrinthine passageways, reflects its energy and abundance.
Jonathan Rabin in Soft City, an account of London life in the early 1970s, writes: "The city was more like a theatre, a series of stages upon which individuals could work their own distinctive magic while performing a multiplicity of roles." Hear Below provides an opportunity to experience the diversity of the city in an underground environment. While the city above is not mirrored directly below, the microcosm of the Pedway, with its seemingly endless maze of corridors and labyrinthine passageways, reflects its energy and abundance.
What can we learn about the city by experiencing and listening to this most ordinary of places? What unifies the Pedway and the city above? Can we come to a greater understanding of the life of the city by observing and noting the myriad of individual performances in the everyday human activities below?