The theme of this presentation is the exploration through the perspective of sound and listening of the so-called “Third Landscape”‘s places: abandoned places like left behind urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land, roadsides, shores, railroad embankments. Spaces that are different for extension and shape, but comparable in terms of absence of human activity. Places that are, anyway, a bulwark for the preservation of biological diversity.
Crossing these spaces through the phenomenological perspective offered by sound means to activate a methodological tool for exploring territories that produce a different sense of place that has more to do with experience: a sonic exploring of place as a social and political construct.
In this experience, “acoustic spaces are shared, conflictual, intimate, animate and energetic”, as George Revill has recently written, “combining points of focus with points of diffusion in ways that both contrast and compliment other sensory experiences of landscape”.
In this sense, acoustic exploration creates connections and differentiations across heterogeneous spaces and memories, leading to a reflection on how sound thought of as mediation can produce distinctive conceptions of landscape, engaging with the historical and geographical specificity of analyzed landscape, sound and listening practice.
All the sound works analyzed in this presentation show quite impressively how much more field recording can be as just a very fashionable attitude, what it can add to the descriptive layers of image and language in order to complete an impression because they “transmit a powerful sense of spatiality, atmosphere and timing” to say it with Peter Cusack’s words.
The definition of “Third Soundscape” concept is a further declination of the research conducted by Leandro Pisano on the new geographies of sound, as they are emerging from the redefinition of the concept of “territory” connected with the post-digital and post-global milieu where we are living in the contemporary age.