Marcus Leadley : Research



My research explores the relationship between environmental sound and language. R. Murray Schafer (1994: 7) describes the soundscape as, “any acoustic field of study. We may speak of a musical composition as a soundscape, or a radio programme as a soundscape or an acoustic environment as a soundscape.” It functions in a similar way to the term landscape from which it was adapted. A soundscape can be approached in terms of its individual acoustic features, it can be visually recorded using various mapping techniques. It can be recorded for analytical and artistic purposes. If we take one step back from the soundscape we find ourselves in aural space – which is the sonic characteristic of the natural, architectural or electroacoustic environment. This can be perceived in the moment when the wind drops in the valley, when we enter a deserted church or inside our headphones when the system noise becomes apparent as the music fades away. It is the product of distances, diffusion and reflection, topography, materials and technologies. And nested within this characteristic we have the human experience of the soundscape, all of our sound-making endeavours and forms of acoustic communication. My research suggests that our experience of aural space and the soundscape are so profoundly connected to our experience of the overall environment, and to what it is to be human that there is a direct relationship, established over millennia, between the ways in which we communicate, and the environment in which communication takes place. The research has led me to the following hypotheses: Without sound binding us in a dialogic relationship with our environment we would not have been able to develop inter-human sounds (i.e., language) in order to function as social beings.     

June 2010: Installation, Whitstable Biennale.
I will be running another iteration of the headphone installation, this time focused on the sounds of the coast, on the beach at Whitstable during the biennale’s opening weekend. Good attendance is again promised. This time the target audience is the general public and questionnaires will again be used for data collection.
Further information
 



 June 2010: AudioLab10.01: The Language of Place.
 I will also be coordinating and chairing a second Language of Place symposium as part of the Whitstable Biennale programme. This will be a condensed one-day event with sound walks and discussion in the morning and artist/academic talks in the afternoon. Peter Cusack, Jennie Savage, Duncan Whitely and I will speak.  
Further details.
Download poster [pdf]
Download programme [pdf]

June 2010: Installation, De Montfort University, Leicester.
I coordinated a version of my headphone installation – focussing on the sound of the urban environment – for the Sound, Site, Space and Play conference. Using the conference environment ensured a target audience of approximately 40 PhD students and academics. The experience of a range of mediated soundscapes – interventions into the sound of the site as well as sounds transplanted from other location – were sampled using questionnaires.
 
March 2010: AudioLab10: The Language of Place symposium.
A two day event coordinated as a joint venture with Labculture Limited/PVA MediaLab, an Arts Council RFO based in Bridport in Dorset. I programmed an afternoon session of artist/academic talks and listening opportunities into the Salt House at West Bay in Dorset, delivered the day’s introduction and chaired the event. The day’s morning session was the presentation of work by four artists involved in a week-long residency, each exploring different sonic aspects of the Dorset location. Work was presented by Rob Mullinder, Ivon Oats, Pali Meursault and Marc Yates. Afternoon presentations were made by: Jennie Savage, Peter Cusack and Duncan Whitely.  These speakers were chosen for the way their practices engage with sound and environment and I was able to interrogate their observations and experience along a trajectory defined by my research questions. Presentations, discussions and question and answer sessions were fully documented for future consideration.
 
The second day programme revolved around a trial series of three parallel soundwalks, each led by a facilitator and conducted with a different protocol. On the first walk people (led by Joe Stevens) were encouraged to observe and discuss the sound around them; on the second (Ivon Oats), participants were asked to proceed in silence and respond to the sonic environment by drawing or mark making. On the third walk (which I led) participants were asked to locate sounding objects and interact with them.  All walkers met up at the Salt House at the end of the walks and the different perspectives proved extremely interesting. However, discussions were informal and only partially documented, and extra time if being planned for the walk discussion section of AudioLab10.01 at Whitstable in June. Each walk was recorded and an unexpected outcome of the project has been the active engagement of three of the participants on the walk I coordinated. Adam Baker, Adrian Newton and Allan Upton are now remixing and editing these recordings. The idea is that I will do the same and we will then gather to discuss our observations of different listening/expressing aesthetics.
 
 February 2010: workshop and installation trial, Walsall Campus, University of Wolverhampton
A group of students took part in a sound observation, collection and processing exercise, which led to an informal trial of installation protocols in the sport hall on Walsall campus. This enabled me to demonstrate a primary aspect of research methodology and ‘road test’ the Max/MSP patches and wireless headphone system I have been developing. The results were encouraging, with much positive student feedback and technical comments that have fed back into the development of my process.    
 

Conference attendance:

 

Additional Workshops

Research Publications
Leadley, M. (2009) Book Review: Autumn Leaves, Sound and Environment in Artistic Practice, A. Carlyle, (ed.) in, Landscape Research Journal 34/4 pp. 479 - 505.
 
Leadley, M. (2009) The Language of Aural Space: Environmental Sound, Human Being and Experience, in, Hill, A,  & Wolfe, W.(eds), Proceedings of Sight, Sound, Space and Play, De Montfort University. Online at: http://www.mti.dmu.ac.uk/events-conferences/sssp2009/index.html
 
Leadley, M. (2009) The Language of Aural Space: Environmental Sound Being and Experience. in, Proceedings of  Euronoise,  CD ROM. St Albans: Institute Of Acoustics.


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