This Is Not A Soundwalk
“Noli Me Tangere” is a ‘sound walk’ around Brighton Museum and Art Gallery that has been commissioned by the Soundwaves Festival 2011.
There are, I guess, two places where the origins of the ‘soundwalk’ might be located. One of these can be found in the area that Max Neuhaus mapped out in his efforts to answer the riddle “Why limit listening to the concert hall? Instead of bringing these sounds into the hall, why not simply take the audience outside – a demonstration in situ?”. With hands stamped with the inky word ‘Listen’, Neuhaus would guide groups on tours “through their everyday environment.” Neuhaus’ extra-musical territory bears interesting affinities with the idea of “derive” or drift developed in the preceding decade by the French writer and activist Guy Debord.
The other area to which the notion of the ‘soundwalk’ can be traced back are the pedestrian acoustic explorations pursued by Hildegard Westerkamp and others associated with the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology. As Westerkamp’s 1974 essay “Soundwalking” bears eloquent testament, play could well be an active element in the soundwalk. However, more serious intentions were also at work, intentions that related to the opening up of our ears to a fuller engagement with the heard world.
“Noli Me Tangere” is not a soundwalk in either Neuhaus’ or Westerkamp’s sense. Instead, it functions as a kind of audio guide to the museum where the vocal commentary normally supplying interpretative information has all been stripped out. In place of the guide’s beautifully modulated and perfectly recorded voice there is a range of strange sounds: loud and quiet, soft and sharp, sudden and prolonged, literal and abstract, limpid and murky.
Although I’m registering a little distance here from what is normally understood by the term soundwalk, in other respects, the term is quite apposite.
For one thing, the encouragement will be for the museum visitor to keep moving - shifting from one spot to the next, retracing their steps and going off at tangents, listening to their headphones but also keeping half-an-ear open to the changing acoustic atmospheres that are already present in the galleries they travel through.
For another thing, while recording new material for “Noli Me Tangere” and while going through hard-drives full of the cast-off audio from previous projects, I’ve realised that my own relation to sound is very much that of the walker’s. There is little in my work, I’ve come belatedly to appreciate, of the patient setting up of the microphone and the cabling back to a safe distance. Re-listening to my recordings – new and old - while piecing together what will be the visitors’ soundtrack, I understand now that everything is hand-held and mobile. Not the microphone as careful snare placed at a hole in the wire fence but the microphone as butterfly net, swept around in a dizzy chase.





