SOUNDSTAINABILITY – Making future from listening XI FKL Symposium on Soundscape – Lugano (CH) 4-5-6-7 October 2023

Sound is much more of an immersive and relational phenomena than we are accustomed to believing and usually admitting. There is no doubt that environmental sound represents a highly specific mode to learn about the world and its quality is a vital condition for human beings and for other animal species. Sound surrounds us and we create it. Animals use sound, producing it and obtaining information from it: moving through spaces, feeding, reproducing, defending themselves, playing. Humans extend this use to culture and its symbolic forms, within which sound plays a fundamental role. Sound is, indeed, part of our environmental systems and the listening and production of sounds register, reveal, and modify the processes within these systems. It is therefore important to pay attention to the present and future state of the sound world, to understand its equilibrium and ask if and why it is in a reciprocal relationship with the macro-processes of environmental, social and economic development. The sustainability of this reciprocal relationship is an essential prerogative today, that is the capacity of satisfying today’s needs without compromising the ability to do the same in the future. To listen, considering reality through an acoustic and multisensorial paradigm, in order to assess and build the planet’s future equilibria becomes a fundamental condition to be able to guarantee this principle of maintenance. This may involve a shift from considering realty through a principally “retinic” paradigm, where it is a static image, in which we are immersed and engaged in a complex system of relationships.

We invite researchers, artists, associations, stakeholders and interested groups, to participate by presenting a proposal related to one or more of the specific from those suggested below. At FKL Symposia scientific, poetic or artistic proposals are given equal importance. The partnership between SUPSI, RSI, UNIL and FKL, adopts this interdisciplinary approach to enable the emergence of novel visions of how sound and listening can contribute to our lives and worlds. We wish to favour experimental situations.

Themes

• Listen globally, act locally. Education as action.
• Sound, power, social justice.
• The sounds of places. New acoustic spaces and new forms of representation
• Production and consumption in artistic practices.
• Storytelling with sound. The language of media and audio-based narration.
• Sound as an ecological indicator.
• Human/non-human. The sound of biodiversity, beyond Anthropocene.

How to Participate

Authors, musicians, scientists, researchers, artists, students, can send proposals in the form of presentations, soundworks and compositions which can be both acousmatic and instrumental, field recordings, radioworks, sound installations, video, listening walks. Creative proposals can consist of the invention of games that forsee, in the way they take place or the game itself, the use of sound and listening.

Photography, maps, recording of the locations used for the installation, musical performance and the games will be available from 25th January 2023 at the following address: www.paesaggiosonoro.it/soundstainability/spaces.html The deadline for proposals is 30 March 2023.

For information on how to deliver proposals see the following address: www.paesaggiosonoro.it/soundstainability/call.html

For further information: paesaggiosonoro.it