Project 1 Window Project is an exploration of the Soundscape of my living area in South Saigon, Vietnam. In response to the lockdown situation I intended to reconstruct through my imaginative responses the missing experience of listening to the ambient sounds. Audio manipulation through sound synthesis techniques as a conceptual approach has been used.


Thierry Bernard - PRS ASIA RMIT Melbourne - School of Design

CONTEXT
Living in Nha Be District, my window studio is located at the 25th floor. During the lockdown, I was listening and recording the sounds through the window, and I was thinking how I will do this research at the soundscape when the soundscape of the city is mainly absent. The notion of auditory imaginary started naturally to resonate within the practice.
Drawing on the book of CRESSON's Sonic experience, a guide to everyday sounds that "focuses on the effects of sound on listeners [...] in the contexts of architectural and urban spaces" (Augoyard and Torgue 2005: xiii), a selection of perceptive and semantic sound effects were undertaken.
These sonic effects are
  1. Anamnesis - "An effect of reminiscence in which a past situation or atmosphere is brought back to the listener's conciousness, provoked by a particular signal or sonic context." (p.21)
  2. Imitation - "it re-represents particularly significant features of the style of reference." (p.59)
  3. Phonomnesis - "This effect refers to a sound that is imagined but not actually heard." (p.85)
  4. Remanence - "the impression of hearing a continuous drone; or melismatic movements that make an absent sound virtually present." (p.87)
  5. Sharawadji - "created by the contemplation of a sound motif or a complex soundscape [...] and stimulates a feeling of pleasure in the perceptive confusion." (p.117-118)
On the other hand, the research is lying on the concept of Sound Object. Michel Chion's Guide to Sound Objects aims "of providing a dictionary of the main key-concepts (often presented in pairs) in Pierre Schaeffer's Traité des Objets Musicaux" (Michel Chion 2009: 7). These Sound Objects refer to the morphology of sound.
These sound objects are
  1. Density/Volume - "two very specific criteria only apply here to the study of pure sounds (pure frequencies, without harmonics). Acousticians have singled them out through experiments in psychoacoustics. We could therefore call them “additional qualities” of pure sounds, as they are added on to pitch and intensity." (p.170)
  2. Value/Characteristic - "a quality of perception common to different objects (…) enabling these objects to be compared, arranged and (possibly) put into calibrations despite the dissimilarities in their other perceptual aspects." (p.75)
  3. Pitch - "is the privileged sound characteristic, the most pregnant with meaning, in the same way as rhythmic pulsation, but also the best able to function as a value and give rise to rich, complex, well-perceived relationships." (p.42)
  4. Timbre - "is that particular quality of sound which means that two instruments cannot be confused, even though they are producing a sound of the same pitch and intensity." (p.48)
  5. Impulse - "is given to very brief sounds with non-existent or short-lived sustainment." (p.130)
  6. Musicality/Sonority - "the “sonorous” refers to the jungle of all possible sounds, still without musical function; here it is a question of choosing the sound objects which are judged suitable to become musical objects in certain contexts, and from which “values” have been derived." (p.71)

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