Three Cities

2011

fixed medium - stereo

10’45”

Commissioned by:

sound

Awards:

Finalist, Musica Nova, Czech Republic, 2013

Three Cities is part of the Three Cities Project, an intermedia research project undertaken by members of SERG (Sound Emporium Research Group) -­ Suk-­Jun Kim, Pete Stollery and Ross Whyte - at the Department of Music, University of Aberdeen.

The project involves contribution, participation and experience from the three cities of Aberdeen, Bergen and St Petersburg with the main aim being for participants (composers, listeners, general public) to learn about and engage with audio culture from each city through engagement with sound recordings at the three locations.

Two central ideas drive the project. The first is Edward Casey’s phenomenon of “re-implacement” within visual representations of place and his three distinctions of:

place at -­ exact depiction;

place of -­ representational transformation;

place for -­ contemplating the ideal, the vision, the “poetic truth”.

The second is Suk-­Jun Kim’s three “engagements with place” when creating soundscape composition:

1 -­ visiting, dwelling on and experiencing a place;

2 -­ composing with sounds recorded at the place;

3 -­ listening to the recreation/representation of the experience of the place.

Sounds were captured from visits made to the three cities but only Kim and Whyte visited Bergen. They had a different engagement with the sounds of Bergen from Stollery; similarly Stollery and Whyte visited St Petersburg without Kim. Future research, following the creation of works using the sounds recorded in the cities will investigate how these different “engagements” affect compositional approaches.