workshops

PERFORMING LISTENING

ongoing
listening workshop

Through a series of exercises based on spatial listening, psychoacoustics, and sound-guided movements, the workshop encourages the active role of the listener and their capacity to perceive and engage with sound.

Grounded on the concept of “listening as intervention”, the workshop leads participants to explore their potential to touch, modulate, and interfere with the production and propagation of sound.

A short list of possible activities includes: listening to the sound of your footsteps; walking to the wall with your eyes closed without bumping into it; touching the participants with a microphone; listening from inside a cardboard box; playing the “analog” filter with your body; listening through the wall; producing sounds by blowing air on a paper sheet; moving in space trying to avoid any sudden feedback occurring between microphone and loudspeaker; finding the spot where two different sounds are perceived at the same loudness; walking away as far as possible from the sound source without loosing it; using the bodies of other participants as absorption panels,…

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ATTACK / DECAY

2020


Attack/Decay is a night walk where participants are invited to explore the acoustics of specific locations by means of a custom built impulse generator device.
The acoustic qualities and the spatial features of the chosen locations serve as a point of departure for developing site related listening pieces.
Through direct experience, the walk introduces participants to primary acoustic principles and spatial listening, framed as a state of interference and interdependency with the propagation of sound in space.



Technical development by Airborne Instruments.
With the support of nadine – laboratory for contemporary arts and the VGC.

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UP IN THE VALLEY

2019 - 2013


Up In The Valley is a self organised workshop led by Davide Tidoni that took place in Valle Sabbia (Brescia, Italy) from 2013 to 2019. The workshop consists of a series of listening exercises and performances specifically designed for mountain locations. Activities are presented as part of different walking excursions and explore acoustic principles such as propagation of sound over long distance, directionality and movement of sound, reflection, and the threshold of audibility. See logistics and documentation images from previous editions.

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SOUNDSTORMING

2012 - 2011

soundstorming

Soundstorming is an exploration walk that invites participants to develop location-based activities. Echoing the brainstorming process, the workshop functions as an informal exchange of collective experiments with sound and listening in outdoor space.

Soundstorming begins with a semi-structured walk that interesects a certain area or territory. Participants stop the walk and start working whenever they find a potentially interesting location. The fundamental parameters for choosing where to stop relate to the spatial affordances of the place, its configuration and acoustic quality as well as to the freedom of movement it provides.

Participants bring to the walk their own technical equipment. Everything must be compact and easy to carry around. Bent electronics, small analog/digital sound instruments, sound generators, portable loudspeakers, megaphones, pre-recorded sounds, contact mics, sound playback/recording devices and found objects are some of the tools for developing interventions and situations.

In addition to being a direct process for rapid prototyping and testing, Soundstorming provides a context in which participants acquire practical experience about notions such as private/public, the abandoned, the act of trespassing, and the reappropriation of space.

Documentation
CONCEPTS from the workshop at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
IMAGES from the workshops at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
VIDEO from the workshop at STEIM, Amsterdam, 2012
VIDEO from the workshop at IMM, Düsseldorf/Köln, 2011

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