Thought of the day

The Places I Return : Echoes of hopes and dreams

The Places I Return : Echoes of hopes and dreams

here is a couple of benches I always return to, both of them small and otherwise unremarkable pieces of urban street furniture, one overlooking a strip of grass and an indifferent sky and the other at the intersection of brutalist concrete design and an ancient waterway, both in a city, a city that no matter what (even the fact I no longer live there) always is my spirtual home and birth place(London). For most of my formative years, right up until my 4th decade, these benches were my anchor, places to stop, think and be inspired, a hopes and dreams launchpad if you will.

Returning Sound to the Commons

Returning Sound to the Commons

am always teaching that sound is immediate, it enters our being before we can prepare, before thought can form a perceptual shield against it. From the time we are in the womb, before ‘King Sight’ (Walter Murch in Chion’s Audio Vision) has taken over we are learning and understanding about the our world through it, and then when we born, our existence in the world is to be immersed in it, pulled into relations that we do not choose but cannot escape. Unlike sight, a sense which allows for distance and framing, sound insists on intimacy, it places us inside the world and ourselves. Ever since, just over 50 years ago, R. Murray Schafer tried to “tune the world” and formalised the notion of ‘soundscape’ and thus soundscape studies which has lead increasing formalisation within the frameworks of academia and now government legislation (for example in the Noise and Soundscape Plan for Wales 2023-2028).