Field Lab #3
What do you see? What do you hear? Are they the same? Are they different? Can you see everything you hear? Can you hear everything you see? Who are you? Does this affect the attention you pay?
MAGDALENA STERLING
MAGDALENA STERLING
Field Lab 2
Active listening requires attention to the time and place, the sounds you hear and the ones you don’t, and the way your body displaces sound when you turn your head or take a step forwards, backwards or to the side. At any specific time or any specific place, you will never hear the same combination of sounds twice. Soundscapes are forever changing.
MAGDALENA STERLING
Understand that the land has a memory that is entirely its own. It will tell us if we listen.
These soundscapes, represented both audibly and visually, reflect my relationship to the land I walked in the Elena Gallegos Open Space and Manzano Open Space in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It’s a deep, chaotic, often complicated relationship. I am confused by the complexities of my part settler, part unknown identity. But the land accepts me, it allows me to listen and learn and reflect.
Notes:
• the acoustic environment as perceived by me in context of the history and memory of the land
• Humans must draw lines (establish limits/bounds) on how they use/live on land. Should these lines be reflective of ancestrally where one comes from or what they are doing today to regenerate relationships with that land and its native people or both? Therefore, where is my line?
• felt exhausted after each day but so stimulated I couldn’t let go to fall asleep
• I was surprised by how hard it was to meditate as a form of embodied research
• I want to know more about water use/water rights. Water shapes the land that it runs through, can sound have the same effect?
• the measurement of “feeling” through sound – how does this relate to my music?