Moving sonic geographies: realising the Eerie countryside in music and sound

Abstract

This paper investigates how sound produces and transforms space and place as it moves and travels. In charting the movement of sound from field recording to music studio, and from rehearsal to performance space, this paper examines the aesthetic and affective geographies that are developed and the consequences of this travel. This argument is illustrated through the example of an artistic project that sought to explore the anti- or non-idyllic practice and experience of the British countryside in sonic and musical form. The notion that there are stranger and eerie, less bucolic, and more unnerving, versions of rurality formed the artistic impulse for this project. The paper explores the creative, emotional, and technical labour involved in translating this idea into sound and music. Through inspecting the processes of achieving this project, and the geographies it generated, the paper argues that it was in the translation and movement of sound through space and through different places that the project was – sometimes unexpectedly – realised. Thus, sonic atmospheres and affective charges of the eerie rural emerged because of this movement-transformation as much it did from the different creative and technical practices, and active sonic-interventions, that sought to achieve it.