The Third Soundscape

Abstract

The creative rediscovery of exploration through sound opens up new spaces for reflection on the processes of deep transformation occurring in territories and landscapes today. Western culture has produced abandoned ruins and deterritorialised places and it is necessary to come to terms with these places ‘out of place’, listening to them with the sense of anticipation that migrants have. The projects of sound artists such as Peter Cusack, Enrico Ascoli, Fabio Lattuca and Pietro Bonanno aim at the exploration of abandoned places through sound. They open up rare aesthetic spaces, creating a different sense of place that has more to do with experience: sonic explorations of place as a social and political construction. All of these works demonstrate how much field recordings take us deep into the layers of image and language in order to ‘transmit[s] a powerful sense of spatiality, atmosphere and timing’ as Peter Cusack puts it.