KC SOUNDSCAPE PROJECT

Notes, thoughts, and reflections

Sound pays attention and remembers: this is how humans move.

Introduction

KC Soundscape Project began in the Fall of 2024 but quickly lost priority in my practice due to the work I was doing for my senior thesis, Natural Sounds II: Soft Focus. Though my practice mainly focuses on compositional sound art, my initial obsession with pursuing sound as a creative medium began with soundscape studies. A personal motive behind KC Soundscape Project was to bring something that became more peripheral of my practice into a more prominent position. As a senior in Kansas City Art Institute’s filmmaking and sound programs, I used my Sound Art Capstone class as an opportunity to pick the project back up again.

KC Soundscape Project began in tandem with the work, research, and writing I was doing for Natural Sounds. While the Natural Sounds series (specifically Natural Sounds II) constructs fictional rooms with sound to attain some hidden truths of the medium, KCSP navigates real-world acoustic territory for a different genre of sonic storytelling. The project is an initiative to sonically map Kansas City through local audio submissions. The work is a living archive — reporting lineages of collective perspective through gathering various recorded experiences of a geographically defined acoustic space. The project’s goal is to encourage Kansas City residents to engage in new sonic experiences while diversifying perspectives by bridging geographical gaps from neighborhood to neighborhood. 

I wanted to do something different — to challenge myself to assume a different role in my practice — not as a composer but rather a facilitator of a community effort that puts others in a position to experience their environment differently.

When KC Soundscape Project first began, it originally lived on a website where the audio submissions were uploaded. Visitors of the site were prompted to listen to the recordings and respond in a dialog box their “thoughts, feelings, memories, and/or nonsensical utterances”. The goal of the text box was to suggest to visitors that experiencing sound is much more than the phenomenon of hearing – inviting listeners to unearth the poetics of a sonic space.

There is plenty of work and research on the soundscape and its social-ecological-political ramifications. KC Soundscape project is obviously derived from that work and research, namely the writings of R Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project. These ramifications (though inextricable) are not the main goals of KC Soundscape Project, but rather the work aims to function as a mirror to those who participated.

The act of making a recording is an inscription of the self spatially and temporally. It makes us aware of the act of listening — not only as one of localization as a means for survival — but also as a creative, subjective act.

In my experience in studying sound art, I have noticed the sanctity of depicting “realism” in sound art and soundscape projects. Recording devices are seen as objective observers and soundscape projects are often received as documentation of our current reality. Thinking about how we encounter and internalize sonic experiences — during the progression of this project I realized that neither of those statements are true.

KC Soundscape Project questions the role of the observer and if their documented experience with the soundscape can ever be accurately depicted.

Notions of accuracy should not be conflated with value. The wonderment of sound is what invites us to engage with it and where we can start to imagine new worlds. In our attempt to capture the spirit of a place, the consciousness that was present is mirrored and documented. It’s a reality that existed for a moment that only can live in unreliable imagination and memory. The recording can only serve as a point of reference, evidence of a hyper-personal reality that occurred in the transience of the soundscape.

These are archived experiences of myself, friends, and strangers. When listening to these recordings, one should consider what about the space that was captured piqued the recorders interest to record – to try to orient themselves spatially and temporally.

Presentation of this body of work

Up until recently, I was uncertain of how to approach including visual media – maps – in this body of work. Including a cartographic language seems to go against what the project aims to do — to encourage others to interact with their environment with their ears instead of their eyes.

Visual information that coincides with the submissions has been omitted so that one must orient themselves solely on the basis of listening without the aid of a visual map.