Listening Together While Apart: Revisiting the SpokenWeb Collective Sound Walk, Led by Angus Tarnawsky, 26 January 2022

Angus Tarnawsky

Jason Camlot

Jason Camlot

Zoom

Montréal, Québec

As part of SpokenWeb’s Symposium, held online in May 2021, a multitude of participants from across the world signed up to walk and listen together for one hour per day. Owing to the virtual nature of the event, all involved remained geographically separated. Acknowledging this as a unique opportunity to discuss all manner of approaches to everyday sonic environments, a workshop called “Noticing, Noting, and Notating Sounds” was organized to investigate different perspectives towards the task at hand. Led by artist and researcher Angus Tarnawsky, the initial workshop provided a series of daily prompts and suggestions for ways that each listener could share their experiences with the larger group. As a result of the diversity of approaches that were subsequently shared on a daily basis, over the duration of symposium, many participants actively began to shift how they listened to, and engaged with their surrounding environment. An archive of hand-drawn and digitally generated “sonic notations,” photographic images, text-based responses, videos, and audio recordings were generated on the fly, and remain accessible digitally via the project website. This follow-up Listening Practice session provided an opportunity for those who took part in the symposium activities to reconnect and discuss the experience as part of an open roundtable discussion.