Sound, body, space & place: listening in Belfast city

Abstract

This thesis presents an ethnographic study of everyday sound and listening conducted in Belfast city. My field-work consisted of a long-term engagement with listening exercises and documenting sound moving outwards to interviews and collaborative projects in an attempt to uncover the sounds and processes of everyday life within the city. Participants emerged from engagements in workshops and participatory art projects or were encountered through observation, listening and sound recording excursions. This thesis moves from concerns regarding the integration of theories and techniques drawn from sound studies, creative practices, anthropology and ethnomusicology to an analysis of a broader body of research pertaining to Belfast city, and centres upon my ethnographic engagement with three communities.

My study is focused on processes of listening, field recording and creatively engaging with sound and auditory experience. These processes of listening and exploring sound were employed in order to produce accounts of the lived experience of Belfast city. Concurrently, I sought to determine what the specific contextualisation of these explorations could elucidate about sound and listening.

The relationship between sound and the construction and experience of space and place was of particular interest in these enquiries. More specifically, data from the field brought me towards analysing issues of control and the imposition of boundaries upon space, the construction of the places of memory, the construction of collectively meaningful places and contracts of behaviour operating in space which were determined by sounding and listening. The manner in which participants discussed and documented sound led to an analysis of the act of field recording and the translation of auditory experience into linguistic representations.

A number of sound recordings are submitted and referenced within the text in order to elucidate certain projects and discussions or to present acoustic elements of the field in a non-textual manner. The integration of perspectives and methodologies Sound, body, space & place drawn from ethnomusicology, creative practices and sound studies proposes hybrid approaches and methods of analyses beneficial to each discipline.

Date of Award	Dec 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Queen's University Belfast
Supervisor	Pedro Rebelo (Supervisor) & Suzel Reily (Supervisor)