[ISEA2017] Artist Talk: Tariq Emam — The Yorkshire Soundscape Project: multi-disciplinary approaches to a sound artist’s experience of landscape within the framework of soundscape ecology and composition

Artist Statement

The Yorkshire Soundscape Project was conceived to retrace footsteps from 40 years ago, within the Yorkshire Dales and focus on specific artistic practices to cope with the search for change in an evidently and relatively unthreatened environment. Within the framework of ecoacoustics, supported theoretically by phenomenology and psychogeography, this is a case study in a sound artist’s experience of landscape through archive, composition, spatialised audio systems, and geopolitics of the ‘natural’ environment. This paper will offer an overview to these methodologies and highlight some emerging themes from its practice- based research. Bridges built with buzzwords bearing twisted roots in what is essentially phenomenology and environmental philosophy, coupled with the conceptualism of contemporary art, may be giving rise to a lack of things that actually matter. In a world of hyper-appearances and post-truths, certain areas of sound and music could be at risk of falling in an eternal ontological squabble whilst the world around it continues to change and disappear at an alarming rate.

  • Tariq Emam, USA