Sound Based Research - Fieldwork

Sound is part of the everyday experience landscape as much as the visual, however dramatically less present. The dimensions and the extensions of sound scapes were earlier discussed in the MyTime interview with Salomé Voegelin.

One of the major topics in this discussion was the relationship between sound and space or the construction of an soundTimeSpace a Voegelin called it.


Image by Andriko Lozowy taken from merlepachett / View of a tailings pond and Syncrude Oil Sand Mine in the distance.

In some new research work, Merle Pachett investigates sound landscapes. She has be working recently in Canada and her project im by mapping the acoustic ecologies of the Athebasca Oil Sands to develop on the work of the ground-breaking 1970’s project Soundscapes of Canada whose objective was to capture disappearing sounds in response to over noise pollution.


Sound by Merlet Patchett

In her most recent presentation of the collected raw material she collaborates with a photographer, Andriko Lozowy, from the University of Alberta. The two media appear to work rather well together and do not simply merge into one as if it were video recordings. The tension that builds up between the different media is really the interesting bit in this documentation.

It is not as if sound was too boring to listen to just like that, but with the photographs a certain dialect emerges between how it looked at this time and how it sounds in this moment.

It seems surprising how the aspects of time play a very different role in both these two medias. We are trained and have acostomised to read photographs as a document of the past. Certain aspects of the image can be read as to guess the approximate time distance. With sound however, this seems less of an immediate reaction. This data is much more in the present, there is not this reflex as to put it as something of the past.


Sound by Merlet Patchett


Image by Andriko Lozowy taken from merlepachett / Fort McKay Industrial Park.