(Audio)Walking the square – a collaborative experiment

During a virtual Masterclass on „Walking Narratives“ at the SONOHR Radio & Podcast Festival 2021 we challenged „the audio walk“, trying to move it – adapting an appeal by Bertold Brecht – from a way of distributing information to a way of communicating with each other.

This was the score for the group of 30 participants:

I Listening and Creating – Individual work

1. Identify a rectangle to walk along (this might be your desk, the corners of your room, four spots in your apartment, the block you live in …).
Max distance between the corners is 1 min walk

2. Four corners – four tasks:

A – Rouse the sound: Sound appears as soon as you wake it up (with your finger, the palm of your hand, your foot, a stick, a stone…) Make the place hearable.

B – Verbalize the place: focus on details that characterise the corner. Describe objects, emotions, surfaces… Words can form rows or sentences or poems. Or they just stay words.

C – Enhance what is there. Listen to the sounds that are there already, enhance these sounds with your voice. Play with what you percieve.

D – freestyle. Repeat one of the former challenges or invent another one.

Practice all four corner-expolations so that you can repeat and perform them. Take notes if you wish. No audio-recording needed. (But if you‘d like to, go ahead.)

II Performing and Percieving and opening the space to whatever might happen – collective experiment

Collectively we go for an audio walk. Everybody walks their own square/rectangle (A-B-C-D) and listens to the contributions (A-B-C-D) of other persons while observing his/her specific spot.

Here is an extract of our joint audio walk which consisted of 21 contributions.

The contributions in this extract are by Massimo Maio, Flora Schausberger, Oliver Süess and Lia Schmieder.