“Decomposing Landscape: Hearing the Troubled Site” presented by Chattopadhyay

Keywords: Sound Art, Media Production, Landscape, Heritage, Ambience, Sitespecificity, ambient sound, Artistic Transformation, Mediation

Site-specific sound artworks are developed through location based listening and recordings made at specific places with a particular cultural heritage. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic intervention by intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognizable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialization techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and portrayal of their site-based narrative. The question is: how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these works? In this proposed paper presentation, I discuss my recent multi-channel sound work: Decomposing Landscape (2015) to shed light on the specific approaches and the methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production dealing with environmentally troubled heritage sites in India.