Borders: investigating liminality, outsiderness and solitude through an exploration of the sound environments of Andover (PhD Thesis) - interlude and film series (2020)

 This practice-based research project examines the relationships between sound, place, and identity through an investigation of liminality, solitude, and outsiderness in the context of Andover, a market town in southern England. The study is centred around a portfolio of soundwalk-based compositions that explore transitional and peripheral environments where urban and rural soundscapes meet. Using methods grounded in soundwalking, art-walking, and some psychogeographic approaches, the research explores how compositional practices can frame everyday sound environments and how these practices explore the themes of liminality, solitude and outsiderness. The work focuses on liminal geographic and acoustic spaces, where differing environmental conditions meet, and examines how these areas can be represented and interpreted through artistic practice. The compositions are realised through solitary walks and are documented using a range of media, including field recordings, photography, film, and text. These documentations are intended to represent the acoustic features and personal experiences of specific locations and link them with the broader themes being investigated. The compositions engage with the sonic characteristics of Andover’s environments and outskirts, and investigate how these contribute to influences on memory and a sense of place. The thesis presents the outcomes of these explorations as contributions to the understanding of liminal environments and compositional responses to everyday soundscapes. It proposes that soundwalking and related practices provide useful tools for investigating liminality, solitude and outsiderness, and for articulating nuanced relationships between individual perception and the acoustic environment.   

interlude (2020) consists of a duo of scores to be realised at home and/or indoor spaces. These pieces were affected by and created during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic – between the creation of borders #2 and #3. walking piece for home use is a soundwalking piece to be realised in the home, where the soundwalker moves between different rooms. It presents an opportunity to listen to the home environment in a new way. window scene is an experiential piece where the window edge frames the view on the other side, and the soundworld is imagined from this view. The glass itself is the border, the thin liminal space, and the soundworld is experienced via the imagination and not from aural listening. It is also an imagined exploration of soundworlds of the everyday – an attempt to experience a familiar environment in a different way.

film series (2020) is a collection of short films where the soundworlds are created in the imagination of the viewer. Related to window scene, these silent films are images of everyday Andover locations, and the viewer is encouraged to create the soundworlds in their imagination. Like the preceding piece, liminality is demonstrated here by the computer screen – the screen itself acts like the window pane, the border, through which an image, the everyday material world, links to the internal imagination of the viewer.