Dead silence
Abstract
This audio paper investigates sonic citizenship within Leise Park, Berlin – a former cemetery turned public park – focusing on the negotiation of noise and the question of reverence in a shared space inhabited by both the living and the non-living. It explores how the perceived silence associated with the buried non-living interacts with contemporary park sounds, shaping visitors' experience and sense of belonging. Applying theories of sonic citizenship, phenomenology, and multispecies kinship, and acknowledging noise and silence as culturally constructed categories, the paper analyses the park's soundscape and the politics of listening (to the silent), informed by a review of the park's participatory design process and interviews with park architects and visitors, concluding that there are temporal phases of negotiation with different power dynamics. It documents artistic work using contact microphone recordings of tombstones to capture material vibrations and spectral traces. This work includes a composition that functionally employs technological noise from the recording process itself to attune listening, exploring technology's potential to mediate the presence of the absent and offer a form of sonic 'voice' to the silenced non-living within these negotiations.
Audio paper
Keywords
Bibliography
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