Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab)

Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab)

Research focus

The SAPLab’s sonic, spatial and temporal attention to the world’s diverse ecosystems can inform our understanding of past relations with 'nature' and may also provide critical and aesthetic tools to help us tackle today's complex environmental concerns.

Meaning of "SAP"

1. associated with "sapience": meaning wisdom, i.e. "the kind of sapience practiced by Homo sapiens that comes from listening"
2. "sap" noun, slang – a naive or boldly open and unknowing person: "the kind of sapience that comes not just from listening, but from becoming unsure of what listening is."
3. "sap" noun – the juice of the plant: "a creative and sweet fluidity with healing properties"
4. "sap" noun – "the extension of a trench to a point beneath an adversary's fortifications"
5. "sap" verb – to weaken or to undermine: "a creative and sweet fluidity with healing properties, accountable for its power to undermine foundations surreptitiously and steadily"

Background

In contrast to the aural, the visual realm arguably provides poor descriptors of the local resonances and "density of interconnections" (Dunn 1999, 13) from which our rapidly changing worlds are made.

A focus on sound allows interrogation of the following key issues in current geographical research:

1. The politics of sound and nature (what is natural? for whom?)
2. The importance of place in the making of science
3. The connection between fieldwork, natural science and gendered subjectivity
4. The linkages between aurality, migratory species and geographical imagination
5. The reconstruction of past soundscapes.

Geographers have begun to critique and address their own historic privileging of visual ways of understanding.

Dunn, David (1999) Why Do Whales and Children Sing? A Guide to Listening in Nature.  Santa Fe, New Mexico: Earth Ear.

Robinson, Dylan (2020) Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, p. 47.

Media

• Belle Park Project Blog
• NiCHE Canopy Interview
• In A Nature Region (2002/2011)
• Into the Middle of Things (2017)
• The Fireplace Series: An Interdisciplinary Conversation