El tren fantasma: arcs of sound and the acoustic spaces of landscape

Abstract

El Tren Fantasma: arcs of sound and the acoustic spaces of landscape.Drawing on the example of Chris Watson's soundwork El Tren Fantasma, this paper considers how landscape is made in sound. Informed by the work of Michael Serres and DonIhde it argues for an understanding of landscape as mediation. Drawing on the work of Brandon LaBelle, Jean Luc Nancy. Mladon Dollar, and Charles Sanders Pearce , the paper develops the concept of 'the arc of sound' as part of a socio-material approach to semiosis able to recognise the ways sound connects and differentiates contingently across heterogeneous spaces and materials. It shows how sound participates in the production of the railway corridor as a complex, animate and deeply contoured historically and geographically specific experience of landscape. Finally, it argues for an approach to landscape as mediation which pays equal attention to ontology and epistemology.Key words: sound, landscape, semiotics, post-phenomenology, railway corridor IntroductionThe concept of landscape has become a lively area of debate and innovation within Geography.Authors concerned with landscape as a practical and experiential engagement have added significantly to empirical accounts of landscape particularly in terms of mobile practices such as walking, cycling, or indeed train travel whilst at the same time developing new theoretical approaches informed by a range of existential, vitalist and post-humanist philosophies (Lorimer 2005;Wylie, 2006, 2009, 2012, Spinney 2006Bissell 2008; Crouch 2010a Crouch , 2010b. A major focus has been to critique and displace visuality and in particular linear perspective as dominant modes of engaging with and interpreting landscape (Rose and Wylie 2006). To date sound has been a relatively minor player in these debates. Sound can be an important component in the experience of landscape and certainly provides a rather different sensory world to that of the visual (Lorimer and Wylie 2010). Though there is an increasing wealth of work in the fields of auditory and sonic studies relatively little of this has engaged directly and explicitly with current attempts to rethink the concept of landscape even where landscape is the ostensible subject of the work (Leppert 1993;Smith 1999;Thompson 2002;Corbin 1998;LaBelle 2008). This paper contributes to ongoing debates concerning landscape, in terms of sound and mobile experience. It's starting point is the 42 minute sound work El Tren Fantasma (2011 Touch #TO:42 (CD)), sound recordist Chris Watson's sonic journey across Mexico by train, released in November 2011 to enthusiastic reviews from critics 1 . The 1 Interviews and some samples of Chris Watson's past and current work can be found at http://www.chriswatson.net/ The three tracks from El Tren Fantasma discussed later in this paper can be heard at YouTube as follows: 2 work is based on sound recordings made when Watson spent a month working for the BBC TV series Great Railway Journeys of the World documenting the final weeks of the railway line across Mexico from ...

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