Decomposing Landscape: Hearing the Troubled Site
Buddhaditya Chattopadhyay / India
University of Leiden
Paper
budhaditya.org/
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.