Landscape Quartet: Creative Practice and Philosophical Reflexion in Natural Environments

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context Since the 60s artists have explored the environment as not only a place for art, but as artistic material. Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, among many others make interventional actions in the landscape, while "soundscape" composers (Murray Schafer, Westerkamp, Truax) have used environmental recordings as raw material for electroacoustic composition. Acoustic ecology has grown from Schafer's "World Soundscape Project" (WSP), producing some remarkable creative, philosophical, and political fruit. However, much acoustic ecology relies on the model of preservation (recording), an ecological strategy that has less and less credence in contemporary environmental debate. Against this is proposed a participative approach to the sonic environment, where performers and audience produce sounds in dialogue with the specific sites explored, in keeping with the more participative and engaged turn in contemporary environmentalist thinking. Such an approach seeks to model an ethical but participative approach to environmental sound art that moves beyond preservation, as a model of ecology, towards interaction and co-operation with the environment; participation rather than representation. aims and objectivesThe project seeks to develop a genuinely "ecosystemic" approach to environmental sound art by confronting our (musical) listening practices, and our notions of the role of musicians in the production of such art, with the phenomenological reality of the aural environment. Practice-based artists will work from physical intervention into environments through to the deployment of meditative spiritual practices to explore the sonic potential of particular places; from highly mediated applications of digital technologies to acoustic improvisations with the sounds found in different environments; from sounding an environment through musically significant actions within it through to playing instruments with the environment, so to speak - confronting the compositional challenge, for example, of allowing a flute to be played by the wind, recording the sounds of violins and guitars being floated on rivers and lakes - unmistakably "musical" sonorities structured by the gently chaotic energies of water and wind. These examples are from experiments already undertaken by that have produced successful artistic and conceptual results that have been presented publicly. Exhibitions in the UK and Sweden along with site-specific performances will result, four symposia held during the project will bring the practical and intellectual findings into a public forum, and a special themed issue of The Contemporary Music Review will publish the philosophical results of these symposia, alongside articles by invited respondents.potential applications and benefitsThe project seeks to raise awareness of the sonic environment and ecological concerns more widely, modelled not on preservation but participation; in simple terms how might we live with and be a responsible part of the environment rather than "put fences around it".The practical side of the project will involve developing strategies of presentation that give audiences insight into the process of the work, exposing assumptions about our relationship to the natural environment that will also lead to educational applications.The project seeks to develop practices that are flexible and may be adapted to different specific places and events, either in the form of single-authored works or events, or as collaborations between the different partners. The work can be adapted to fit with outdoor sites, gallery or concert spaces, and educational workshop projects, giving it a wide applicability in the broader culture.A broad community of environmentally-oriented artists and intellectuals exists (e.g. WSP, CRiSAP) to whom the project will be of direct interest. This community will be accessed through exhibitions and publications already noted, and via RSS feeds from a project website