B-AIR – Art Infinity Radio – How does the world sound ?

Funding : Programme: Creative Europe Culture Sub-programme ‘Support for European cooperation projects’ 2020 EACEA-32-2019 – Larger scale cooperation projects (COOP2)

Scientific coordinator(s): Radio television Slovenia, RTV SLO – Nicolas Rémy and Nicolas Tixier for AAU-Cresson

Research contract starting in November 2020 and ending December 2023

The international ambiance network has been a partner in most of the B_AIR research activities. 

B-AIR: the Infinite Art of Radio is a research-action project funded by the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA – Creative Europe) and bringing together international partners from academia and the radio and sound arts industry. The general aim of the action is to propose new theoretical, methodological and practical tools to encourage sound creation for more vulnerable audiences (very young children, people with disabilities, the elderly and the sick, vulnerable places and situations). This action-research project has three objectives

• To propose a series of activities that link the arts and sciences, and thus initiate new working methods between artists and scientists to tackle situations of vulnerability with sounds.
• To create a multimedia platform dedicated to the sound arts, radio, soundscapes and soundscapes that not only makes its content widely available, but also offers new creative tools.
• To propose a series of actions to disseminate and promote its content to new audiences interested in sound creation, from the youngest, to the most vulnerable groups in our societies, whatever their age.

If sound and ambience are so closely linked, it’s because they both challenge the idea of a clear distinction between perceiver and perceived, subject and object, inside and outside, individual and world. Instead of relying on a dualistic and substantialist mode of thought, they open up an alternative to an ontology of the thing and attention to the medium and flows involved in everyday sensory experience. These perspectives allow us to approach the notion of ambience by revealing some of its key features: the emphasis on perception rather than meaning; the crucial role of resonance and affective tonality; the importance of internal dynamics, everyday gestures and forms of social life; the phenomenon of coalescence that unifies the various components of a situation; the articulation between the spatial, the social and the physical (Thibaud). In other words, the present research project aims to explore urban ambiances through sound, primarily using the notion of Sound Effect for both description and creation. What can we learn from an ambience when we listen to it? In other words, how does the world sound?

In concrete terms, the actions implemented by our team consist of four 3- to 5-day seminar-workshops, combining theoretical work and sound experimentation involving various partners:

• January 2021: Grenoble (FR) and Volos (GR): 9th Winterschool “Vulnerabilities and sounds, the experience of listening”
• September 2021: Portbou (SP): Seminar « Walter Benjamin, Radio and Childhood »
• January 2022: Grenoble (FR) and Volos (GR) : 10th Winterschool « Sound spaces in waiting »
• October 2022: Cuneo (IT) : Seminar « How does the world sound ? Composition & sonic environment »
• January 2023: Grenoble: 11th Winterschool « Density, Intensity, Mixity: how does living sound? »
• May 2023: Cerisy (FR) : Seminar « How does the world sound ? Art Infinity Radio »
• August 2023: Venice : Workshop and laboratory  « Radio Utopia – News from the world ».

And a focus : Losonnante (solidian listening)

Countries involved: Slovenia, France, Croatia, Serbia, Finland, Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Partners: BAZAART (RS), AAU_Cresson / Ecole d’Architecture de Grenoble (FR), Institut Jožef Stefan (SI), ITA-Suomen Yliopisto (FI), Javna medijska ustanova Radio – televizija Srbije (RS), Radioteatar Bajsic i prijatelji (HR), Twixtlab AMKE (EL), Visokoskolska ustanova internacionalni burc univerzitet-International Burch University (BA)

AAU-Cresson team: Nicolas Rémy and Nicolas Tixier (resp.) with Jean-Paul Thibaud, Evangelia Paxinou, Giuseppe Gavazza, juL McOisans, David Argoud, Françoise Acquier, Théo Marchal, Sébastien de Pertat & Cédric Pichat.