Sixty Second Theatre, an online Exhibition organized by the OISTAT Sound Design Group, has been launched to celebrate the first World Listening Day on July 18th, 2010. This project invited members of the international theatre sound design community to submit a 60 second recordings of moments in their lives of the week leading up to July 18th 2010, in order to celebrate the practice of listening as it relates to the world around us, environmental awareness, and acoustic ecology. Audience can now visit the exhibition online and listen to the recordings of those moments from numerous artists. By listening to the miscellaneous sounds abstracted from daily life, the attention of audience is drawn to perceive the significance of insignificant daily routine and the existence of the world surrounding us. This experience helps audience to refine their sensibility in perceiving the soundspaces created in theatre.
Concept of the Exhibition
Theatre sound design often has to recreate naturalistic soundspaces in a variety of auditoriums and on stages of various shapes and size. A consequence of this is that the sound designers are constantly listening to the environment, wherever they are, whatever they are doing, because simply they might need to produce something similar in support of a future production.
However, most sound designers working in theatre today not only seek to understand the many sonic and acoustic elements which go into creating the infinite amount soundscapes which underscore all of our lives, but they also often aim to recreate and use to our advantage (and most importantly, in order to support to the playwrights words and ideas) the emotional and psychological affect which many everyday sounds have on each and every one of us.
Inspired by this conception, this exhibition gathers what some of the theatre sound design community (including a non sound designer or two!) have been listening to this week, recorded with whatever devices were to hand.
World Listening Day
July 18, the date of World Listening Day was chosen as the date for World Listening Day because it is the birthday of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. Schafer is one of the founders of the Acoustic Ecology movement. The World Soundscape Project, which he directed, is an important organization which has inspired a lot of activity in this field, and his book Soundscape: The Tuning of the World helped to define many of the terms and background behind the acoustic ecology movement.
Listen to the Sixty Second Theatre
More information about World Listening Day
