Three Types of Engagement with Place Through Acousmatic Listening and Composition

An ontological ground on which to live our life, place both embraces and haunts us, manifesting itself as the source not only of comfort we feel when we are in place, but also of nostalgia, a pain we experience when we are out of place. Understandably, people have long desired to understand the inevitability of our relationship with place by telling stories, singing songs, and drawing maps and paintings. Thanks to developments in modern technology, we can now take pictures and make films of places. But no matter what (old or new) technology we use, it ends up only partially explaining our engagement with place and such a trait of technology is most vividly witnessed in the practice of acousmatic listening and composition where audio technology provides us with new possibilities of understanding our relationship with place. This paper aims to examine our relationship with place through the practice of acousmatic music; specifically, it identifies and describes three different types of engagement with place that each of the three authors employs in his compositions and discusses the workings and the implications of these types: firstly, by observing the phenomena of displaced sound relating to acousmatic attitude while referring to the works of Heidegger and Ihde; secondly, by comparing the three types to Edward Casey’s three senses of re-implacement in art; and finally, by discussing the Three Cities Project, SERG’s current project investigating and exploring a sense of place in relation to the proposed three types of engagement with place.