"Soundscape City Diary" is presented as an approach for creating an alternative aesthetic perspective of the inhabited urban environment taking into account that sound is a medium of information exchange and not just the auditory stimuli to reaction. Sound is one of the primary interfaces between the individual and the environment. I use the term soundscape to denote how people understand the acoustic environment through listening and making references to the semantic. The objectives of this project are, for the participant to discover and understand the acoustic environment of the city, to recognize urban sound as a means of communication, to create through this material aesthetic meanings, and to understand that sounds are made in different ways and reflect different meanings so it can be a means to free him/her from a ‘purely’ visual perspective.

1. Listen…

2. Soundscape City Diary Haris Ladopoulos [email_address] Sound art works 2000 - 2006 Part A

3. metropolis

4. Sound is the primary interface between the individual and the environment. I describe sound as an invisible three-dimensional moving quality which has to go somewhere into space and sound colour all these different qualities and quantities that I hear

9. soundscape city diary I

10. a sound installation that took place at the Institute of Education (IoE). This ‘diary’ reflects the depletion of ‘natural’ sounds in the city experience, for the shake of the virtual domain. Investigates randomness and the resolution of the uncontrollable outstanding urban sound in the real time transforming it outside from its actual context

16. city capsule

17. the modern man inhabits a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known. Sound in the city is a space of “noise” without order or certain authority. Sound is a non-linear system in the linear visual system of our world. Nonlinear systems generally cannot be solved and cannot be added together. The nonlinear terms tend to be the features that people want to leave out when they try to get a ‘good’, ‘simple’ understanding

22. hospital

23. the specific choice of the recorded places and situations justified from the recounting of my memories. Everyday experience of sounds, smells, feelings and fluids came to seem so basic and so ordinary that people had a natural tendency to assume that they understood them very well. It was not so + disinfectant’s smell

28. silence

29. i question the visual, as an artefact enclosed in glass box, while the participant, alone in the installation, is invited to step into an empty cabinet with a heavy door closing behind. Inside the participant listens a pre-recorded blank tape from 9 invisible speakers while a spy camera records his face and he feels the strong feeling of coldness on his feet. My father’s presence was the sound of the city while now his absence represents the silence of the city, the silence of the eye (the absence of the seen), the sound of the other side

35. wired room

36. a sound and visual installation that has shown at the Greengate Gallery. It is a combination of sounds, wires and painted black lines. The dominant sound is a heartbeat. The purpose is to evoke the feeling of construction and order in the chaotic environment of a city, using the sound and line as a critical vehicle of information Group Capsule Haris Ladopoulos Yiannis Christakos