Andra McCartney, associate professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Québec, Canada, describes herself as a soundwalk artist and researcher interested in the production and reception of the sonic experience as it pertains to everyday life. A scholar on sound art, sound recording, and issues on gender in relation to sound technologies, McCartney has been experimenting with electroacoustic soundwalk installations since the mid-1990s.

McCartney’s current project, Soundwalking Interactions, consists of the documentation of public soundwalk through media including sound recording, still photography, and video recording. The walks culminate in an open discussion in which participants reflect on their experience of the walk. As its name implies, Soundwalking Interactions emphasizes the various points of interaction created via the process of the soundwalk, between and among “among audiences, sound environments, research contexts, movements, media, senses, and places.”

Central to Soundwalking Interactions is its research blog, where readers can view videos and edited versions of the walks. In addition to performing the basic function of documenting the progression of each project, the blog serves as an open resource for interaction and collaboration with international audiences. For example, McCartney took part in a soundwalk with Multimedia University students in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia, in 2010, and later interacted with them via teleconference at a public soundwalking event in Montreal in 2011.

Soundwalking Interactions is concerned with the role of the participant in the soundwalk, addressing issues such as agency and improvisation through the exploration of different exercises and approaches involving soundwalks. One recent soundwalk that explored relationships between bodily movements and sense of place developed into a presentation of the soundwalk recordings in collaboration with a choreographer and dancers. The project has also led to an interactive installation that allows people to “dance” with sounds. Across much of McCartney’s work, in fact, is the emphasis she places on the embodiment in soundscape recordings. As McCartney has explained, ‘‘Soundwalk work is far from detached. The recordist’s perspective is written into the recording…a recording soundwalker is simultaneously an intensely engaged listener, connected by a phonic umbilicus to the surrounding world.” Like Hildegard Westerkamp, whom McCartney has written extensively on, embodiment in the soundwalk serves as an important source of reconnection. Following Westerkamp, McCartney’s work uses the soundwalking experience to engage audience and participants in asking questions about their relationships to places and their histories.

You can learn more about Andra McCartney at her website, http://andrasound.org/, and follow the blog of Soundwalking Interactions at http://soundwalkinginteractions.wordpress.com.

Works Cited

1. McCartney, Andra. “Soundwalking: creating moving environmental sound narratives.” Soundwalking interactions27 (2010).
2. Paquette, David, and Andra McCartney. “Soundwalking and the Bodily Exploration of Places.” Canadian Journal of Communication 37, no. 1 (2012): 135.
3. Andra McCartney, PhD. Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University.https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/coms/faculty.html?fpid=andra-mccartney. Web. (Accessed 8 July 2016).
4. Andra McCartney website, andrasound.org. Web. (Accessed 8 July 2016).