Major
Film Media
Second Major
Music (including Music History and Literature and Jazz Studies)
Advisor
Reyes, Ian
Advisor Department
Communication Studies
Date
5-2022
Keywords
soundscape, rhode island, south county, sound art, sound walk
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Abstract
The purpose of this project is to create unique soundscapes that depict the sonic environments of coastal communities in Rhode Island’s South County. This is an area of coastline that has been drastically impacted by climate change already, and will be inevitably transformed due to coastal erosion over the next 50-100 years. This project is aligned with the practices and ideologies of acoustic ecology. However, it is important to note that this is in no way a scientific endeavor and is instead an artistic investigation of South County’s coastal communities created through the production of unique interpretations of their sonic environments.
Acoustic ecology is a discipline that investigates the relationship between humans and their environment, and in this case the investigation is centered around the relationship of our coastal communities to nature as well as climate change and industrialization. By creating soundscapes for seven beaches around South County, this project seeks to preserve their unique sonic environments before they disappear forever.
This collection of soundscapes can have many functions, depending on the wishes of the end user, but its overarching purpose is to preserve the acoustic environments of South County’s coastlines, which are largely artistically preserved through visuals only. Consequently, this collection will serve as an aesthetic time capsule of the unique auditory environment of this particular area of Rhode Island’s vanishing coastline.
Media Format
embedly