F 21 / World Listening Day

July 18th is the birth date of renowned Canadian composer, music educator, and author, R. Murray Schafer. With the World Soundscape Project he developed the fundamental ideas and practices of acoustic ecology in the 1970s. These inform the current, burgeoning interest in our changing acoustic environment. Thus, World Listening Day honors Schafer’s contribution to understanding our world.

Soundscapes, silence and noise. all sound spectra, from infra to ultrasound, frequencies and rhythm. But also, ecology, citizenship, equality and urban policies. The listening as a catalyst for transformation and sounds that are part of our everyday life places. How the soundscape affects us and how we are responsible for the sound we generate. For several years, sound artist and documentary filmaker Raquel Castro recorded interviews with many sound artists, soundwalkers and sound theorists about the role of sound and listening in human life, about the education towards improving of aural literacy. The SOA film was premiered last year and now for the first time in Czech Republic.

The theme for 2021 “The Unquiet Earth” is an invitation to reflect on and engage with the constant murmur of the Earth, sounds beyond the threshold of human hearing, to remind ourselves that we share this mysterious and awesome planet. Small, hidden, subterranean, aerial, underwater, infra and ultrasonic sounds, inaudible to the naked ear, can bring a new, potentially hopeful, perspective on the future of the planet and humanity. Listening as activism encourages us to question our attitudes as listeners as we aim to construct a more inclusive and empathetic new world. Join the unquiet revolution!

Raquel Castro is a PhD on Communication and Arts about Sound, Space and Acoustic Identity (New University of Lisbon). Among other films, she directed the documentary Soundwalkers which was presented in Subtropics Festival in Miami and screened at various conferences of sound art and documentary film festivals. She is currently working on a new documentary series called “Soa”, to be broadcasted by RTP2 in 2020. As aaquel is the founder and director of Invisible Places International Symposium and the environmental sound art festival Lisboa Soa. Currently, she is a fellow researcher at CICANT – Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies under the project “Aural Experience, Territory and Community”, funded by FCT.

We invite you to join a sound walk through the urban landscape after the screening.

SOA, director: Raquel Castro, 71 min, 2020, original with English subtitles 

The event takes place on the occasionWorld Listening Day 2021 in cooperation withCENSE – Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies and GAMPA. We thank Pardubice for the financial support.