Alex Berman • Art Practice • Lalya Gaye • Organisation of Events • Richard Widerberg

Ljudcykeltur(SoundBicycleTour)#1

Posted by Richard on 22 June 2008⋅ Comment⋅ Share⋅  Email ⋅  Print
Tags: bikes, Göteborg, sound, Urban Space

Dånk! and the Psychogeographic Society of Göteborg organized the first SoundBicycleTour (Ljudcykeltur in Swedish), on Sunday 22 June in Göteborg! Ljudcykeltur is inspired by the concept of soundwalks, where a group of people drifts in a city listening very careful to its various soundscapes.

Each participant chose in advance a sonically interesting site which was included in the tour. We ride bikes to these places and carefully listened to their sound qualities.

Unfortunately it was raining quite a lot this day so there were not many people showing up. But the four of us that didn’t let the rain stop us had a good afternoon. We went to a few places with different sonic auras in Göteborg. For example an open field in the middle of the city, outside the local amusement park, a river, close to an electronic billboard with large moving and sounding parts, a forest close to the city. We bicycled silently to these places and then stopped and listened very careful to each of them. Worth noticing is that it was quite difficult to listen carefully while bicycling since there is other stuff to concentrate on and the wind in the ears filters out many sounds. We also noticed that the traffic sounds louder than usual on a wet day.

Ljudcykeltur is a continuation of our experiments around city, sound and bicycles. It inverses the “sustainable sound pollution” idea proposed by Vélophonik 1.0 and instead focuses on silent listening and on taking in existing sounds.

We will soon let you know when the Ljudcykeltur #2 takes place!