Raviv Ganchrow - Aural Tectonics workshop
Binaural Ambience Study in The Hague with student of the Sonology department, Royal Conservatoire.
Raviv Ganchrow gave an interesting workshop at the Royal Conservatoire about binaural recording techniques.Together with students of the Institute of Sonology, he captured environmental acoustics in prominent places of our city The Hague, such as the beach in Scheveningen, in the middle of ‘Centrum’, at the busy Torenstraat and at Den Haag Centraal.
Raviv Ganchrow’s work researches the interdependencies between sound, place, and listening, aspects of which are explored through installations, writing, and the development of pressure-forming and vibration-sensing technologies.
Binaural recording techniques employ in-ear microphones to capture a spatial complexity of environmental acoustics intersecting at the listener. Carefully choreographed recording
and audio montage techniques structure, intensify and at times disrupt the innate qualities of this particular audio format of embodied hearing. The following sequence explores these diverse auditory qualities and spatial agencies encountered by The Hague's first-person listeners.
This piece was realized by participants of Raviv Ganchrow's Aural Tectonics workshop. Aural Tectonics explores the site-specificity and context-dependency of sound by fostering a critical awareness of, and attitude towards, environmental ambiance. Founded in a practice-based approach, the workshop develops site-dependent strategies for listening, recording, mapping, audio synthesis and sound intervention. Each year a particular site is chosen around which a sequence of intensive projects is developed. Within that framework, diverse approaches to 'hearing place' are fostered by adopting locational modes of listening and encouraging individual approaches to contextual ambiance.
Participants of the workshop: Miro Bollen, Margherita Brillada, Quirijn Dees, Willem van Erven Dorens, Abel Fazekas, my name is not mata, Lucie Nezri, Kaðlín Ólafsdóttir, Filip Sternal and Anna-Lena Vogt
Audio Mastering: Lucie Nezri
The recordings have been produced with binaural methods and require headphone playback for spatial accuracy.
The broadcast contains a sequence of binaural ambiences culled from The Hague's urban environment. The piece forms an interlinked trajectory from The Hague Central Station to the Scheveningen coast, creating a meandering aural section through the city’s urban ambiences. Each zone along the trajectory is explored by an individual recordist reacting upon the inherent qualities of their site. The resulting work reveals not only a range of atmospheres but also a polyphony of auditory approaches to urban sounding.