Winter School of CRESSON
A week long training, organized within the AAU Cresson team in the ENSAG facilities and with several European partners
How does the world sound? More recently, the concept of ambiance is subject of special attentionas it appears very promising to develop a new perspective on our contemporary sonic environments. If sound and ambiance are so closely related, it is because they both question the idea of a clear distinction between the perceiver and the perceived, the subject and the object, the inside and the outside, the individual and the world. Instead of relying on a dualistic and substantialistic mode of thinking, they require an alternative to an ontology of the thing and attention to the medium and fluxes involved in everyday sensory experience
Since 2013, the CRESSON Winter School has taken the form of a week-long of research and practices in order to discuss and explore the laboratory’s methods and concepts in their capacities to give some answers to a specific topic in connection with the sound environment, its study and its transformations. In 2021 and 2022, the week took place within the framework of “B-AIR Art Infinity Radio” project which led us to work on the theme “vulnerabilities and sounds, the experience of listening”.
Winter School's program is both theoretical & practical on listening, research and design of the sound environment and alternates between a series of conference-meetings with field work. This allows the participants to consolidate their theoretical knowledge by improving their own field practice: The week ends with participants‘ show regarding the sound pieces produced during the week. 9th and 10th edition of Winter School is dedicated to B-AIR research theme.
Listening to the environment is a gesture that may seem simple and insignificant: Being intrinsically related to time, sound is a medium also very capable of questioning our relationships with places & spaces at scales and temporalities that are often « left aside » because they appear to be too obvious, too small or too large. Therefore, sound is a lever for considering, questioning or reframing these issues.
Architects, urban planners, artists, designers, but also inhabitants, conceive and occupy public spaces and the landscaped spaces through various uses and sound practices. 2022 edition proposed to the participants to think more precisely about the cultural and spatial dimensions of the perception of ambiences by working on "sound spaces in waiting": How can we design public space and its furniture to be less vulnerable ? How can they be designed and built to give or bring attention to the vulnerabilities and pluralities of uses and spaces?
Conversation on intricacies of sound in the room and the Cresson Winter School.
Aren't we a little too quick to associate density with sonority? If you take a closer look at this question, it's clear that architectural and urban forms offer a wide range of possibilities for users with very different sonorities. The back of a large building may be strangely quiet, while its street frontage is alive with traffic and shops; living on the top floor or the ground floor changes our perception of a place; from one apartment to another we experience sound proximity very differently, and, more generally and fortunately, the world around us can sound in a thousand and one ways.