Salomé Voegelin

Dear Listener

You are invited to take part in Melbourne SoundWords, a phonographic writing project convened by Salomé Voegelin in collaboration with Catherine Clover for the Liquid Architecture Festival, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia, August/ September 2014.

Melbourne Soundwords forms a guest edition of a regular blog SoundWords soundwords.tumblr.com, which attempts to write about sound and the listened to without simply relying on adjectives and adverbs, (loud, quiet, noisy, harsh) but by expanding and inventing words and their use, to accommodate the invisible ephemerality and passing nature of sound. We are interested in publishing short texts that express a present listening to Melbourne, or that articulate a remembered sound of the city, and even texts about imagined sounds that might not have been heard at all but that could sound in Melbourne one day. They can be from any environment you listen in: your home or your hotel room, the street, the car or the bus, a shop or bar, a park or an institution, any moment of listening through which you encounter or imagine the city.

These texts can be very short, with the minimum word count being one, and the maximum being 50.

You are encouraged to write several times or only once, these texts can be as experimental, ungrammatical, poetic, prosaic or even inarticulate, as you like.

They will be published before during and after the Liquid Architecture Festival on the blog site and 20 of the submitted texts will be screened on the Big Screen in Federation Square a popular public meeting space, ringed by cultural institutions (the National Gallery, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Ian Potter Museum; various auditoria) and restaurants/cafes/bars in the city centre of Melbourne.

Please send your texts to Salomé Voegelin mail@salomevoegelin.net. Deadline for Big Screen inclusion is the 25th August, however we are happy to receive further texts for the blog site throughout September.

Each entry will be properly accredited

A few notes here about the context of the blog SoundWords:

www.soundwords.tumblr.com was started in 2010 as an attempt to write about sound without placing it in the role of the attribute, the adjective and adverb, linked and sublimated to a visual object, a noun, describing without being grasped in its own invisible materiality.

The blog writes the soundscape, sonic events and occurrences of the everyday through listening: working from the heard into words, to draw attention to the listening process and how we participate in our acoustic environment. The interest lies in what a transcription of listening can produce, how it can narrate our surroundings differently, leading to different insights, sensibilities and consequences about the world we live in and how we live in it.

Your texts about Melbourne will be added to the blog and hopefully the blog will have new entries everyday increasingly opening the sonic world of Melbourne to its readers who might never have been there and only know it from images or from its visual map, or who have lived there all their lives but never listened to it. The aim is to provide a different image of the city, one made from the relationships, processes and materials forming below the surface of the visible; to explore Melbourne through its sound, to hear it as an environment, a timespace place that does not afford us a vista but grants us access to the mobility of its own production.

We are very happy to answer any questions and to clarify the project further, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

We are looking forward to your contributions

With the very best wishes

Salomé Voegelin and Catherine Clover

Documentation