Echoes of the Past: Sound, History, and Memory

Lecture and Q&A with Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle

The lecture with explore the ambivalent relation between sound, history and memory and explore how field recordings, soundscapes and composition can facilitate memorialization processes. Cathy Lane’s presentation will focus on selected sound works, all made for or informed by specific geographical locations, which she has composed over the last decade. Each work explores living and lost memories, and how those memories relate to the present day and features spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse. Cathy Lane is currently focused on how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment, and our collective and individual memories from a feminist perspective.
Angus Carlyle will talk on the long-term research project called Zawawa that addresses auditory lives under military flight paths on the island of Okinawa, a phrase that is sometimes encountered in US discourse is “The Sound of Freedom.” The questions of how sound can be preceded by a definitive article, of the extent to which sound might mean that same thing to different listeners, of sound as a sensory exception, of whether present sounds can echo the past (or perhaps can trouble accepted histories and memories) will be considered through elements of the research of the Zawawa collaborators: artist Angus Carlyle, anthropologist Rupert Cox and scientist Kozo Hiramatsu.

Biographies/
Cathy Lane is a sound artist, composer and academic. Her work uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse. She is currently focused on how sound relates to the past, our histories, environment and our collective and individual memories from a feminist perspective. Cathy is Professor of Sound Arts and Director of CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) at University of the Arts London.
Angus Carlyle’s creative work shifts between a documentary impulse and a more poetic register. It deploys text, photography and compositions based on field recording and often involves working with others. His three most recently published works have focused on sonic field notes, soundmaps and the idea of sonic wilderness. With Professor Cathy Lane, he co-wrote the oral histories In the Field (2013) and Sound arts now (2021) and co-organised the first three Sound Gender Feminism Activism conferences. Angus Carlyle is Professor of Sound and Landscape and researcher at CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice) at University of the Arts London.