locus sonus > R&D > SINC

Partners

• SARC Sonic Arts Research Center Queen's University Belfast
• Institute for Sonic Arts Research (IRZU) (Slovenia)
• French sound research lab (Locus Sonus)
• Norwegian National Centre for Technology in Music and the Arts (NOTAM)
• Multi media association (Auropolis) (Serbia)
• contemporary art museum and foundation (Serralves) (Portugal)
• Music Technology Group (MTG-UPF) Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona (Spain)

Aims & Objectives

• To better understand cultural identity through sound in communities across Europe
• To develop cutting-edge sound art practices/works that address European cultural identity
• To develop connectivity between several European communities through sonic activities
• To understand the life of each community, its cultural and sociological identity and the identities of its people through sound and collaborative sonic creations

Specific Aims

• To identify and record culturally specific sonic profiles and make them available through freesound.org
• To develop a methodology in order to identify best practice for the development of the sonic profiles across the SINC consortium
• To place sound at the centre of creative engagement with cultural identity through the guidance of a world authority on creativity in contemporary society (Charles Landry)
• To offer training sessions and workshops in each partner’s location, involving local communities (school children, independent artists, disadvantaged communities as well as the ageing population)
• To produce high profile sonic art works (including installations, distributed music performances, networked streaming projects, festivals, collaborative compositions) linked by a well-researched methodology
• To raise the awareness of sound with the general public through regular presentations
• To document all SINC outcomes by means of a website and e-book

Research Questions

• How can we gain a greater insight into European cultures through sound?
• How can such insights contribute to the development of cross-cultural collaborations in a EU context?
• How can we assess the effectiveness of sound for understanding cultural identities?
• How integral are local communities for an exploration of a culture-specific sound environment?

About the Project

The SINC project will use sound as a means for understanding cultural identities across a network of communities in Europe. SINC will provide training sessions for local communities; it will allow for the exchange of skills and distribution of best practice through the use of the consortium’s combined expertise as well as through the use of new audio technologies. Commissions and workshops across the consortium will allow for the mobility of young professionals, the active engagement of people in the creation of new sound practices and performative works that address cultural identity.
SINC is a project that has at its heart a mutual understanding of different working approaches, people and cultures, aiming to enrich each communities’ environment through cultural actions and exchange.

SINC’s network of partners has great expertise in cultural production, sound art and community engagement. The coordinator, a world-leading sound research institution in the UK (SARC), is joined by Slovenian Sonic arts research institute (IRZU), French sound research lab (Locus Sonus), Norwegian National Centre for Technology in Music and the Arts (NOTAM), Serbian multi media association (Auropolis), Portuguese contemporary art museum and foundation (Serralves) and Spanish Music Technology Group (MTG-UPF).

SINC Context

With fast-paced societal change and increase in mobility within Europe and worldwide comes a necessity to engage with notions of cultural identity and how this is shaped by today’s world. The mediated nature of many social and cultural interaction places the use of media (images, videos, sounds, text) at centre stage as we move from a culture of media consumers to media producers, evidenced by numerous youtube phenomena. The role of sound gains particular relevance, as new ways of distributing media might resemble a return to aural cultures in which ideas, memories, stories and knowledge are constantly being shared across communities.
SINC proposes to examine cultural identity by collecting, transmitting and archiving non- urban and urban sounds, while engaging with local communities, their sonic memories and aural understanding of their environments. SINC will engage local sound artists and archivists to record and collect specific sounds from within their cultures. An archivist will focus on verbal histories and memories of the chosen communities, specifically taking into account voices, accents and sound histories of each specific community. These sounds, collated in the Freesound.org repository will be used as a basis for many of SINC’s creative outputs.
SINC thus brings collaborative artistic creations into a EU context, while aiming to create a network between seven European communities with highly diverse creative and technical expertise.