Sound- and Listenwalk during the international conference ‘The Role and Positioning of Sounds and Sounding Arts in Public Urban Environments’ on the occasion of the new Chair ‘Auditive Culture’ at Leiden University held by professor Marcel Cobussen.
“Moving the Masses” is a soundwalk through the historic city center of Leiden, in which I insert Chinese city noise from different periods in time. The soundwalk is thus an eye-ear encounter in which coincidence plays its own role. Sounds and sights of Leiden are confronted with the sonic culture of masses in (pre-)globalized urban China. “Time Lapse China 1986 – 2015” is the result of my listening research in urban China on Chinese globalization. In 2015 I went back to the cities where I had made binaural recordings during my first visit 29 years earlier. The changing tone of mass control in this rapidly commercializing nation has become one of the sound themes of my research.
Half way the headsets go down. Ear and eye are sync again in Leiden’s cityscape.