Abstract of Doctorate Project

BIOCYBRID SOUNDSCAPES: A WAY TO CONTEMPORARY AESTHETICS

PhD candidate: André Luiz Gonçalves de Oliveira
LART – UnB-FGA/Gama.

Advisor: PhD. Diana Domingues
Sênior Professor at Brasília University – UnB.



The soundscape music composition is a kind of artistical work that appeared at the 70th decade. The composers created a new purpose in aesthetics that came to be considered as a new paradigm of the conceptual framework of the music. New concepts of perception offered a support to these advances. The Phenomenology of F.Brentano and E. Husserl are the bases of these novelties from the 19th to 20th century. However, the works of Merleau-Ponty and some of his followers, as F. Varela, H. Maturana, A. Noë and others, from the middle of the XXth century to this time, become the great references for new developments of the perception theory foundations and of the Soundscape study area.

The Phenomenology of Perception, the Ennactionists and Externalists Theories of Cognition and Perception have disposed some concepts that permitted advances toward a new aesthetic possibilities. Some concepts have been used at the context of creative applications in artistical works. The Biocybrid concept (the coupling between body, data-cyberspace and the physical world at the informational level) has demonstrated (in experiential artistical works as "Opened Body Connection", "XIV BIS") an enormous capacity to contribute for a development of technology to create Soundscape Music and others artistic modalities that may be called Biocybrid.

We will work in order to specify a set of procedures characteristics of Biocybrid Soundscapes. It will involve populations of organisms in one ecologic (meta) community and its territorial dynamics, with urban places. For this thesis the frogs will be our focus by its production and wide use of the sounds in its lives. The frog’s sounds are considered as markers of many aspects of the ecosystem life. The soundscape of the environment where the frog populations live will be connected with other places, such as urban physical places and a www sites. In this work we want to transpose and link different environments, in order to stress the relations between them. The urban environments are growing in direction of natural ones. What are happening with the natural soundscapes? What kind dynamical mixture does the growing of urban environments over the natural ones produce? We hope that the soundscapes that emerges from this mix may show to us some features of the relations between the diferent communities in our ecosystem.

As the urban soundscape begins to blend with the natural (not urban) soundscape, populations of different species move yourselves, seeking for better living conditions. This movement have direct influences on the composition of the local soundscape. Thus, if we follow for a certain period of time, the movements of certain populations within the meta-communities of amphibians and frogs, we will draw a map (a sound map) of how these species responds to the advance of urban environments. The soundscapes, composed of the fauna sound events of a region, are taked here as artistical works made trought biological markers on the conditions for sustaining life (for such species) in the ecosystem in question.

This thesis intends to research the development of technology to compose Soundscape Music based on new theories of perception. In this way we can focus on the concept of biocybrid systems envolving ecosystem and communities of frogs, humans and machines working together in a simbiotic way. Then, we’ll make a kind of biocybrid ecological soundscape that emerges from symbiotic relation between the actors named previously.