Archaeology of the Voice: Exploring Oral History, Locative Media, Audio Walks, and Sound Art as Sitespecific Displacement Activities

This thesis develops a notion of an archaeology of the voice that is situated between three principal areas of research and practice: oral history, locative media, and sound art.
The research takes place in the context of contested urban space in Holbeck, Leeds one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the U.K. Through a reiterative and reflexive process of extensive interviewing, soundwalking and field recording the area is deep mapped and material gathered in order to produce a percipient led sitespecific presentation of oral history I term 'phonoscape'. Although the technology exists to connect oral history to place via locative media within a database aesthetic, a practical and conceptual gap is identified between these technologies for those working with audio interview material. In this context a purpose-built app is developed to enable oral history audio archives to be distributed geospatially, becoming navigable aurally on foot. In order to distribute a polyvocal sampling of an archive in time-space, techniques and principles from contemporary sound art are introduced, in particular a form of field composition involving an understanding of constitutive silence, soundscape, and voice editing techniques. Research into contemporary audio walk and memoryscape practice confirms that non-linear, fragmented narrative forms are used the construction of polyvocal understandings of place, and this is taken forward within a conception of the embodied hypertextual affordance of locative technology. The findings are then brought together in a transdisciplinary manoeuvre that introduces Displacement Activities, a translocational form of site-specific participatory performance art, providing a public vehicle that draws attention to phonoscape, its oral history content, and the archive
itself. As an open work that is generative and reflexive, Displacement Activities extend the notion of site-specificity, finding global analogues before returning to the original site to begin the work again.