With Sunday the 18 July being World Listening Day, I will be asking the public to Opening our ears: learning to listen and help to survey the sonic landmarks of the seaside.
 - What is the seaside soundscape like?
 - What sounds are important to them?

Public Domain is a three-day festival happening from 16 – 18 July in Bournemouth Lower Gardens. The festival includes film screenings, family workshops, installations, performances and participatory events from leading artists with international profiles encouraging participants to explore what it means to share parks, gardens and other public spaces. The festival invites everyone to take part through collaboration and creativity in the workshops and some of the artworks, or simply by bringing a picnic and experiencing one of the many screenings and concerts that are on offer over the weekend.

For full programme: www.scansite.org/publicdomain

The purposes of World Listening Day are:

• to celebrate the practice of listening as it relates to the world around us, environmental awareness, and acoustic ecology
• to raise awareness about issues related to the World Soundscape Project, World Listening Project, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, and individual and group efforts to creatively explore phonography
• to design and implement educational initiatives which explore these concepts and practices

July 18 was chosen as the date for World Listening Day because it is the birthday of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer. Schafer is one of the founders of the Acoustic Ecology movement. The World Soundscape Project, which he directed, is an important organization which has inspired a lot of activity in this field, and his book Soundscape: The Tuning of the World helped to define many of the terms and background behind the acoustic ecology movement.

Health-Seeker is a map that privileges the ear over the eye. It is at once a historical record and a subjective representation of what is going on in the country. It is what each user wishes it to be and it is ever growing, ever changing and totally interactive.

The purpose of this map is to explore and create an ongoing dialog regarding your experience specific to the arts and health. We welcome your input into this map and details on how you can record your own soundbite can be found on the recording page.

What kinds of projects are happening in arts and health across the UK?

With Health-Seeker, you can zoom, pan and search for people talking about their projects with interactive satellite photos or detailed maps of their area. Click on hot spots to listen to the recorded sounds of a location based on gps tracking.

Do zoom into the map, as you will find many projects overlap in our cities. You will only see one or two projects in the default view of seeing the whole of the UK. While zooming in will open up many more projects.

While acknowledging that the visual sense often dominates, and conscious of the fact that the internet is largely a visual interface, we strive to create spaces that engage ALL the senses, and the mind, in a truly interactive way.

This project will deal with personal memories and human interaction with the land. We will explore the participants’ local landscape, using photography, drawing, writing, soundscapes, and GPS recordings. With each participant creatively recording a walk through their landscape that mixes facts with memory.
 
Participants will be taken through a series of workshops exploring photographic techniques and contemporary photography practices. This will enable them to document their own landscapes through documentary photography.
 
Participants will be asked to select a walk they regularly undertake, i.e. to a friends house, the local shop, restaurant, or pub. As well as record their journey using photography, we will ask participants to write a description of the journey and to explore their memory of the trip. We will ask that they sketch out the walk, as if they were describing the route to a friend; how do you get from A to B?
 
Lastly their walk will be technically recorded using a GPS recorder. All this information will be combined into a final exhibition, and possibly a catalogue and website.
 
The project will end with an exhibition in a local venue, celebrating the groups’ work. A website will show the ongoing work from the participants and allow a continuation of the work after the project has finished. A book will also be produced highlighting the work.