Sonotomia

Sound Anatomy of Unique Places (SONOTOMIA) is a 32-month-long project supported under the Creative Europe programme, Culture sub-programme, promoted by the Education, Audiovisual and Cultural Executive Agency (EACEA).

The project aims at making an analogy between the concepts of sound and cultural heritage as the values and unique characteristics of shared cultural heritage can be captured and transmitted through shared sounds; and sound can link the past with future, just as cultural heritage does. SONOTOMIA partners believe that heritage can be preserved and promoted through captured and manipulated sounds that can aspire future generations to value and cherish more the environment and culture around them. This will be achieved by raising awareness of the (un)conscious sounds from the surroundings that shape the specificities of culture in local spaces and in urban, rural, coastal, and industrial areas.

Consequently, the intention is to reflect on the presence of sound and how its consumption tailors the way human beings sense and communicate daily events. More concretely, in this project the diverse cultural values can be mirrored and established in multidimensional soundscapes that get overlapped and synchronised, which may produce an effect of pluralistic comprehensions and impressions depending on the listeners’ identities. The identity of culture is perceived according to the identity of a listener, while in this case the listener’s identity changes through time and space by interpreting listened soundscapes.

As sounds are widespread and accessible to anyone, promoting and disseminating cultural aspects through captured and modified sound elements will be the core of this project.

Therefore, the project calls upon cultural and creative professionals in order to increase their awareness, interest and competencies in coproducing and exploiting cultural outputs/products with digital core elements that apply sounds for the promotion of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Due to the project scope and context, cultural and creative professionals denote primarily musicians and sound engineers, as well as art historians, curators and biologists, etc. linked professionally to the cultural and creative fields, especially to cultural heritage. The diversity and levels of experiences and backgrounds of cultural and creative professionals are an added value that the project will profoundly capitalise on, by promoting interdisciplinarity and exploitation of project results.