Endangered Sounds: Participatory podcast and immersive mixing for political resistance in internal areas

Presenter: Dario Galleana (University of Turin, IT)

Abstract

The urgent matter of internal areas – rural regions isolated from basic services – fractures Europe into two competing soundscapes: the loud mediatised cities and the silent disconnected villages (Scanu et al. 2020). However, sociology, political science and geography focus on macro policies and ignore the people’s living voices (Carrosio 2019; De Rossi 2020; Meloni 2015; Rossi-Doria and Gorgoni 2005; Tantillo 2023; Vitale 2024). As a result, broad analyses neglect local struggles to redefine internal areas (Palmieri 2023). My work addresses internal areas with special attention to voice and the role of sound technology in participatory action research (Hilder 2023; Stoecker and Falcón 2023; Van Der Vaart, Van Hoven, and Huigen 2018). Specifically, “Endangered Sounds” is a participatory podcast that challenges the city-countryside dichotomy and unearths the liveliness of the Alpine village of Cevo, Italy. Using immersive mixing techniques, the voices of Cevo merge with their soundscapes, creating an archive of the community’s sounds. QR codes throughout the village share the podcast with travellers. I argue that the participatory podcast (Barbarino, Herlo, and Bergmann 2022; Smith et al. 2021; Wilson 2018) is a tool for political resistance and critical consciousness (Freire 2021; Hofman 2020), and that immersiveness emphasises the authors’ positionality within the territory and exposes the power dynamics of audio technology. In conclusion, this project gives a new voice to the neglected soundscapes of internal areas by using the participatory podcast and immersive sound as tools for political resistance and the preservation of marginalised sonic cultures.