Exploring the soundscape and the atmosphere of the Gigli di Nola cultural festival in Italy

The Gigli di Nola is an Italian folk ceremony featuring a shoulder-borne procession celebrating the feast of Saint Paulinus. Despite its cultural significance as a UNESCO site, the soundscape and atmosphere of the festival has scarcely been explored. This study examines how the physical and spatial arrangement of Nola shapes the enactment of the festival's soundscape, atmosphere, and behavior of its participants. It further investigates how the rhythmic qualities of the music are related to bearers' spatial maneuvers and to non-bearers’ participation in the festival. Through the use of rhythmanalysis and a mixed method approach, the results reveal the festival to be deeply connected to Nola's urban fabric and community life. The spatial arrangement of the historic streets with their nodes and boundaries, forge body–space relationships that indicates place, people, and music, are interconnected in the Gigli festival. The soundscape dominates the atmosphere of the festival, which in turn affects non-bearers and bearers' behavior. These rhythmic qualities also guide the parading of the Gigli festival for its participants. We conclude by pointing to a lively view of culture to promote UNESCO's management of cultural festivals.     

A field is to play. Enacting mental images of the soundscape

The article mainly focuses on the presentation of “A field is to play”, a collaborative and interactive installation dedicated to the recording and the reenacting of the relationship between the inhabitants of Mazama, WA – a small community in the USA – and their sonic environment. Through multimedia local interactions, enaction and emplacement, the project aimed to give expression to the many, individual and socially constructed, mental images of the local soundscape. A physical, interactive audio installation presented excerpts from individual interviews, emplacing and activating such mental representations, to merge them back into the environment. The artistic intervention was conceived as a localised process, acting through an engagement with publics. The soundscape itself, and its mental representations, were manipulated both as relational media, and subject matter. The presentation is preceded by three sections that introduce the theoretical context at the origin of the installation starting from urban theory in architecture, to the role of public art up to the discussion around the topic of soundscape, in a path from the most general issues to those more related to the specific character of the installation. The conclusion pulls together the theoretical and the applied sections and offers some response to the questions raised in the introduction. Through a theoretical engagement with the installation, it asks the reader to rethink the relationship between sound, memory and mental images.