sound of freedom

The project from which this set of recordings derives combines acoustic analyses and methods of social engagement and media production, in order to investigate the significance of military aircraft noise in defining the senses of place and memory of a community who have lived beside the US air base at Kadena in Okinawa, Japan for over fifty years. There are three relevant contxts to these aims: the prevalence of an individually centered approach to the question of the impact of aircraft noise, the predominantly visual (photography and film) and oral registers of existing representations of the post-war relationship between Okinawa and American military air-bases and the impending threat of the community???s disappearance. In existing, policy oriented studies (currently the subject of debate in the High Court in Okinawa), aircraft noise is approached as an external and measurable force of technology in the environment, impacting upon the physiology of individuals and conceived in terms of the physics of sound and categories of medical pathology. However, these same sounds are also experienced as a ???soundscape???, that is through the lived social space of a community, held internally within the bodies of its members as one of the memories of the senses of that place over time that resonate for many with lingering traumas from the Battle of Okinawa. I have been investigating the relationship between the environmental and embodied aspects of aircraft sound by recording and disseminating, by means of a CD the soundscapes that constitute a sense of the present social life and memory of a community of people whose history has been defined by the sound of military aircraft.