Hearing a shakkei: The semiotics of the audible in a Japanese stroll garden
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Michael Fowler
Michael Fowler (b. 1974) is a research fellow at Technische Universitat Berlin 〈synthifou@gmail.com 〉. His research interests include Japanese garden, acoustic ecology, semiotics, and architecture. His publications include “Mapping soundspace: The Japanese Garden as auditory model” (2010); “On listening in a future city” (2011); and “On the relation between inside and outside: Conceptualizing acoustic space in John Cage's Variations IV” (2012).
Abstract
Though there has been some interest in the semiotics of Japanese gardens (Casalis 1983; van Tonder and Lyons 2005) as pure visual articulations of landscape elements, attention to what Schafer (1977) and Truax (2001) identify as a garden's soundscape has been lacking. This paper investigates the gardening technique of shakkei (borrowed scenery) in the Tokyo garden Kyu Furukawa Teien. Utilizing the terminology of Schafer and Truax, I construct a Greimas square to interrogate the semiotic function of the shakkei in light of traditional Japanese uses of Chinese geomancy, and to further investigate the garden's synthesis of landscape and soundscape elements.
About the author
Michael Fowler (b. 1974) is a research fellow at Technische Universitat Berlin 〈synthifou@gmail.com〉. His research interests include Japanese garden, acoustic ecology, semiotics, and architecture. His publications include “Mapping soundspace: The Japanese Garden as auditory model” (2010); “On listening in a future city” (2011); and “On the relation between inside and outside: Conceptualizing acoustic space in John Cage's Variations IV” (2012).
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Between the grid and composition: Layout in PowerPoint's design and use
- Beyond speech balloons and thought bubbles: The integration of text and image
- Abstraction as a limit to semiosis
- The multimodal representation of emotion in film: Integrating cognitive and semiotic approaches
- Hearing a shakkei: The semiotics of the audible in a Japanese stroll garden
- Towards a social semiotics of rhythm in popular music
- A carnival pilgrimage: Cultural semiotics in China
- Photography and intermediality: Analytical perspectives on notions referred to by the term “photography”
- An exploration of possible unconscious ethnic biases in higher education: The role of implicit attitudes on selection for university posts
- New insights into the medium hand: Discovering recurrent structures in gestures
- The multimodal construal of the experiential domain of recipes in Japanese and Chinese
- Cyberterrorist messages: A semiotic perspective
- A necessary condition for proof of abiotic semiosis
- Review of From First to Third Via Cybersemiotics
