This is a  journey through the sounds and voices of Ethiopia, between the rural markets of small villages and the largest African market in Addis Ababa. An auditory route by means of listening to the transiting sounds that populate the streets from one village to another, from a school to a well.

An immersion in the sounds and images that aims to engage the observer in one of the possible sound portraits of contemporary Ethiopia.

The research is focused around the soundscapes and attempts to two goals: 

• outline certain acoustic identities of the Ethiopian contemporary society.
• identify and experiment with various artistic and documentary ways to communicate the soundscapes.

The result of the research is documented with three videos, and a selection of audio clips from over thirty hours of audio recordings, through which I have made audio documentaries and a soundscape composition.

Also with the aim of identifying different possibilities of the soundscape realized by recording Audio/Video I developed a live performance and an installation.

The whole work can be consulted through a dedicated web platform www.aleolla.it/elqe

This thesis is part of the disciplinary field of “Soundscapes Studies”¹.

In this research, the key term “soundscapes” is meant as the totality of the sounds that surround us, being the object of perception in relation to a subject, differing from the concept of acoustic field which instead indicates the acoustic space of an object.

This project stems from  ideas developed during the master in “Sound Art” at the University of Barcelona, and has been realized thanks to an artistic residency conducted in March 2016 at the Italian Cultural Institute in Addis Ababa.

¹ Network UNISCAPE, Careggi, Firenze, Giugno 2012. Accessed on 15 April 2016 on website: www.uniscape.eu/