The Listener’s Listening
Lawrence English BBus (Mng), MMusic
Supervised by Dr Keith Armstrong (Principal) Professor Philip Graham (Associate)
Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Office of Research (OER) Faculty of Creative Industries Queensland University of Technology 2017
Keywords
Listening
Audition
Field Recording
Sound
Vibration
Affect
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Abstract
This research project explores the experience of listening as it relates to the practice of field recording. It develops an emergent theoretical framework, called ‘the listener’s listening’ - an approach to listening rooted in affect that reflects the agentive and creative capacities of the listener. A subsequent listening condition is examined which explores the relationship between the listener and the recording technologies on which they rely to capture a field recording. The ‘listener’s listening’ proposes that any listening undertaken during the completion of field recording must be engaged and conscious. It also proposes this listening to be agentive, in that it is temporal and rooted in the artist’s creative engagements in place and time. This necessitates a participatory approach to the experience of audition that engages the artist’s social and cultural milieu. The project uses this theoretical lens to ask the key question: what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording? The thesis is contextualized within several historical and social developments. Field recording is described as a product of particular technological, social and historical movements. The technology of reproduction emanates from Edison’s phonograph invented in the 1800s. From this development, several other innovations have been significant, principally affording an increased access to, and ease of use of, technologies including microphones, amplifiers and other recording devices, which have resulted in field recording becoming more readily available as a practice. Social phenomena that have influenced field recording across the 20th century include ethnography (Filene, 2000), sound recording (Schaeffer, 2012), acoustic-ecology (Schafer, 1993), musicology (Svec, 2013), and most recently fine arts (Lane & Carlyle, 2013). Each of these social phenomena have influenced and helped define the contemporary understandings of field recording. Finally, historical movements and various key works have also provided a contextual frame for the practice. These include radiophonic works (Tonkiss, 2003) but most especially Luc Ferrari piece Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer (Ferrari, 1970) is explored as the link to the creative practice element of this research project. Theoretically, the study explores the role of field recording in relation to sound phenomena, place and listening in order to address the experiential elements of the practice. Sound, as the material content of field recordings is theorised in the absolute, existing above, below and within commonplace audition, through a
ii vibrational ontological approach (Goodman, 2010). Following O’Callaghan (2012), the study considers sound as a series of events that are decoded, translated and apprehended from which meaning is made. Place is theorised, in relation to Morton (2007) as open, complex and flowing, and is understood as an atmosphere that floats within location. It is, the where of listening, and the zone of engagement between sound as vibration and listener as attentive and agentive artist. Listening is theorised in relation to the listener who must be attentive to the sound events that unfold in time and place, and through doing so create a unique listening. The process of listening in relation to the practice of field recording forms the basis of the new theoretical lens for this thesis. The use of practice led and reflexive methodologies foregrounded the experiential elements of field recording. These practices were conducted and focused using sensory ethnography, and an emergent associated methodological approach ‘sound specific ethnography’. The practice led nature of the work derived the research question from the challenges identified in practice (Gray, 1996). Following from Graham (2016) and Grierson & Brearley (2009), a practice led approach facilitated the identification and development of the research question through a reflexive and relational framework. As an experiential framework reflexivity encourages the artist-researcher to refocus the day-to-day operations of their practice in order to formalise their research project. Through the sensory ethnography and sound specific ethnography methodologies I reflected specifically on sound and addressed its unique challenges and the practices required to approach it. Methods included listening exercises, audio recording, journaling and studio work. The execution of the creative work, Approaching Nothing, offered an optimal setting to utilise the emergent theoretical positions and the methods outlined. This setting was optimal as it provided a diverse range of potential field recording opportunities across four days and nights in Vela Luka, Croatia. The site of Vela Luka is also significant historically for field recording as Luc Ferrari recorded his piece Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer there in 1968, a significant contextual anchor for this thesis and the creative work itself. As the creative work component of this research project it is analysed through the theoretical and methodological tools outlined previously in this exegesis.
The main contributions in relation to the research question is that:
iii • Field recording is an episodic, embodied, relational practice that is informed by socio-cultural understandings. The practice is dependent on the artist-researcher embedding themselves temporally in a field of audition. Field recording is a proximate, qualitative encounter, apprehended through cognitive and affective means, and concerns itself not with the super-representational, quantitative, aspects of sound, but rather the sub-representational or qualitative.
• The ‘listener’s listening’ theory outlines the framework through which the act of listening, as it pertains to field recording, is completed. This particular approach to listening requires the listener to heighten their attention and simultaneously embrace multiple aspects of the embodied relationship that listening requires. This position is an intermediation of the artist-researcher, sound, place, and technology.
• Sound, as the object of listening and thus field recording, is ongoing, chaotic and fluxing, and it is through this that a listening pierces. The listener, as an agentive practitioner, carves out a unique listening that reflects their interests and preoccupations, from any number of other possible listenings in that place and time. Therefore, even if the place and time of listening were shared, no two artist-researchers’ experiences would ever be the same.
• Place, as it pertains to field recording, is not merely the static, physical characteristics in which sound unfolds. Rather, it is the dynamic and shifting production that reflects the listener’s affective relation with the environment that they are working in. Place is therefore an affective atmosphere and a lived in zone, that is framed both within space and location.
• A listener’s listening is affectively shaped by the senses, and acutely tuned to the resonances of place in time. The listening accepts sound in the absolute, reflecting the opportunity for sounds, and non-sounds, those that exist beyond everyday audition, to have affective potential for the listener.
iv • Field recordings are the capture of a listening that unfolds in a relational field of audition; one that relies on a condition being established and maintained between two horizons of audition. The horizon of audition refers to the dynamic and evolving zone of available sound that surrounds a listener (Idhe, 2007). The first horizon of audition is the organic, interior, affective and psychologically shaped listening of the artist-researcher. The second horizon of audition is forged by the microphone and recording device and is accordingly external to the listener themselves and technologically bounded. These two horizons of audition necessarily overlap in a field recording. Field recording is the manifestation of a listening that occurs temporally in place. The relation listening condition established between the two horizons of audition determines its success or failure.
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Table of contents The Listener’s Listening...... 1 Keywords ...... i Abstract ...... ii List of figures ...... iii Statement of original authorship...... iv Publications during candidature...... i Acknowledgments...... ii 1. Introduction...... 1 1.1 Arrival at Audition...... 2 1.3 Arrival At Field Recording ...... 3 1.4 Thesis Overview ...... 4 1.5 Approaching Nothing ...... 6 2. Contextual Review ...... 7 2.1 The Age Of Phonography ...... 8 2.2 The practice of field recording ...... 12 2.3 Pre-echoes: Towards contemporary field recording...... 13 2.4 Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer...... 16 2.5 A world soundscape of environments...... 18 2.6 Field recording in the present...... 20 2.7 Field recording: Summary ...... 21 2.8 Conclusion ...... 22 3. Theoretical Framework ...... 24 3.1 Sound phenomena ...... 25 3.1.1 Toward An Affective Vibrational Ontology ...... 27 3.1.2 The Matter Of Sound...... 32 3.1.3 Everything Vibrates...... 33 3.1.4 Timbre ...... 36 3.1.5 Sound Summary ...... 38 3.2 Place ...... 38 3.2.1 Proximate Place and Perspective...... 41 3.2.2 Place, Atmosphere and Affect...... 42 3.2.3 Place and Production ...... 44 3.2.4 Place: Summary...... 44 3.3 Listening: Introduction ...... 45 3.3.1 Different Uses For The Same Organs...... 46 3.3.2 The Phenomenology Of A Listener’s Listening ...... 50 3.3.3 The Listener’s Listening In Field Recording ...... 52 3.4 Summary: Towards The Listener’s Listening...... 53 4. Methodology ...... 55 4.1 Practice-Led Research Strategy ...... 55 4.2 Reflexivity...... 58 4.3 Sensory Ethnography...... 60 4.3.1 Sensory Ethnography And Practice-Led Research...... 61 4.3.2 The Emergence of Sound Specific Ethnography...... 63 4.4 Methods...... 66 4.4.1 Listening exercises...... 66
iii 4.4.2 Audio Recording...... 69 4.4.3 Journaling And Documentation ...... 69 4.4.4 Analytical Studio Practice...... 70 4.5 Methods and methodology: Summary ...... 70 5. Approaching Nothing...... 71 5.1 Approaching Nothing: Overview...... 72 5.1.1 Approaching Nothing: Technical Overview...... 74 5.2 Approaching Nothing analysis...... 76 5.2.1 00:00-12:00 From Dawn...... 77 5.2.2 12:00-20:00 Through Day...... 81 5.2.3 20:00-22:10 Into Night...... 83 5.3 Approaching Nothing: Summary ...... 88 6. Contributions and Conclusion ...... 89 6.1 A Listener’s Listening...... 91 6.1.1 Capturing The Listener’s Listening ...... 95 6.1.2 Listening Across Two Horizons ...... 95 6.1.3 Two Horizons Two Directions...... 98 6.1.4 New Acoustic Phenomenologies ...... 99 6.2 Conclusion ...... 100 6.3 Further Research...... 102 6.4 Concluding statement...... 104 Appendix One...... 105 Appendix Two ...... 106 Appendix Three...... 107 Appendix Four...... 108 Appendix Five...... 109 References...... 110
iv List of figures
Figure 1: Bell tower ...... 77 Figure 2: Jadrol Ferry Terminal...... 79 Figure 3: Documentation example...... 79 Figure 4: Field recording set up ...... 81 Figure 5: Street corner documentation ...... 84 Figure 6: Listening exercise, soccer recording ...... 85 Figure 7: Chiroptera Listening Exercise ...... 87
iii Statement of original authorship
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
QUT Verified Signature Signature: Date: 28-08-2017 Publications during candidature
English, L. (Deutschlandradio Kultur). (2014, October 3) Approaching Nothing (Audio Podcast). Retrieved from http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/ursendung- approaching-nothing.1022.de.html?dram:article_id=293383
English, L. (2015, February 9) The Sounds Around Us: An Introduction To Field Recording. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/the-sounds-around-us-an- introduction-to-field-recording-36494
English, L. (2015, Spring). Relational Listening: The Politics Of Perception. Retrieved from http://earwaveevent.org/article/relational-listening-the-politics-of- perception/
English, L. (2016). Approaching Nothing on CD. Paris, France: Baskaru
English, L. (2015, October 7) The Sound Of Fear. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-sound-of-fear-65230
i Acknowledgments
To begin, I wish to sincerely thank my supervisors Dr Keith Armstrong and Prof Philip Graham who have very kindly, and patiently, helped me unpack the questions relating to this research project. Their willingness to encourage both a depth of practice, and the development of the theoretical underpinnings of that practice, is graciously appreciated.
I owe an enormous debt of thanks to Rebecca English, without whom this document would not be nearly as rigorous or considered. Her input into this document has been critical and I extend to her a particular note of love and gratitude for her insights, critiques and edits.
In creating Approaching Nothing, I was fortunate to have the support of several artists and curators who facilitated the realisation of the work. Petar Milat from Mama and Leila Topic from Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, were both instrumental in the realisation of Approaching Nothing. My thanks also extends to Baskaru who published the work and Jan Rohlf, who commissioned the piece for DWR.
I also wish to acknowledge both William Basinski and Merzbow, whose sound works created the sonic environment within which the lion’s share of the thesis was written and edited. Their atmosphere is a reminder of the power of sound to offer transcendence from the everyday.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I owe a debt of eternal thanks and love to my father (and for that matter my mother and brother). His simple request to close my eyes and listen, provided me with what was a cursory engagement with my audition that has since resonated throughout my life. I carry forever that seed of experience he planted in me, and for this I am most thankful.
This work is dedicated to the next generation of listeners; Frances, Theodore and Augustine.
ii 1. Introduction
In this research project, I am concerned with the experience of listening as it pertains to the creative practice of field recording. I define field recording as a phenomenological pursuit, which is an episodic, embodied, relational practice that is dependent on the artist-researcher embedding themselves temporally in a field of audition. Field recording is a proximate, qualitative encounter, apprehended through affective means and concerns itself not with the quantitative aspects of sound, but rather the qualitative. This research project is primarily concerned with the practice of field recording up until the point at which the recording is presented to an audience. It focuses on agentive, affective listening and the requirements for that listening to be successfully completed as a field recording. I call this specific approach to listening in relation to field recording the listener’s listening.
To realise this approach, a listener must recognise how their experience relates to the particular technologies (microphones, electromagnetic pick-ups, hydrophones and others) they are using, which in turn facilitate a certain horizon of audition, one different from that of their listening. The horizon of audition refers to the dynamic and evolving zone of available sound that surrounds a listener (Idhe, 2007). This technologically bounded horizon of audition offers a differing perspective to the sound events that comprise a listening in time and place. Through doing so the technology can provide an expanded or contracted exploration of audition, which can be utilised by the artist-researcher seeking to collect their listening as field recording. The project subsequently focuses on the conditions through which such relations can be established between the artist-researcher and their technology. I am calling this condition relational listening. This thesis concerns itself with analysing the practices and considerations required for an artist-researcher to address the experience of their unique listening and how it is they can successfully complete a field recording, which embodies their listening in place across time.
The research is born out of the work I have been undertaking for the better part of two decades. During this period of creative investigation, I have extensively examined my auditory capacities, interests and preoccupations. I have come to intimately understand the degrees to which my audition is capable of realising certain creative feats and the requirements for these practices to be effective in realising my listening through field recordings. Specifically, I have come to
1 understand aspects of my audition that are intimately tied to my practice in field recording and relate to my capacities to explore, engage and collect sound materials in time and place from a dynamic horizon of audition. I have also come to recognise the criticality of the technologies used to capture listening as field recording. Accordingly, this research project considers the question:
• What experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording? The thesis is borne from the research I have undertaken and is comprised of two parts. There is a written exegesis and a related creative piece, Approaching Nothing, a collection of field recordings (30 minutes, 30 seconds) recorded in Vela Luka, Croatia. This creative work exists as a culmination of the practices in listening, through field recording, which I have undertaken from the outset of this research. Accordingly, Approaching Nothing is the first piece I have completed that is guided principally by the application of the methodological and theoretical framework outlined in the thesis.
1.1 Arrival at Audition
I arrived at a starting point for my audition in 1984 when I was 8 years old. I lived in Brisbane, not far from the old docklands that stretched between Hamilton and Eagle Farm. In the mid-1980s, the port largely comprised abandoned factory shells, chemical and sand storage facilities and large tracts of overgrown low set grasslands. At the Eagle Farm end of the port, the road terminated at an incinerator complex and mineral sand storage facility I visited regularly with my father. The sand was unfenced and we would spend long periods of time playing there. Apart from sand- play, our other main activity was bird watching; an activity fostered by my father. It was undertaking this activity that revealed to me the possibility of audition. Ironic, considering that bird watching by definition favours a visocentric appreciation of the avian subject.
Running parallel to the sand storage facility was an area of swamp, where water would regularly pool and, within this area, a particular species of bird lived. The bird was the reed warbler. It is a small brownish bird, with a softer tan tone on its underbelly. In many respects it is not a particularly spectacular bird, until it opens its mouth. The reed warbler is a remarkable sounding bird, it has a range of piercing but melodic electronic sounding calls that bring to mind analogue synthesizers as much
2 as bird communication. This bird captivated me. I wanted to see it, but visit after visit it eluded my sight, as it was camouflaged in the reeds of the swamp and my ability to use binoculars was incredibly limited.
After many visits, my growing frustration led to my father taking the binoculars from me and asking me to close my eyes. He told me to listen to where the bird was, to sense it into a place where I could focus my sight. He told me that once I had located the bird I should open my eyes and point the binoculars toward the location I had listened into. To my amazement, the very first time after this exercise, I saw the bird. More importantly, for the first time, I had consciously listened to and for a thing. Whilst I might not have thought about it in these terms at the time, this was my first experience of contemplating my audition. Furthermore, it was the opening up of my interest in a way of approaching the world that embraces a different horizon of experience than that offered by sight.
1.3 Arrival At Field Recording
The first field recording I made, subsequently published on a CD, was of pied oyster catchers on a shore near Nudgee Beach in Brisbane in 1998. The recording, which was used as a sound bed for a piece of experimental music, is neither creatively nor technically remarkable. Its significance lies in it being the point from which I began exploring audition as it relates to this research project. Specifically, it prompts me to ask the question, what listening is, as it pertains to a creative practice in field recording. Moreover, how the relational conditions between human audition and the technologies utilised to record those listenings must be carefully considered.
Since that first recording, I have undertaken many thousands of hours of recordings. These recordings have been in different environments – from the Amazonian rainforests to the central Australian deserts, from the Antarctic Peninsula to remote woodlands in Poland. Each of these locations has confronted me with new challenges for my listening and for collecting that listening in field recording. As technology has developed, and better and more accessible equipment has been produced, questions around collection of a listening have become even more pertinent. This change reflects developments around the size and portability of equipment, recording fidelity, specificities of microphone design and developments in new technologies related to sonic phenomena such as electromagnetic recording
3 devices. It is these questions, and research and theorisation around them, which underpin this project. In what follows, I outline the structure of the thesis component of this research project.
1.4 Thesis Overview
In chapter two, I provide a contextual framework within which my practice is situated: historically, creatively and technically. In this chapter, I set out a broad analysis of the origin of field recording. It traces a history from the earliest moments at which sound could be reproduced beyond the moment of its utterance. From there, I explore field recording specifically, drawing a historical pathway out of the early ethnographic traditions, through soundscape practices into the contemporary phenomenological approaches field recording. Throughout this chapter, I also explore how it is field recording has developed creatively and that it should be recognised as one of streams within the sonic arts. I address in depth the work of French artist Luc Ferrari whose piece, Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer, I argue is a critical turning point for the way in which I approach and situate field recording. My response to his piece is called Approaching Nothing, and is the creative practice element of this research project.
In chapter three, I develop a theoretical framework to approach the question underpinning this research project. The theory specifically addresses the practice of listening as it relates to field recording. This theoretical framework is rooted in a phenomenological approach and explores three related themes that are critical to addressing this research project. The first theoretical focus is sound, the primary subject of listening. Sound is theorised through a vibrational ontological position, which enables a listener undertaking field recording to approach sound in the most comprehensive way possible during those moments of listening. This approach to sound permits an appreciation of sound that embraces the potential of all sonic phenomena. It therefore concerns the sounds commonly accessible through our auditory capacities and other less available sonic occurrences. Those not readily available include electro-magnetic sounds or sounds from other atmospheres such as water that may still hold a point of interest or investigation for a listener.
The second theoretical focus is place. Place is theorised as the setting in which a sound is encountered by the listener. This setting is the staging arena within which
4 a sound is explored during field recording. Place is explored as a proximate and porous frame within which a field recording occurs. It is further theorised as a production of the listener, suggesting both the socio-cultural framing of the artist- researcher and the phenomenological understanding of being as being-in-the-world (cf. Heidegger, 1962). Critically, place is recognised as an affective atmosphere within which the listener finds themselves during field recording. The third theoretical concept is listening. I theorise listening as an agentive exercise in the phenomenological reflection (cf. Merleau-Ponty, 2012) which opens up the possibility for an embodied, affective and qualitative setting in which field recordings are undertaken.
Chapter four addresses the methodology and the methods employed for my research project. I begin with the macro concept of a practice-led research approach. I then explore the meso-concept of reflexivity and conclude with the micro concepts of sensory ethnography and sound specific ethnography. The methods described are outlined with respect of their relational interactions with one another in addressing the research question. Each method addresses the practice of field recording as well as the pursuit of creative and agentive listening.
In the fifth chapter, I examine the creative work component of this research project, specifically my artwork Approaching Nothing. I apply the theoretical tools developed through the third chapter to consider the work and examine the individual elements of the piece, using the methods outlined in chapter four as a means of critically understanding the sensual materials that comprise the piece.
In the final chapter, I outline the findings of this research project. I address the concept of the listener’s listening, which has emerged from this research project and is the contribution to new knowledge in this field. The emergent theoretical framework of the listener’s listening refers to the state of listening as it pertains to field recording and other creative recording situations. The success or failure of the listener’s listening in field recording is contingent on a relational listening condition that builds a theoretical and aural bridge between the organic and technological horizons of audition. I conclude with a summary of this thesis and also address areas for future research.
5 1.5 Approaching Nothing
Approaching Nothing is the creative work developed and executed as the manifestation of practice within my research project. The piece, which runs approximately 30 minutes, is comprised of recordings from Vela Luka, Croatia. The audio recordings in Approaching Nothing are the results of my listening and subsequent field recordings, shaped through the emergent concepts and methods that I outline in this research project. It is recommended that this piece be experienced either with a high quality home stereo system, professional studio monitors or on headphones. Given the detail of the sonic materials included in the creative work, listening through laptop speakers or similar devices will mean the listener can not adequately approach and consider these field recordings.
6 2. Contextual Review
In this chapter, I contextualise the study of field recording and examine listening and the desire to collect listening through field recording. First, I consider listening through a history of audition in the age of the phonograph, which commenced in the mid 19th century and has continued to the present day. This era began with “the first means of musical presentation that can be possessed as a thing” (Adorno, 1990, p. 56). Before the arrival of recording and playback devices, my practice could not be reasonably achieved. It was initially through the phonograph and more recently with digital recording devices that practices such as field recording became possible. I therefore argue that it was the invention of phonography that changed understandings of and the willingness to philosophically reposition listening. I have chosen this timeframe in the development of audition in order to understand how a listener’s listening can be collected as a field recording. The transmissible form of the listener’s listening is thus, a field recording (cf. English, 2014).
This emergent framework of the listener’s listening considers a number of key aspects of the practice of listening as it relates to field recording. It recognises a need for attentive, agentive listening (Link, 2001); for listening to be rooted in affect (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010); for a sense of place to be recognised as dynamic and in flux across time (Ingold, 1993); and for a desire to collect that listening, in the case of this research project, through field recording so it can be successfully transmitted to others (Szendy & Nancy, 2008). Those aspects, specifically the affective agency of the listener and the atmospheric nature of place, suggests that field recording requires an attentive, present listener because it is temporal and in flux and thus develops continuously during its completion.
Furthermore, extrapolating Toniutti (1999), field recording requires the recordist to focus attention upon, and to carve out, the atmosphere of place from within a location or space. This position emphasises agency in the practice of field recording. As an artist researcher, I must also consider a range of dynamic variables and attentively filter a selective portion of sound from within a complex horizon of listening (Idhe, 1973). The horizon of listening is the temporal, physiological and physical place within which a field recording is conducted (Blesser & Salter, 2007).
7 The filtering of those variables is constituted by a range of technical, aesthetic, physical, and temporal constraints and, by identifying and considering them, I create the opportunity to communicate a listening of a chosen place and time that is entirely unique. As Szendy and Nancy (2008) note, listening is agentive and reflects preoccupations and interests, and is shaped through accumulated social, political, and cultural experience as well as physiological capacity. Furthermore, this filtering recognises that the visual limitations of place may not be identical to the acoustic limitations (Idhe, 1973). It denounces the primacy of visiocentric traditions in favour of a prioritised acoustic awareness. Thus, to critically contextualise the practical aspects of this thesis, I explore the central developments and define the key positions, works, and artists that have established the foundation from which my own work as a listener has developed.
2.1 The Age Of Phonography
Phonography is a term applied to a wide range of recording pursuits that stem from the creation of recording and playback devices in the mid 19th century. Phonography both identifies a practice and, in its earliest period, a series of recording/playback devices. Phonography is technological, as the term refers to the phonograph, a commercially available device created by Thomas Edison that made audio recording, storage, and playback possible (Sterne, 2003). The phonographic period is primarily defined as being “marked by a distinct set of attitudes, practices and institutions made possible by a particular technology, the phonograph” (Rothenbuhler & Peters, 1999, p. 243).
As early as 1807, several inventers were designing the first phonographic devices. Thomas Young, one of the forerunners of phonography, described his ‘recording’ device as “a sharp metal stylus attached to a wax coated, revolving cylinder” (Dellaira, 1995, p.192). It would be half a century before these ideas were developed into a physical apparatus, specifically Thomas Edison’s phonograph invented in 1877. Kahn (1999) describes the devices at the beginning of phonography. He specifies two devices that were especially significant: the phonautograph created by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857 and, shortly after, the phonograph by Thomas Edison. These devices provided a “device for recording and reproducing sound” allowing phonography to come into being as “an emblem for a dramatic shift in ideas regarding sound, aurality, and reality from that
8 time” (Kahn, 1999, p. 70). Thus, the developments were critical in advancing the understandings of, and possibilities for, sound as a creative medium (Milner, 2011). Moreover, the reproducibility of sound meant that new ways of engaging audiences could take place.
No longer was sound’s resonance fixed geographically and temporally, rather sonic materials from one location could be reproduced in another time and place. This de-embedding of sound from its geographic and temporal point of origin led to new opportunities to consider the possibilities of communicating a listening. In the centuries preceding the creation of the phonograph, music had occupied the majority of creative aural enterprises. Musical notation provided the first steps towards a sense of acoustic repeatability, albeit through a distinctly visual format (Ong, 1971). It provided a set of rules through which musical ideas might be reproduced, but could not address the critical considerations around how sound exists in place. Notation primarily addresses the performer and instrument in time.
Outside of the performance of music, there had been several developments in other creative acoustic fields that considered the role of place in audition, including sonic architectural designs, for example in places of worship such as cathedrals that could spatially augment instrumental and vocal recital. The use of sound within garden design, including the Suikinkutsu in Japanese Zen Gardens also considered the implications of sound in place (cf. Fowler, 2010; Weiss, 2013). These sonic investigations however, were temporally and geographically isolated, unable to be communicated outside of those constraints. Any experience of them required an audience to come into direct contact with the sound or secondarily transmitted through the written word. It is for this reason the technological possibilities of phonography were a prelude to considerable socio-cultural changes (Attali, 1985).
Phonography’s primary cultural impact was one of absolute aurality (Kahn, 1999). Rather than understanding aurality through what Schafer (1993) describes as the selective and subjective nature of the human ear, where the mind creates filters and focuses on particular sonic information developed under socio-cultural conditions, the phonograph “heard everything” (Kahn, 1999, p. 9). While not exactly a literal sense of everything, the everything Kahn defines is important because it provided an opportunity for human listeners to recognise that the phonograph could not extract signal from empirical noise. The cerebral filtering that was present in a
9 human listening, specifically the individuated and agentive concern that forged a listening, was not shared by the recording technology. Rather, the technology addressed sound based on its technological and storage media facilities. This technological constraint allowed a reconsideration of the ways in which our own listening and perception operated. Through the experience of recording and playback, we were able to recognise that our listening and that of the phonograph were not necessarily unconditionally related in any direct way.
Kittler (1999) argues the phonograph “does not hear as do ears that have been trained immediately to filter voices, words, and sounds out of noise” (p. 23). Instead, the device “registers acoustic events as such”, the effect being that, “articulateness becomes a second-order exception in a spectrum of noise” (Kittler 1999, p. 23). The phonograph that captures all sounds in its range does not maintain a listening as such, but rather registers acoustic events in a given horizon of audition. Thus, a new understanding of human listening, contrasted against the auditory capacities of the phonograph, was made possible through acoustic reproduction technology. Through this new recording technology our sense of listening, as a means of perception was able to be re-examined. Specifically, the phonograph allowed a critical distance from listening itself to be created and through this we could come to understand better the physical and psychological operations involved in listening and hearing. This comparative opportunity acted as a catalyst for defining the act of listening as opposed to notions of acoustic registration and became one of the central developments through which contemporary aurality could be investigated, analysed and subsequently theorised.
The phonograph delivered another significant contribution to the understanding of audition. Sound could be removed from its source, both in terms of geography and time, therefore introducing a new mode under which listening could take place, acousmatic listening. Acousmatic listening is sound removed from its source (Sterne, 2012). This development, in which sound could be removed from its spatial and temporal source, presented a fundamental shift in the way most people listened. Temporal acousmatic listening had been practised since the time of the Pythagoras, with the name drawing its root from the ‘acousmats’, a Pythagorean sect who listened to lectures given from behind a black sheet, so as to not be distracted by the gestures of the lecturer (Kim-Cohen, 2009). What the phonograph provided was
10 a new dimension to this removal of visual source, not just with a close performative environment such as a lecture, but also in time and in place. No longer did the listener need to be sharing those circumstances with that of the sound’s author.
For the first time, music, speech, and sound more generally were not tied to performance. Music could be, not only disembodied but also removed from communal listening in the concert hall, church or other shared environment. Even more pertinent was the phonograph’s ability to remove auditory information from the moment or place from which it originated. The time displacement of sound initially provoked suspicions in some listeners, who found their ears unsure what to make of sound and voice that appeared to haunt from the other side (Gordon, 2008). The phonograph gave voice to those who were no longer, those who had died or were not sharing the same space as the listener (Rothenbuhler & Peters, 1999).
There were further ramifications as phonography also presented a significant shift in cultural archiving and distribution, specifically, because it challenged the primacy of the printing press as pre-eminent form of media archiving and information dispersal (Rothenbuhler & Peters, 1999). This important demarcation meant that for the first time non-musical sounds might be presented in a meaningful manner. Many authors had explored ways in which environmental or animal sounds might be represented, but words fell short of articulating the complexity of any given sound space (Weiss, 2008). Examples of this shortcoming can be read in Weiss’s (2008) analysis of Henry Thoreau’s finely nuanced texts and the onomatopoeia that characterises Walden - Or Life In The Woods (Thoreau, 1995). However, even these notable works failed to adequately convey the sonic environment as it existed (Weiss, 2008). Theodore Adorno (1990) suggests that it was the phonograph’s role to introduce this transference of aurality in a sonic format. He argued that a phonograph, and later the long playing record, were the first means by which any sound could “be possessed as a thing” (Adorno, 1990, p. 56). For the first time, an object allowed not merely the systemic, structural component of music (and sound) to be captured, but also the sonics themselves.
With the creation of these phonographic objects came a series of institutions through which production, marketing and sales of these recordings could take place. The creation of these institutions in turn promoted a cultural phenomenon that altered the speed at which music and sound could be heard and under which
11 circumstances that hearing took place; a choice now controlled by the end user (Björnberg, 2010). As the discussion above suggests, the phonograph and phonography were a vital turning point for our relationship with and understanding of our ears. Phonography suggested new possibilities in art and creativity, as well as in philosophy, commerce and archiving. It promised to expand the aural capacity of human beings from being in the moment to a timeless echo of repeatable performance. It is critical to understand the implications and influences brought about by the shifts described above. Their impacts have come to forge the various strains of contemporary practice, as well as influence research around listening more broadly. In what follows, I contextualise the concept of field recording with is a key consideration of the creative practice aspect of this dissertation.
2.2 The practice of field recording
Field recording is a practice born of multiple interests and movements across the 20th century. I define the practice of field recording as the attentive listening to events, in place and in time, with the desire to capture that listening and transmit to others through recording. The history of field recording is traced out of developments across social, political and cultural movements throughout the 20th century. Changes in technology, accessibility, portability, environmentalism and eco-acoustics, aesthetics and philosophy have all impacted on the development of field recording.
It was not until after the First World War, and the creation and increased availability of portable recording technologies, that field recording began to emerge as a discrete creative practice (Denning, 2015). The emergence of highly portable tape machines ensured that artists could access recording technologies, opening out their creative output. Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1970) also heralded a significant pivot within field recording practices, being the first publication to essentially demarcate a zone of increased artistic endeavour within listening and field recording.
A number of subsequent works and artist-led approaches underpinned incremental shifts towards the contemporary notion of field recording. Throughout the final third of the 20th century these works encouraged artists to push the boundaries of their listening and test their abilities to collect that listening through recordings. In doing so, the cascade of artistic works encouraged further creative
12 exploration primarily concerned with the positioning of field recording as it pertains to this research project.
Field recordings are recognised to take place in complex environments that are in constant flux and thus their sonic events are unrepeatable (Cox, 2009). What differentiates this practice from other recording traditions, such as those associated with commercial music recordings, film or radiophonic work, is the way in which places and events are recognised and filtered by the listener within the frame of the recording. This ensures that field recording is never a reproduction of the real; field recording is rather primarily concerned with the capture of artist-led listening in time and place (Mullane, 2010). It is this listening from which the field recording emanates and reflects the artist-researcher’s agency which actively filters and seeks to consider a discreet place from within a broader horizon of audition. The horizon of audition refers to the dynamic and evolving zone of available sound that surrounds a listener (Idhe, 2007). Furthermore, as the name suggests, this practice unfolds in the ‘field’.
The recordings are the results of a subjective, individuated acoustic experience and creative interpretations of what has occurred in a given time and place. They are shaped by an array of choices made by the listener, from dramaturgical considerations such as the unfolding of dynamic events in time through to the aesthetic, and ultimately embody a desire to communicate the listener’s listening. To understand the context of the practice I present here, it is important to discuss how others have used the term field recording under different circumstances and to different ends during the first half of the 20th century (Filene, 2000). In the section that follows, I address those critical works and movements with a particular focus upon how they begin to delineate field recording as an agentive and creatively informed practice.
2.3 Pre-echoes: Towards contemporary field recording
When broadcaster and amateur ornithologist Ludwig Koch, recorded the Common Shama, a species of thrush, in 1889, he broke the anthropomorphic spell of the phonograph (Lane & Carlyle, 2013). This rendering was purportedly the first of its kind. The recording, made using an Edison Wax Cylinder, placed its focus entirely on a non-human subject and thus opened out the possible uses of the phonograph
13 into the non-anthropic realm. It acted as an important marker towards the development of recording interests beyond a narrow focus on the human. This departure is especially significant for the development of my practice because it critically expanded the applications for recording technologies.
Following this recording and into the early part of the 20th century, increasingly diverse and often orchestrated recordings were made with ethnographic intent on a variety of recording devices. Although often called field recordings, many of these recordings such as those made by African ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey or by American recordists such as John and Alan Lomax, were entirely focused on the sociological and cultural aspects of human communities (Denning, 2015). They were produced as sound photographs. The emergent fidelity of the recording devices led John Lomax to conclude that they were collecting real and objective recordings of their subjects (Filene, 2000).
Beliefs, such as those of the Lomax brothers, that recordings represent a real sense of the subjects captured was increasingly eroded across the later half of the 20th century. This shift was the result of artists and researchers recognising the shortcoming of phonography’s promise of objectivity, particularly as fidelity continued to develop and researchers began to question claims of objective practice across a range of disciplines, including sound recording (Schaeffer, 2012), ethnography (Spray, 2011) and other creative arts such as photography (Laruelle, 2011).
The creative zone surrounding Hörspiel, a practice of radiophonic art (Tonkiss, 2003) is also important to explore. This practice, which uses techniques of field recording as concrete material for radiophonic productions, presented early examples of how these sound elements could be used by artists. Practitioners in these fields opened new ways of understanding sound and the role creativity played in shaping a listening. They also recognised the communicative possibilities of field recording. One work of particular note is Walter Ruttman’s Wochende (Weekend), which first aired in 1930 on German national radio. This piece, while conscious of the listener’s presence in time and place, concerned itself with an assemblage of sound events within a formal compositional framework (Kim-Cohen, 2009).
Ruttman referred to the recording as blind cinema (Kim-Cohen, 2009), which was a reference to the recording medium of optical sound film stock. Rejecting visual
14 information in favour of the acoustic, Ruttman prioritised the potential of applications of audio recordings as a means for communication of time and place. As a primary work of collage rather than a distinct exercise in listening, it lays out a fundamental consideration for the ways in which the listener’s listening and the technological listening associated with the microphone might be brought into relief with one another. Rather than allowing the recordings to develop a sense of time and place from which they might speak for themselves, Ruttman’s intent with Wochende was overtly compositional in a post-production sense (Kim-Cohen, 2009). His skills as a filmic editor were rendered in an auditory sense and his craft in connecting seemingly unrelated sonic elements represents one of the earliest examples of auditory montage and displaying an awareness of the ways in which the assembly of sound materials might be used to create affect.
What also makes Wochende important in terms of establishing a pathway towards shaping contemporary field recording practices is its focus on narrative construction through a range of non-spoken means. It is one of the first works within which the narrative is largely allowed to unfold without a reliance on spoken human narration (LaBelle 2006). Unlike other Hörspiel, Ruttman’s work did not rely entirely on human actors as the central narrative drivers, rather he uses voices in a sparse abstracted manner, relying equally on the city itself and, within it, the machines, architecture and other sonic characteristics of Berlin (Goergen, 1989) to encourage meaning to be discovered by the listener. Additionally, splicing together this sound portrait of Berlin demonstrated the power of the microphone as a technological hearing device with which recording artists could listen and as an agent for affecting the listener. The microphones dimensionality and its potential of highlighting particular sounds in many respects pre-empted the modes for listening developed in subsequent decades.
His work of spliced sound materials used the technological possibilities of film based sound recording. He applied those technological developments to various montage methodologies he had explored in his film making, collating disconnected sounds of Berlin’s growing metropolis into a living breathing urban character. Wochende also represents an important progression in the understanding of editing (within sonic contexts), especially in terms of creating internal relational structures within sound compositions.
15 These structural forms and montage were re-examined two decades later by French researcher and artist Pierre Schaeffer. He founded Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète (GRM), an association of like-minded composers, who sought to take documentary phonographic materials and transform them via studio based manipulation to generate a new form of concréte music (Licht, 2007). Leading the group was Schaeffer, whose influence is still widespread today through his sound works and his theoretical writing on sound, listening and music (Kane, 2007). Musique Concrète drew widely from the potential of recording reproduction technologies. Embracing phonographic developments, such as vinyl manipulation, magnetic tape editing and later, the addition of electronic instrumentation, Schaeffer and other composers such as Pierre Henry explored a range of concerns that sought to redefine the possibilities of music and spatialisation of sound.
Formally, the GRM composers’ works during the 1950s and early 1960s did not focus on field recording, though many of their compositions involved the use of non-musical sound objects, phonographic elements and other sound materials. Musique Concrète represented another significant move away from the phonographic intent of the real, rather encouraging an acousmatic consideration (Licht, 2007) of sound objects and inviting listeners to engage deeply with the sounds themselves rather than the phonography. Schaeffer (1966) argued the conditions of listening were not fixed and lacked a critical theoretical development until the mid 20th century. It was this lack of theoretical engagement that drove Schaeffer and GRM to devise new ways in which composers and audiences might engage with sound from all fields, and through doing so expand the possibilities of creativity for artists working with sound that was located outside of musical convention (LaBelle, 2006). Amongst these composers was Luc Ferrari, whose work Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer reimagined the position of the listener, recognising their agency with respect of the collection of their listening in field recordings. I examine this piece in the next section.
2.4 Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer
LaBelle (2006), Kim-Cohen (2009), and Caux (2013) have identified Luc Ferrari’s (1970) Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer (henceforth Presque Rien no. 1), as the critical work for understanding the creative development of field recording. The importance of this work is in its use of untreated recorded materials and its specific
16 forms of listening to achieve its final result. Specifically, Ferrari sought to find a human scale to his listening, one in which transparency and depth might be realised (Caux, 2013). Presque Rien No.1 is an important punctuation point not only in the use of what was understood as concréte audio materials, but more specifically around how listening might shape the recordings being undertaken. Ferrari recognised that the listening of the artist is paramount in the exploration of sound in time and place. In many respects, Presque Rei No.1 represents the first acute methodology for listening as it pertains to the creative use of field recordings (Kim-Cohen, 2009).
Presque Rien No.1 focuses entirely on sounds from a small fishing village, Vela Luka, on the then Yugoslavian coastline. Presque Rien No.1 translates as ‘Almost Nothing’ and reflected his approach towards field recording. Specifically, Ferrari attempted to do almost nothing upon the completion of the recording except for selecting edit points. This approach was markedly different to the work of his Groupe de Recherches Musicales contemporaries because it refused to transform concréte materials in favour of allowing the recording to self-resonate. LaBelle (2006) suggests that “listening searches for its own narrative” (p. 7) and it is that assertion which forms the basis of Ferrari’s approach. Ferrari described his approach: “as soon as I walked outside the studio with the microphone and the tape recorder, the sounds I would capture came from another reality” (Caux, 2013, p, 129). Recognising his departure from the Schaefferian ideals of Musique Concréte, Ferrari stated that he “thought it had to be possible to retain absolutely the structural qualities of the old Musique Concréte without throwing away the content of reality of the material it had originally” (Wishart, 1998, p. 129).
Searching for a language to describe the sounds he was collecting, Ferrari turned to visual art metaphors calling his field recordings found objects (Caux, 2013). He sought to define his work as anecdotal, noting that later “it would be called soundscape” (Caux, 2013, p. 130). Rather than utilising the related field of radiophonics and Hörspiel, through which Ruttman’s Weekend had sought to construct narrative through editing, Ferrari opened out the duration of the recordings, reducing the possibilities for montage and as a result, created a new methodology for listening, recording, and composition.
The approach prioritised the field recordings themselves and the listening that preceded them. It recognised and celebrated that sonic events in time and place can
17 create meaning for both the listener and subsequently the audience even if they remain largely without editing or composition in the musical sense of the word (LaBelle, 2006). In Ferrari’s case, this desire to communicate a listening reflective of the flux of place, sought to allow the field recordings to articulate his listening, but simultaneously invite an audience to explore and in the process discover their own meanings, narratives and signification (Cox, 2011; Caux, 2013).
Presque Rien No.1 is perhaps the birthplace of contemporary field recording as a considered creative practice because it recognises, as Kim-Cohen (2009) summarises, “the act of recording alters what it records” (p. 179). It heeds important recognitions of the subjectivity of framing time, event and place, and furthermore it considers the way in which recorded sound events can invite an audience to discover their own meaning and narrative. Ferrari’s methodology sets the broad rules of engagement for generations of artists that followed. He invited an open questioning of the possibilities of field recordings as a meaningful and creative sonic expression. Following Presque Rien No.1, a growing catalogue of recordings and approaches emerged that presented a subjective and aesthetic rendering of time and place. The artistic projects, outlined in the following section, opposed to any attempt to offer an objective rendering of a singular events, song, voice, or some other anthropological or ethological communication that featured prominently during the early part of the 20th century.
2.5 A world soundscape of environments
Luc Ferrari’s recognition of the soundscape, as a result of his experiences creating Presque Rien No.1, is an acknowledgement of the agency of the listener and the capacity of the listener to express strong positions within a given listening. In his piece, Ferrari collected recordings that directly connect to his listening and his interests in the quotidian and anecdotal sounds of Vela Luka during his summer there. Nowhere is this question of intention of the listener better represented than in the development of The World Soundscape Project (WSP), which was established at Canada’s Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s by R. Murray Schafer (Schafer, 1993). WSP sought to promote, preserve and bring to the foreground concerns over the invasion of humankind’s ‘noise’ into the ‘natural’ environment. Schafer’s 1993 text ‘The Soundscape: Our Environment And The Tuning of the World’ provided another important foundation for a range of investigations into environmental sound recording.
18 WSP arrived on the back of transformative social movements of the late 1960s (Truax, 2012). The Soundscape and WSP sought to document the environment in as ‘pure’ a state as possible (Schafer, 1993). Schafer’s (1993) interest in the pure referred explicitly to sound recordings of nature that did not suffer the intrusion of mechanised, industrial noise. Through prioritising a so-called pure state in which the sounds of humanity were actively shunned, WSP founded a new medium of environmental field recording known as acoustic ecology (Kahn, 1999). Acoustic ecological recordings sought to reduce or remove the sound of civilisation in order to create a politicised sound space, reifying the natural environmental sounds (Lopez, 1998).
Like the phonographers working in the first half of the 20th century, recording in anthropological and ethnographic settings, WSP promoted a notion of the soundscape as a strident representation of the natural aural environment (Schafer, 1993). Their position as listeners and their desire to communicate that listening were shaped by a political agenda as well as an aesthetic one. Using Schafer’s writings on soundscape as a method for practice, a generation of acoustic ecologists began shaping their recordings, seeking to capture the environment through acoustic means and in doing so, frame a range of acoustic phenomena while negating others (Kelman, 2010). Whilst the soundscape listeners may have been interested in what might be considered natural environments, their highly selective and filtered listening created hyper-real impressions of the spaces they recorded. Truax (2012) confirms that these artists may have in fact been responsible for “the creation of a purely imaginary or virtual world, one that perhaps seems ‘hyper-real’ with recognisable elements and structure, yet logically impossible, and possibly interpretable as mythic” (p. 195). By hyper-real, Truax refers to the recordings being a mediation of the sound, time and place in which they were occurred. The work of the WSP artists formed the basis for a wide range of sonic applications from simple aesthetic enjoyment, through to bioacoustic data collection and other conservation agendas. United through an opposition to industrialised noise (Lopez, 1998).
Not all artists concerned with environmental recording share this approach. For Lopez (1998), it is a “reductive interpretation of nature recordings” (p.1). He states the focus of this discipline is primarily upon animal sounds used for identification. His analysis echoes that of many other artists whose interests move
19 beyond the bioacoustic or the conservational into a more transcendental consideration of environment. By this move beyond the bioacoustic, I mean the use of the sound materials beyond their informational use for identification and cataloguing. A consideration of environmental recordings as transcendental was the root of the first commercially successful field recording publications developed and published from 1969 By Irv Tybal’s Syntonic Research Inc (Tyball, 1969, Track 1). Those editions collectively titled Environments: Totally New Concepts In Sound (hereafter Environments) were a series of environmental field recording albums designed to transform urban and suburban spaces, such as an office space or living room, into outdoor environments through playback (Leidecker, 2013). The first edition in the 11 LP series featured recordings of the ocean and a bird enclosure at the Bronx Zoo. Working alongside Tony Conrad, whose film Coming Attractions (1970) was the catalyst for the initial oceanic recordings, the Environments series arrived on the back of a growing interest in new age philosophies, meditation and WSP’s push towards acoustic ecology. Cummings (2001) argues, in addition to their commercial success, these records introduced a highly aesthetic rendering of environmental sound to popular audiences. Unlike the WSP’s approach that forged acoustic ecology, this series was presented as a compelling listening experience (Cummings, 2001) and sought to create a transcendental listening experience for audiences.
2.6 Field recording in the present
Over the past three decades, the number of artists involved with field recording has greatly increased (Licht, 2007). Growth in the practice of field recording is due to numerous factors, including the higher profile of field recording and reduced barriers to entry. Portable, inexpensive recording devices have allowed many artists to access the technology needed to participate in field recording. Mullane (2010) comments that field recording has “proved to be a rich vein for artists wishing to rebroadcast and hyper-realistically radicalise the prosaic sounds we encounter on a daily basis” (p. 7). Recognition of the practice as one category of the sonic arts has also greatly increased with artists such as Chris Watson (cf. 2008), whose work alongside Sir David Attenborough has had wide reaching effects through his publications and installations exploring the multifarious practice of field recording. Artists such as Stephen Vitiello (2002) have also reached wide audiences through works concerned with very specific conditions around field recording. In Vitiello’s case, recordings
20 made on the upper floors of the World Trade Centre buildings during Hurricane Floyd in 1999 assumed a powerful resonance following the destruction of the buildings during 9/11 (Kim-Cohen, 2005).
Broadcasting also includes sounds that are not readily accessible during common audition. Increasingly, via technological developments, the opportunities to examine sonic events in time and place have been recast. Artists can now work with technologies to tune into naturally occurring sonic phenomena that exist beyond human audition (Voegelin, 2010). Artists including Toshiya Tsunoda (1999) whose edition Extract From Field Recording Archive #2 and Joyce Hinterding’s (cf. 2002) very low frequency radio transmissions (hereafter VLF) works have expanded the notion of field recording to acknowledge sound materials that exist either at frequencies below or above the human hearing range. Such examples include infrasonic vibrations, electromagnetic sounds and VLF, which have become increasingly prevalent in various strands of field recording (Toop, 2004).
Durational recordings are another area in which activity has increased aided by greatly expanded media storage and other technological developments. Artists such as Francisco Lopez have developed significant practices based around acousmatic traditions and explore extended durational recordings seeking to unveil macro level acoustic phenomena (Chion, 1994). Without limitations of analogue formats, field recording can be expanded to include vast durations and multiple perspectives, using sound field and multi channel formats. Meaning that the focus of the possibility for creativity in a post-production environment is greatly expanded. Diversifying technologies and approaches have made the practices around field recording increasingly specialised. Diversification has encouraged artists to experiment further, and has allowed them to refine approaches that stretch far beyond the historical ethno-phonography and environmental soundscape that populated the majority of such activities in the early and mid 20th century.
2.7 Field recording: Summary
Through the work of the most recent generation of artists, including those mentioned in the previous section, field recording can be seen as a creative extension of practices rooted in early 20th century phonography (Lane & Carlyle, 2013). Field recording has moved significantly beyond the narrow phonographic interest in
21 objective ethnography and documentation to become a genuinely creative practice (Filene, 2000). In recognising the role of listening as it pertains to field recording, the creative and artistic capacity of my practice in field recording is realised. Field recording recognises not just the subjective nature of listening and the desire to realise through recordings, but also the relational forces that shape and are expressed by the transcription of audio events in a given time and place.
The practice of field recording presents the artist with an invitation to become aware of auditory perspective and dimension, and to recognise the filtering of events in a given place and time (Blesser & Salter, 2007). Field recording embraces the subjective agency of the listener and thus opens out the possibilities for the creative use of recorded sound. Lane and Carlyle (2013) discovered a recurrent theme during their research into contemporary practices in field recording: “the emphasis placed on a process of listening that is conducted alongside that of the recording” (p. 10). Their research suggests that artists, listening, and field recording are in a continuous orbit of one another, with developments in one, shaping the other.
2.8 Conclusion
In this chapter, I examined the age of phonography and the subsequent technological and social shifts facilitated by the opportunity to hold sound as a thing (Adorno, 1990). I have also considered field recording examining both the historical contexts and various approaches and philosophical positions that relate to my practice. Further, I examined listening and its abilities to be successfully communicated by the technologies created in the wake of the age of phonography, and discussed these in relation to field recording. From the review of written and creative works undertaken, I have been able to identify a gap in the knowledge around listening as it relates to the creative practice in this thesis. Specifically, the gap exists in understanding listening as an agentive and creative pursuit; what I refer to as a listener’s listening. When considering field recording as a creative practice, it is vital that the creativity of the listener be afforded something that is presently under-theorised in the literature.
In what follows, I develop a listener’s listening by addressing theoretical considerations as they pertain to a practice of field recording. I consider the research question: What experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording?
22 As part of that definition, this thesis maps out the boundaries of listening as they relate to this practice. I consider listening as agentive, which reflect the power exerted by the listener in relation to the objects of their listening. I also consider sound as the primary focus of any listening and examine its dynamic temporal ramifications for the listener. I address the implications of place as it relates to listening, and how place is formed through listening as well as considering the relational conditions needed for the collection of a listening to be successful. This addresses my research question what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording? This relational condition involves the examination of the auditory conditions necessary for the artist researcher to successfully represent their listening through various technologies of audition and reproduction.
23 3. Theoretical Framework
This chapter explores key theoretical perspectives that inform this research and develops a theoretical perspective about the listener’s listening. The listener’s listening is an emergent explanatory framework through which the conditions of listening as they relate to field recording can be understood. This chapter explores the relational listening condition required for such a listening to be completed as a field recording. I define field recording an episodic, embodied, relational practice that is dependent on the artist-researcher embedding themselves temporally in a field of audition. The theory facilitates an understanding of both listening and its potential collection in field recording. Accordingly, the theoretical perspective developed for this research project is composed of three relational concepts: sound, place, and listening. These concepts are relational because they form a zone of entanglement within which a listener undertakes a listening, with the desire to capture that listening as field recording.
To theorise this framework for listening as it is expressed through a practice of field recording, it is necessary to establish the theoretical paradigm under which these practices can occur. To develop this position, it is critical to recognise that, for this practice to be undertaken by an artist-researcher, one must embrace a set of relational interactions. These interactions are between (a) sound in the absolute, as the naked nature of what a listener, and the technology they employ, may perceive; (b) place, as the location in which sound exists and within which listeners interact and; (c) listening, recognising both the human capacity of listening and the opportunity for appreciating other phenomenon, which are made available through technological means. This research project utilises a theoretical framework built around a phenomenological perspective, as this perspective is the most effective way through which the research question can be addressed.
Phenomenology, as a way of investigating a first person engagement with the world, is a relational and embodied theoretical perspective that can address the research question (Merleau-Ponty & Smith, 2012). It is a return to the world and to lived experience and requires an exacting and specific state of reflection (Husserl, 2012). This state is reflective of that called for during the practice of field recording, as it requires an intense focus and attentiveness. Furthermore, phenomenology is not a fixed position and is never complete, rather it views experience is an ever-emergent
24 practice. It is through the application of phenomenology that its understanding is realised (cf. Merleau-Ponty & Smith, 2012; Idhe, 1977).
Phenomenology requires the artist-researcher to remove themselves from a natural attitude (Husserl, 2012) and move to the phenomenological attitude, which is a position that refers to the suspension of any presuppositions about the world (Husserl, 2012). The phenomenological attitude is a perspective from which experience can be consciously approached and subsequently considered (Idhe, 2007). Specific to its connection to listening, phenomenology is attentive to the temporality within which sound unfolds that realises a listening. It asks the artist-researcher concerned with phenomenology to commit to a deep investigation, pushing beyond their habituated appreciations and develop a critical and controlled exploration. Husserl (2012) described phenomenology as a reductive process addressing the correlation between the object of experience (noema) and the process of experience (noesis). By addressing this correlation between the noema and noesis, phenomenology invites a relational, intersubjective lens through which an artist-researcher’s concerns of listening in a field recording can be addressed. Specifically, phenomenology’s intersubjective framework is useful as it invites temporal phenomenological variations (Idhe, 2007). An approach through which the concepts of listening to sound in time and place can be rigourously investigated through repeated experiences of audition.
3.1 Sound phenomena
Sound within any given moment in any horizon of audition is not one-dimensional; rather it shifts and pushes outward and inward, up and down (Idhe, 2007). Sound is promiscuous, simultaneously stimulating objects and things and moving in ways other materials do not (LaBelle, 2006). Sound enters, bends, curves, envelopes, obfuscates, consumes, stimulates and generally evades easy summarisation. Its complex unpredictability requires a listener to be present and attentive should their listening hope to comprehend sound’s richness and promise.
To understand sound as a focus for phenomenological investigation, I employ a vibrational ontological perspective. As the object of a listening, I theorise sound, in line with other researchers (cf. Goodman, 2010; Gershon, 2013; Cox, 2011) in the absolute, meaning a conception of sound that extends beyond naked human audition and embraces opportunities for accessing sounds through various technological means
25 such as electromagnetic induction or direct contact recording. Within the practice of field recording, as it is framed throughout this research project, this position is critical as it facilitates investigation, and creation, without bounds. The artist-researcher is free to examine their practice and seek to create field recordings that extend beyond the familiar or the readily identifiable. In this sense phenomenology, which encourages a breaking away from habituation, allows for the discovery of a fullness and richness of a given experience and accordingly provides is an important theoretical linkage for the artist-researcher concerning sound (Merleau-Ponty & Lefort, 1968). Phenomenology offers the artist-researcher the opportunity through which they can appreciate and consider all sound available through a vibrational ontological position. Specifically, phenomenology recognises the embodied relationship maintained by the listener and the sound they encounter, in that sound as vibration directly impacts not just the acoustic faculties of the ears, but the body itself (Idhe, 2007). With consideration of the research question about which experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording; this section reflects upon the possible objects of the listening, those available through commonplace audition and those that are not.
In the first section, I develop a vibrational ontology (cf. Gershon, 2011; Goodman, 2010) from which a comprehensive theory of sound can begin to be developed. This all-encompassing theory offers the artist-researcher a position from which the widest possible approach to sound, commonly audible or otherwise, can be considered. Sound is fugitive and heterogeneous as it unfolds in time (Cox, 2011). This section also seeks to understand sound as it functions as the raw material of affect (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). This research project positions the affective potential of sound as the focus for a primary sensory engagement across time. Critically, sound forges an aural architecture (Blesser & Salter, 2007), so we must understand that sound is situated in place.
In the second section of this chapter I theorise the concept of place. Place is the setting within which a field recording is made. It is a vibrant and evolving zone, creating its own dimensions moment to moment (Ingold, 2000). Place is a discrete setting in which sound is situated and where encounters with a listener’s listening occur. It exists as a production (cf. Bourriaud, 2007) of the engagement of listening in time and location. Additionally, place is created by lived moments in which a subject
26 is attentive to, and present with, the objects and things around them (Ingold, 1993). From a phenomenological perspective, it is the embodied nature of place that is critical to the development of this theoretical framework. It is important then to recognise that place and space are contrasted (cf. Morton, 2016). Within this research project, place is developed as a locale of dynamic events in time and not the entirety of a static location. This section then also address how these dynamic events form an affective environment (cf. Berlant, 2010) within which the sonic dramaturgical inter and intra-relations of objects and things are considered.
In the third section, I theorise listening. Listening is examined as a phenomenological engagement by the artist-researcher with sound in place. Listening is initially examined through the work of Attali (1985) addressing considerations of agency and the relevance of auditory technologies as they relate to the capacities of listening beyond naked human audition. Listening as a dynamic practice is then explored in contrast to the sense of hearing. A listener must be attentive to the sound events that unfold in time and place, and through doing so can create a listening that is unique. Finally, the idea of the listener’s listening is approached and so directly addresses the research question of this project.
3.1.1 Toward An Affective Vibrational Ontology
Sound is vibration in atmospheres and physical materials (Blesser & Salter, 2007). These vibrations resonate in and for us as sensory beings (Gershon, 2011). Periodic vibrations are measured in Hertz, a measurement of cycles per second, and exist from the infrasonic to the ultrasonic frequency ranges. Between these terminal points on the acoustic spectrum, our embodied audition exists within a range usually understood as being between 16Hz (very low sound) and 20kHz (very high sound) (Blauert, 1997).
Goodman (2010) takes these understandings further to argue it is possible to consider sound through a more complete vibrational ontology. He states “at a molecular or quantum level, everything is in motion, is vibrating” (p. 83). Vibration then, whether it falls into our range of audition or not, provides bearings for the artist- researcher as listener, as well as having impacts on the objects and things around that listener. Vibration across the spectrum allows a listener various ways in which to explore the sonic capacities of the places in which they find themselves. This recognition of a full spectrum of sound is important as it acknowledges the broad
27 potential for accessing sound that exists around the listener. This sound may be directly audible or rely on a technological auditory device to be accessed and made. This position specifically addresses an artist-researcher’s audition and relates to this research project in that an expanded sense of available sound is considered part of what might comprise a field recording.
Specifically, a vibrational ontological position allows the listener to approach a unified conception of sound, an understanding of sound that includes all sonic materials available to the spectrum of human audition, as well as those that exceed it. These sounds include phenomenon such as electromagnetic emissions, geophony and other audition made possible by listening through devices such as contact microphones. Accordingly, this position accommodates an interconnectedness of sound. It accepts sound as existing in excess of human audition, inside and outside of objects and things, and with the capacity to create affective complexities. It allows and facilitates a conception of sound as an embodied system of meaning (Gershon, 2011), a system recognising that sound exists as a unifying phenomena (Ong, 1967). Furthermore, it allows for the consideration of sound not always available to an unaided listener and requires the listener to extend their audition into unfamiliar sonic strata.
These vibrations affect a listener and those objects and things around them with varying force. The term affect is used here as it pertains to the developing field of affect theory, specifically vibrational affect (Gershon, 2013), which explores how sounds’ resonances carry in place and influence a listener, as well as the objects and things around them. The way in which sounds act upon a listener in place is critical as sounds’ affective forces encourage them to seek emergent understandings and appreciations. The listener’s concern is with how sound maintains a resonant affinity with bodies and the world of objects and things (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Affect theory provides an additional mechanism through with the phenomenological position of being-in-the-world can be examined and understood. It provides a theoretical space within which the constant flux of experience can be approached and additionally, how the forces and intensities of these experiences can be accounted for (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Sounds’ resonance, its force as vibration, is an emergent affective knowledge that informs how one is and what one knows (Gershon, 2013).
28 This is notion of resonance as vibration is central to field recording as it recognises sound as generating affective meaning for those who encounter and interact with it.
Affect theory further echoes sounds’ vibrational proportions, through being a habitually rhythmic undertaking (Berlant, 2010). The condition of affect encourages listeners to extend their capacities of engagement in the world, through a willingness to embrace the transitory moments that unfold across time in place. In terms of the research question, what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording, affect is one of the constituent parts of how listening is understood in this thesis. Affect encourages agency in a listener and for them to strive to develop abilities to effectively act, react and most importantly become capable of meaningfully approaching the spectra of sound as it pertains to field recording. A listener can recognise sound’s capacity to create affect, not just from a frame of their own audition, but extending out towards the recognition of the intensities, unfamiliarity and inbetweeness that is at the core of how all sound becomes and un-becomes in time (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010).
The sound a listener encounters is the result of vibrations interacting with objects and things. Bennett (2010) proposes “thing-power” (p.2) as a theoretical extension through which sound’s affective influence may be examined. She uses dynamic and ad-hoc gatherings of disparate vibrant matter as a means of recognising the inherent complexities in relations of power between different things. Power, in the case of sound, is energies realised through vibration. This power is furthered in relation to listeners who draw on their physical, socio-cultural and political powers to examine sonic phenomena. Power expresses itself in varied ways, which the listener encounters directly, and through its interactions with objects and things around them.
Further extending a sonic interpretation of Bennett’s theory, it is possible to frame sound as affecting and being effected by a diverse range of things, human and otherwise, in any one moment. As the vibrations of sound move in and around a listener in time, the power of those vibrations, and the exchange of energies that occur, creates the opportunity for affective sonic encounters within field recording. In a phenomenological sense, these vibrations are the manifestation of sounds’ resonance and they form the foundation of the embodied encounter between sonic phenomena and a listener. This notion of encounters is important to a practice of field recording as the interactions a listener has with sound are subject to the influence of, and power
29 exerted by, things and forces that may lie beyond their conscious apprehension. For example, the force of low frequency soundwaves caused by an earthquake, operating below human audition, and may have implications for the behaviour of certain wildlife, which are more readily audible for a listener. Whilst a listener may not be conscious of them, or able to experience them in full, these sounds in excess of human comprehension do have an affective impact on a listener.
Goodman (2010) proposes that vibrations embrace all things in their wake. Therefore, vibrations radically reposition the possibilities of enunciation through field recording and they can also exist in excess of the unaided apprehension of sound. This comprehension of sound and its implication for objects and things is still emergent for researchers, but has already resulted in a number of critical discoveries around the apprehension of vibration from objects previously considered incapable of enunciating sound. Examples of this vibrational enunciation include the visual microphone project developed by MIT, which extracts vibration from all manner of objects (Davis, Rubinstein, Wadhwa, Mysore, Durand & Freeman, 2014).
This opening out of understandings of sound into the fringes of human audition also has implications for the materiality of sound (Cox, 2011) and non-sound (Cage, 2011), such as sonic phenomena that exist outside of everyday audition. Field recording is a practice through which both conscious appreciation (presence of sound) and unconscious sensuous potential (presence of non-sound) can be considered and accounted for. Likewise, Jasen (2016) argues in favour of a reading of sound that pushes the continuum of sonic apprehension and in doing so allows sound to reach beyond commonly audible or available sonic phenomena to things that exceed a listener’s common audition (but not that of their bodies and the objects and things around them).
Jasen’s (2016) work gives equal importance to Cage’s (2011) theory of non- sound. This consideration of that which lies outside human audition is significant as it provides a position through which the relational interactions of a listener and their technological audition devices can be critiqued. In considering non-sound, the limitations and possibilities of organic and technological audition are made apparent and can be approached theoretically. Through the research question’s concern of what experiential elements are involved in conducting field recording, I invite considerations of the sonic phenomena that exist outside of everyday audition. John Cage’s (2011) concept
30 of non-sounds feeds into this critique, arguing sounds shape affectivity even if they remain unheard or are received unintentionally. Affect theory is concerned with these excesses and in-between relations, which are beyond conscious appreciation (Gregg & Siegworth, 2010). Cage’s (2011) reading of non-sound then reinforces the importance of considering sound beyond that which is directly within auditory reach. This “clamorous silence”, as he refers to it, encourages a critical analysis of not just the embodied experience of a listener, but of any body, object or thing, as these relations impact on an artist researcher’s experience of audition.
By recognising this open and inclusive approach, the complexity of sound as it exists between the inside and outside of objects and things, human and otherwise, can be considered. The materialist extension afforded by a vibrational ontological position allows for an analysis of the broad relational contexts under which affect might (un)become. These relational conditions become important when considering the investigation of sound that is at the very core of the listening as it relates to field recording. Phenomenologically, this position invites the listener to strive for an intensive and tireless application of the self in pursuit of sound. It asks them to become invested and to recognise themselves in this process of affective exploration, contemplation and discovery that is eventually captured as a field recording. The desire to approach and understand sound as extending beyond the immediately available and to include the possible affects and effects of Cage’s (2011) non-sounds, is critical if the full spectrum of a listener’s potential engagement with sound is to be realised. Non-sounds, for example the spectrum of electro-magnetic sound that travels without medium, in contrast to acoustic compression waves, are vital when considering field recording. These phenomena reflect the materialist nature of sound and create opportunities for anomalous, deterritorialised sensation (Jasen 2016) and unexpected phenomenological encounters, through which new considerations of sound can be explored.
To consider sound through a vibrational ontology is then to recognise that sound operates in complex ways, not all of which are available to a listener at any one time. Sound’s characteristics, the sub and super representational attributes of its vibration, simultaneously come in contact with things and objects, including the listener, in place. These simultaneous interactions create transient relations, which in turn shape the way an artist-researcher’s appreciation of sound can take place. Sounds
31 create affect in the listener, and it is through the recognition of the complexity of vibration that a valuable ontological position is provided from which field recording can begin to be critically investigated. Vibrations create a horizon of sonic affect in which listeners, objects and things, find themselves in dynamic temporal relation.
3.1.2 The Matter Of Sound
Further refining this approach to sound, Cox (2011) asserts sound as a state of flux, within which human expression is a contributing factor, but which precedes and exceeds these expressions. In line with Connolly (2013) who argues for a sonic materialist perspective that eschews an anthropocentric view of sound, Cox (2011) asserts both the all-encompassing nature of vibration and the complex heterogeneous nature of sound as a ceaseless product of varied materials. His work argues for an approach recognising constant flux as existing in the shared time and place of human and non-human objects and things. He insists that both the human and non-human are equally critical. Specific to this research project, Cox’s approach to sound refines the conditions under which the affective influence of sound can be understood within and through objects with which it comes in contact.
Cox (2009) also theorises sound through an analysis of noise as a means of framing the capacity of sound’s meanings within flux. By noise, Cox (2009) is speaking directly to a materialist appreciation of sound, as noise is the absolute possibility of sound. He argues, in opposition to contextualising noise as the unwanted or the un- affective component of sound, a position commonly associated with theories of communication and electrical engineering. He posits noise as the ongoing state of absolute sonic possibility and recognises the energy contained within it and represented in the theoretical structure of white noise as a full spectrum vibration, infinite and endless in time.
Noise’s infinity, like that of vibration, provides the basis upon which to develop a critical theoretical position through which the capacity of sound to distribute that energy across things and objects in time can be understood. Noise holds near endless opportunities for sonic investigation (Hainge, 2013), for auditory understanding and most of all for affective possibility, should a listener be willing and able to approach it. Cox (2011) argues that the distinction between noise and signal is a case of the signal being an extracted phenomenon, veiling noise in its rupture from a ceaseless
32 backdrop. He suggests noise must be considered as the absolute condition under which signals might be brought forth. Explicitly, if the signal is to be known and the phenomenon recognised, noise then is not just a matter for phenomenology, but rather a matter of being in itself. The inability of the listener to extract a potential signal is their deficiency or failure. In this way, noise as the materiality of sound must be considered beyond the human, and be made available to all objects and things as its energy pervades all. This opening up of sounds force through vibration supports future developments in auditory technologies that reveal new possible zones of investigation for field recording.
Within all places where field recording occurs, it is also important to consider what O’Callaghan (2012) describes as the distribution of sound and its associated energies; that is the multiplicity of paths of sound in any one moment The vibrations carrying sound through atmospheres across time produce dynamic and unexpected occurrences in all directions. These occurrences, whilst not always predictable, must be accounted for or at least approached theoretically. This consideration is critical as it allows sound’s intricate pervasion, in terms of frequency, timbre and amplitude to be appraised as it relates to how a listener is situated during field recording. This understanding of the chaotic flux of sound is further complicated, as a single sound can change entirely over the course of time (O’Callaghan, 2012). Examples including oscillators sweeping, or a plane passing overhead, that demonstrate that a sound is never static; rather, it is perpetually in momentary flux (Cox, 2011). Understanding the ways in which a listener attaches meanings to sound must consider sounds complexity and the ways in which sounds vary, develop, arrive and depart across time.
3.1.3 Everything Vibrates
Sound can be summarised as having a number of overarching characteristics. These characteristics are: timbre, referring to the tonal colour of a sound; pitch, referring to the frequency or harmonic information of a sound; and amplitude, which refers to the dynamic acoustic value (volume range) of the sound (Blesser & Salter, 2007). Of those three terms, timbre is most critical to this research as it contains aesthetic dimensions. These three characteristics can be divided into two sub-categories: sub- representational and super-representational. Sub-representational refers to the qualitative and psychological aspect of sound such as aesthetic appreciation. Super-
33 representational refers to the quantitative aspects of sound (Cox, 2011). Timbre is qualitative in nature and, thus, sub-representational. Accordingly, the super- representational category refers to quantitatively measurable aspects of sound, namely frequency and amplitude.
When considering sub-representational sound, Schafer (1993) states that there are two Greek myths at the root of much contemporary thought concerning sound. These myths are some of the earliest assertions about how sound might generate an embodied, physical and psychological response (Schafer, 1993). The first myth is that of Athena’s invention of the Aulos to honour the Medusa’s anguished sisters. The sisters, riddled with anguish over the slaying of their sibling, sought comfort in Athena’s tonal passages. This tale demonstrates the emotive, embedded human response to sound. The second myth, Hermes’ discovery of the lyre resulting from his encounter of the resonant chamber of a hollow tortoise shell, speaks to the physical manifestations of sound, the materialist, vibrational properties through which objects and things resonate.
It is through the myth of Hermes that early interest in, and understandings of, vibration have come to be connected to an analysis of sound. The shell’s resonance is a recognition that sound, through the passage of its forces and intensities, reaches out to all bodies, objects and things within a given location. These objects and things in turn shape aspects of our aurality and create a feedback loop of influence. Ong (1967) argues that sound has the capacity to reveal the interior without the need for a physical invasion; for example tapping on a wall to discover it is hollow, reveals what lies beneath or behind it’s exterior form. He also argues further that a sound’s ability to reveal interiority is based on sound’s formation through interior relationships, such as those discovered by Hermes exploring the hollowed tortoise shell.
By contrast, the myth of the Athena’s Aulos establishes, albeit at the most basic level, an affective possibility of sound. Affect, as it relates to this research project, is drawn from affect theory and reflects upon the momentary relation of forces and intensities that pass between bodies, human, non-human and otherwise. Specifically, affect theory explores the relation of these forces that exist in excess of conscious knowing and reflects on the conditions under which bodies find themselves immersed in the world (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). In this way, affect speaks to the way sound
34 can penetrate the body and mind in much the same way as the myth of Athena’s Aulos.
Schafer (1993) argues that examination of these myths represent the central themes that have subsequently shaped the historical development and interactions with the theorisation of sound. Furthermore, these two myths address the sub- representational, qualitative characteristic of sound. The sub-representational characteristic pertains to the creation of affect and questions of how sound is distributed across the human and non-human objects, and recognises materialist concerns.
Following the recognition of an exterior, materialist world of sound, it is important to acknowledge the super-representational characteristics of sound that maintains an understanding of sound based upon mathematics (Cox, 2011). This conception of sound can be traced to Pythagoras, who developed a mathematic appraisal of harmonic relations (Kahn, 1999). His theories established a means to define sound through quantitative methods. This allowed sound to be measured, analysed and understood in non-qualitative ways.
Whilst philosophical and theoretical discussions around super-representational sound have continued with significant developments in the 20th and 21st centuries, the sub-representational understandings of sound remain less precise and often are less easily defined (Cox, 2011). This lack of clear definition means sound, beyond its more fixed quantitative understanding, remains largely anchored to various secondary features, for example visual representations (Ong, 1967). It is the problem surrounding the definition of sound’s qualities and the opportunities and what it offers to a listener that are addressed through the research question of this thesis. Cox (2011) argues that the primacy of the visiocentric theory means that physical objects and their attributes are given central focus rather than the sounds themselves. To illustrate, a person might talk of the sound of a car, rather than that sound being a presence or event in its own right (Cox, 2011). This relation of sound and visual representation also reflects sounds attachment to event or action (Ong, 1967). It is for this reason that a more detailed investigation into timbre is needed if it is to be a useful tool for this research project.
35 3.1.4 Timbre
Timbre is the result of actions by objects and things and can be understood in a variety of ways. To readily examine sound’s qualities within the context of this research project, timbre is a central characteristic because its use indicates a more qualitative approach to sound. Quantitative tools, such as those measuring pitch, are largely inappropriate for this project. Rather this project, being concerned with an agentive, affective approach to listening through the research question guiding it, invite qualitative perspectives within which socio-cultural understandings, and considerations such as aesthetics are critical (Nancy & Mandell, 2007). Timbre is complex and provides an opportunity for aesthetic investigations into sound events, that occur during the process of field recording.
O’Callaghan (2012) argues that timbre is a critical when approaching sound. His interest extends from a position of the audible qualities of sound, to an argument in which the relative position of a listener shapes the way in which timbre might be understood. He addresses two main concerns, the first relates to the abilities and interests of listeners. Specifically, he examines their understanding of timbral qualities in sound; and the social, cultural, and political contexts from which their understanding is drawn. Second, he considers where they are positioned in relation to the physical and spatial locale of the objects involved in the sound event. These two locales, physical and psychological, relate directly to both sound’s potential affective value and equally its materialist nature.
Morton (2013) extends understandings of timbre defining it as the sensual appearance of an object to another object. Using the example of the Aeolian Lyre, he explains this understanding through the interaction of the wind and lyre, objects affecting one another and the results create timbre and potential affect for a listener. For Morton (2013), the meaning of an object unfolds in respect of another object, there is a relation that is struck between them from which affective engagement can be registered. He suggests timbre is conditional on the positioning of object to object in that the relationship between them creates a particular sense of timbre. Timbre maintains a quality that is not-yet or to come. He offers that the significance and value of any relation is in the future.
While sound events are only transitory (cf. Chion, 2016; Ong, 2012), their contextual appreciation is not readily available at that moment of extinction. The
36 momentary nature of sound means that as sound unfolds in time, its meaning and value in aesthetic terms cannot always be understood at the instant of audition. Rather, sounds’ requirement to be understood by a listener across time means that any appreciation of sound, as it pertains to a practice like field recording comes in the near future (Morton, 2016). The sub-representational, timbral quality of a sound event cannot be made sense of in a comprehensive way in the moment of encounter. Its characteristic proportions might be understood, but how its timbral shape unfolds in time is not instantaneous. Unlike the super-representational characteristics of sound, which can be quantitatively accessed more quickly, such as a the frequency of a note, timbre is not reducible to that instant, but rather must be understood within a time based frame, such as a field recording, a song or a sentence spoken. The temporal implications of approaching sub-representational sound, when considered phenomenologically, acknowledges the necessity of a listener’s presence when attending that sound (cf. Heidegger, 1962). Sound unfolds in time and therefore is constantly becoming. Its appreciation requires an intense investment on behalf of the listener undertaking field recording.
Morton (2016) argues further that timbre has an alluring quality and sensual capacity that in time creates a drama, which is inherently aesthetic in its dimension. Specifically, he is speaking to the temporal qualities that must be granted to timbre if it is to be understood in a way that affords value to a creative practice such as field recording. The dramaturgical implications of timbre relate specifically to the way that timbre is understood in time, and how its qualities change and develop. It recognises the capacity of a sound to start with one set of timbral qualities and conclude with another set of timbral qualities. These changes, inherent in a sound’s timbre, invite a dramaturgical appreciation.
The apprehension and appreciation of timbre allows an artist-researcher to begin to understand the possible meanings of sound, aesthetic and otherwise. Morton offers that when we listen to sound, we are seeking out particular dynamic moments from what we are hearing. Here he is addressing a feeling of process that is apparent when approaching a concept such as sound, in that the temporality of the sound is paramount to a listener. It is across a timeline that the timbral and aesthetic qualities of a sound might be appreciated and understood. In any one moment of hearing,
37 countless complexities of sound are unfolding in time. The breadth and diversity of these complexities makes sound a powerful, but at times bewildering, experience.
Equally, in any one moment there are many different sonic strata at play in a given place. Our audition then requires the artist-researcher to commence an analysis that registers a dramaturgical piercing of sound within which its characteristic of timbre is of primary concern across time. Sound’s timbral qualities and its potential meaning as a procession of vibration is, in essence, understood in the immediate future, as listeners comprehend the qualitative content of their audition. Timbre, is a qualitative opening within a comprehensive approach to sound through vibration, and thus is relevant to a practice such as field recording.
3.1.5 Sound Summary
Sound consists of emissions that we must decode, translate and in some way and apprehend if we are to actively engage with it as a listener (O’Callaghan, 2012). Sound, as an ongoing chaotic flux and dynamic set of possible relations, requires the listener practicing field recording to develop a theoretical position that accommodates and uses its dynamism meaningfully. Upon the apprehension of vibration, the listener resonates, both literally and metaphorically. This embodied resonance is the moment at which the phenomenon of signal can be brought forth from a backdrop of noise, and a listening to sound can begin. Whilst vibration and sound are ongoing, sounds’ affect, meanings and understandings are extracted by a listener within particular temporal constraints and form a construction, rooted in the socio-cultural understandings, and considerations such as aesthetics, held by that listener. This position accommodates the materialist features of sounds at the same moment as calling upon the socio-cultural backgrounding a listener has accumulated and directly addresses the research question, which is concerned with experiential elements involved in conducting and completing a field recording.
3.2 Place
As outlined in the previous section, the practice of field recording requires theoretical tools that allow the listener to approach the entirety of sound. It is these tools that permit field recording to be considered in the absolute, concerned with sounds commonly available and those beyond everyday audition, thus affording the greatest relation possible between the artist-researcher and their various technological
38 recording devices. In developing the theoretical position for this research, it is important to examine a vibrational ontology and address where sounds occur. Sounds’ appreciation is, by the physical qualities of an environment, effected by the various objects and things within a given horizon of audition.
To do this work of field recording, it is necessary to consider the spaces and locations within which a listener’s engagement with sound might occur. From a phenomenological standpoint, this acknowledges that the listener’s being is always a being-in-the-world (cf. Heidegger, 1962) and the dynamic locations where they find themselves engaged in their practices simultaneously influence those practices and impact on the embodied experiences. Furthermore, it recognises "a basic structure of human existence that captures the fact that human beings are fundamentally related to the contexts in which they live” (Pollio, Henley & Thompson, 1997, p.7). This experiential and contextual relation means that the listener and their interests within place are shaped through their expressions of agency and the interests they maintain within their practice. This consideration of spaces and locations must also recognise more than the merely physical, quantitative conditions of space and location, and embrace a theoretical position through which a listener can approach the specificities of affective relation (cf. Berlant, 2011) with these environments and places. Thus, a mechanism is needed through which a listener can account for the production (cf. Bourriaud, 2007) of a porous responsive frame. This frame acknowledges an artist- researcher’s interest in, and experiences of, sound in a given territory of space and location (LaBelle, 2010). I propose that this porous frame be called place.
For the purposes of this research project, I define place as an affective atmosphere, a lived-in zone framed by space and location. I theorise place phenomenologically and recognise place as an intimate zone of lived experience (cf. Heidigger, 1962). Place is a zone that also invites knowing (cf. Brockelman, 2003). It is where the intentionality of the phenomenologically grounded listener can be actualised. Place is more than the quantitative physical characteristics of its location; it is not fixed to those characteristics. Place is not space (Casey, 2013), it is not simply a locator or container, rather, it is the zone where embodied experience of listening can occur and other affective conditions can be experienced. This recognition is important to my research question as it establishes the setting within which an understanding of listening unfolds, in particular as it pertains to field recording. Equally, this
39 understanding of the notion of place is critical when considering my research question because it impacts on the potentials of listening.
Accordingly, place can be considered an atmosphere (Morton, 2007) that carries a resonant affective ambience, in that it floats within the spaces of a location. Place is a causal dimension created by the relation of things and objects and is constantly changing and refreshing itself. Place requires a listener to be inside it if they are to breathe in its specificities and experience its particular qualities. Place is as affective as it is experiential (cf. O’Sullivan, 2001) and requires a listener to be available, agentive and focused (cf. Berlant, 2011) to its forces and the opportunity for affect that is afforded through such engagements.
Place’s atmosphere is in dynamic and contingent relation with the many objects and things within a location; creating an invisible, but tangible and ever changing connection between them (Morton, 2007). Place allows for the resonance of a given lived in moment in time (Ingold, 1993). It is open, complex and flowing. This complexity requires the artist-researcher to become invested in time, attentive to the dynamics of a mesh of activities occurring from moment to moment. To recognise and comprehend the affective possibilities of place requires a listener’s attention to apprehend the intensities and excesses that present themselves, and to reflect upon the dramatic and dynamic interplays of that place across time. It must also be recognised that place exists in excess of the constituent things and objects that are contained within a location (Ingold, 1993). Place’s atmosphere is layered and ever changing. At any one time, a listener in place may or may not be able to apprehend certain features of that place. Not all is available; something is always in excess of a listener’s engagement. While it is comprised of these things and objects, place’s realisation as it pertains to a listener is contingent on and formed by the interconnectivity of the forces at play with one another and with that listener (Thibald, 2003). Place’s atmosphere is a construction, moment to moment, extracting particular points of affective interest to create an aesthetic and creative frame within which a field recording can take place. Thus, to situate place within this research project, an epistemology must be developed from which a listener can begin to consider the ways in which field recording relates to, exists within and reacts with place.
40 3.2.1 Proximate Place and Perspective
Place, as a listener encounters it, must be proximate. Phenomenologically, a listener is embedded within a place’s atmosphere. Thus, in an embodied sense, the listener exists in a lived in zone and it is this zone that provides the materials from which a field recording is composed. Place, as it pertains to a listener, is not a singular perspective that is viewed head on (Ebbatson, 2013). Rather, place’s atmosphere pulls location away from a visiocentric perspective within which spatial characteristics might be made quantifiable through traditional mapping. By contrast, place’s atmosphere reflects a sense of enveloping; a blanketing effect that permits a listener an embodied experience. Unlike location, place’s physical and spatial qualities are not static; rather, its affective atmosphere exists without a consistency within the spaces upon a location (Morton, 2016). Place’s constant shifting and change must accommodate the interrelational and intrarelational potentials of all things and objects within place (Thompson & Biddle, 2013). Thus, place is not the entirety of a space or location, neither does it maintain a constant presence (Morton, 2016). Rather, a listener’s understanding of place and its affective capacity is temporal and exists moment to moment. This recognition attends the point of uniqueness of experience in the research question, what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording.
In many circumstances, place is the proximate zone in which field recording occurs. Proximity is not just physical, but also philosophical. Morton’s (2007) examination of the ideal of wilderness explores this concept of proximity. He argues wilderness is historically recognised as the out-there, distant, untouched and beyond. Wilderness is a diffuse and sprawling sense of location, unknowable and remote. It maintains a negative ambient state that either refuses or reduces the capacity for place to be realised. Once place is realised in such a location, the distance of wilderness is removed and the possibility for affective, embodied relations with that location erases any sense of remoteness. Place’s atmosphere, as it relates to the concerns of a listener, are literally and conceptually proximate.
This proximity affords the listener a particular engagement in, and recognition of, place. Specifically, it facilitates the artist-researcher to address the scales in time and dimension that exist at any moment (cf. Morton, 2016). How a listener experiences and explores place in terms of a field recording practice is a journey in
41 sound through time that is entirely unique to those moments and the relations between various objects and things, including the listener. The confluence of objects and things, their shifting interrelations, the scale of perspectives and that of the sound within and around them, offers an exacting and focused positioning for a listener.
When a listener engages with place and approaches it through the practice of field recording, they are not seeking to represent or to document location as an engineer or cartographer might. The aim of an engineer/cartographer is to produce a map or view, which is independent of any point of observation (Ingold, 1993). Rather, a listener’s listening and the resultant field recording refuses quantitation. Field recording acts as a qualitative encounter, one that is apprehended through affective means and concerns itself not with the super-representational aspects of sound, but rather the sub-representational. This focus upon the sub-representational aspects of sound allows for a creative reading to be realised. It affords the listener a position in opposition to a quantitative appreciation, instead encouraging a subjective, relational account of these moments in place and in time.
Place, as it pertains to the practice of field recording, cannot be surveyed meaningfully in a quantitative way. Rather, a field recording reflects upon place, as a set of aspects and interrelations that relate to the agentiveness and the desires of a listener’s listening. Field recording embraces the listener’s living within place, being affected by it and in turn relating with it. In line with Ingold (1993), a listener becomes one object within many and their presence impacts how place can be recognised moment to moment.
3.2.2 Place, Atmosphere and Affect
Place is an atmosphere, which is responsive to changes and constant movements of the objects and things within it. This enveloping and affective atmosphere creates a condition for qualitative investigation within which the richness and individuation of place in opposition to location can be recognised. Thus, place positions a listener within a specific nexus within a location. When place is realised, a listener finds themselves at one distinct nexus, but embodied within the whole location (Ingold, 2000).
Morton’s (2007) analysis of the questions of ambience and the resonance of objects expands upon this idea of place in the moment. Specifically, he argues
42 atmosphere, environment and place are particular kinds of vibration, and that place maintains similar qualities to sound. These similarities are actually specific to its temporality (cf. O’Callaghan, 2012) and moreover to how it is developed theoretically (Cox, 2011) in relation to ideas of flux. Place only exists for a listener when they become attentive and agentive in a location. Therefore, its appraisal is only meaningful in time; its comprehension as related to the practice of field recording is thus in the future. It is across time that the narrative of place is written (Morton, 2007). The experience of place acquires more meaning and affects more deeply the greater attention and time is spent with it. Place, as it relates to the practice of field recording, is understood as an affective echo, a reflection that arrives after the original utterance of sound (O’Sullivan, 2001).
Berlant’s (2011) writings on intuition, which she describes as a dynamic sensual data gathering through which affect is made apparent, is an important conception from which place can be further theorised. Berlant (2011) outlines the affective conditions under which intuition allows for a deep engagement with sensual information. This approach exists in opposition to the processes of habituation that reduces our sensitivity to engagement with everyday phenomena. Similarly, habituation in how we approach and perceive the spaces of location, reduce the opportunity for place to be fully realised by a listener. Habituation leads to a loss of attentiveness and an inability to recognise detail. Berlant (2011) encourages an active questioning of the a priori understandings and embodied modes of engagement as they relate to sensual data gathering. This position suggests that to be attentive to place requires a listener to be present to the subtleties that emerge. She adds it is in moments of unexpected circumstance that might exist at the edges of perception and sensation where one must be actively seeking and hyper-vigilant. It is in these moments that an opportunity for a truly affective sensing of that which is around us is realised; a position that reflects the phenomenological attitude.
Extrapolating Berlant’s (2011) position to embrace ideas of place, it can be argued a listener’s attentiveness and agentive participation is required to raise a ‘place’ out of the endless possibilities of location. It acknowledges the idea of uniqueness raised in the research question of this project. To create a place, a listener must carve out the atmosphere from within an atmosphere. It is an action of making and creation, one in which an artist-researcher’s agency and interests bear down on and activate
43 place’s atmosphere; drawing it out from the location. This carving out and creation is a critical recognition of the commencement of the creative capacity of the practice of listening and field recording. The choices reflect the creative endeavours and agentive concerns of a listener, rendering place’s atmosphere a production zone in which sound is encountered during a field recording. This process also recognises what Merleau-Ponty (2012) calls affective intentionality, a position that acknowledges how is it the experiences of an artist-researcher, shaped by their interior psychological interests, must be accounted for in their engagement with the lived-in world.
3.2.3 Place and Production
The production of place and its extraction from location is the commencement of a creative process for a listener’s practice. Bourriaud (2007) advances the concept, arguing that producing a new idea or new reading of an object, or complex range of objects and things in the case of field recording, is a creative production. Thus, place and its atmosphere is the point at which a whole range of complex variables, such as the sound, the space, the objects and things are brought into relation, through a listener’s attentiveness to these variables a creative process may begin.
In this sense, place is a setting within which a durational performance of the listener’s listening is conducted. The performance is not, as Berlant (2011) calls it, autonomic, referring to interactions that result automatically often at a subconscious level, but instead it requires training and conditioning if the opportunity for a creative piece is to be realised successfully. Additionally, the performance as it relates to a listener’s field recording is episodic, as the flux of sound, its non-repeatability and the shifting relations between sound, and object and thing, allows a listener’s listening to only be in that instant. Its transmission, through field recording will always position the framing of place in a historical setting (Morton 2007).
3.2.4 Place: Summary
Place as it relates to this research project is understood as the constructed and produced setting (cf. Bourriaud, 2007) in which a listening to sound is undertaken during a field recording. Phenomenologically, it is the lived-in zone of experience that directly relates to a listener as they engage with sound. Place accepts that the listener’s being is always a being-in-the-world (cf. Heidegger, 1962) and it affects the embodied experiences of that listener. The bounded frame of place is not always the entire
44 location surrounding a potential field recording, but rather a proximate locale of interest to the listener. Place is more than the quantitative physical characteristics of its location and is not fixed to those characteristics. In essence, place maintains an affective atmosphere that is always changing and developing (Morton, 2016).
To create a place, a listener must carve out the atmosphere from within an atmosphere and remain attentive to it. Place is not the sound events that occur within and around it, but rather the stage upon which the interplay of these sounds might resonate and unfold. It is where a listening occurs and thus is a lived in zone of engagement where the vibration of sound meets the listener as well as the objects and things proximate to them.
3.3 Listening: Introduction
In the first chapter of Noise, Attali (1985) calls for a set of “radical new theoretical forms” (p.4) to address what he perceived as the new realities emergent in audition. In the years following the publication of this text, the role of audition has continued to develop and expand both philosophically, in research areas such as sound studies, and through ever-expansive technological developments that allow for listening across previously unexplored sound phenomena.
Attali (1985) begins his analysis with a focused dialectic on listening and its critical linkages to power and the ability of the listener to change a world’s reality through exercising their agency in audition. For Attali (1985), listening is the central point from which the power of audition stretches outward into the world and back again toward the listener. The research question guiding this project recognises this positioning of the listener and seek to critically analyse that position and the agency proposed by it. Through the feedback loop suggested by Attali (1985), of applied perception and examination, listening encourages those engaged in it to “decipher a sound form of knowledge” (p.4). He argues that the objects of listening, and their subsequent meaning as it unfolds over time, are rooted in the political engagement of the listener, reflecting directly their willingness to express agency during audition. In addition, Attali identifies the critical influence that technology plays as the primary means through which any transmission of a listening or sonic reproduction is realised. Just as agency shapes a listening, so too does technology shape its ability to be realised and transmitted.
45 Highlighting the agency of the listener and the technological implications of reproduction are the basis of a practice in field recording and the subject of my research question. In the following section, I describe a theoretical approach to listening as it pertains to field recording.
3.3.1 Different Uses For The Same Organs
Listening and hearing are the subjects of numerous studies from various disciplines including neuroscience (cf. Blesser & Salter, 2007), sociology, psychology (cf. Hoppe, 2007), and biology (cf. McGregor, 2005). The physical and cultural differentiations between sense and perception continue to be tested and explored as new technologies shape the ways in which these two phenomena are manifested and able to be interrogated. Equally, philosophical approaches developed in the age of the phonograph have expanded our understanding of the relationship between our sense of hearing and the interpretive capacity of listening (Oliveros, 2015).
Highlighting listening as the primary focus of this research project requires me not only to examine the sense of hearing, but moreover, reflect upon how listening as a creative practice can be extricated from the divergent discourses around audition and sense making. It is critical, therefore, to ask questions about exactly what is being listened to (and for) and how it is that listening is shaped by factors not inherent to the audition of the listener (Voegelin, 2010). It also requires an analysis of the available modes of listening and to understand how these modes may be exploited for creative sonic pursuits.
As noted earlier, an element of my research project is concerned with contrasting listening against hearing. It is important I acknowledge this contrast, as presently there are semantic exchanges of these terms and establish a discrete differentiation between them is important for the continued development of this field (Helmreich, 2007). This substitution of one term for the other creates a conflated understanding of the differences between the sense of hearing and the interpretative capacities of listening. It is therefore necessary to consider the present functions of these terms.
Vickers (2012) suggests that listening has the difference of intent: “hearing is a physical activity, a function of the human auditory system, whereas listening is a mental or cognitive activity involving the mind” (p. 5). Moreover, Vickers’ work
46 highlights the differentiation and recognises the cognitive differences of each action. Vickers interrogates the ways in which the participation and agency of a listener is central to their ability to listen to, consider and filter a given flux of sounds in time and place. Sharing Vickers’ assertions, Blesser and Salter (2007) argue that listening is an engaged act, one that marries spatial awareness with the metaphysical. For them, listening is
a means by which we sense the events of life, aurally visualise spatial geometry, propagate cultural symbols, stimulate emotions, communicate aural information, experience the movement of time, build social relationships and retain a memory of experience (Blesser & Salter, 2007, p. 4).
Their definition suggests three external conditions of listening, (1) spatial awareness, (2) communication and (3) broader socio-cultural signification. They also highlight two internal conditions of listening: affect and memory. The identification of affect and memory in Blesser and Salter’s (2007) definition is significant because it proposes that listening is not just a functional act of spatial orientation; rather it is also metaphysical. The metaphysical nature of listening is a vital point of affirmation for the work of a listener with field recording, as it acknowledges the complexities and subtleties that can be realised within a listening. As in the formation of place, listening is an exercise in training and is a deeply affective pursuit that is immersed in sound through vibration. The familiar and unfamiliar vibrations of sound, create a setting in which embodied affect results from a listener’s embracing of the diversity of possible audition.
Back (2007) confirms, “listening to the world is not an automatic faculty, but a skill that needs to be trained” (p. 9). It was through the prosthetic ear of the microphone and early playback devices that humans recognised the impressions of our own audition (Kahn, 1999). Until this time, listening had been utterly subjective, unable to be repositioned from the interior self, and incapable of being communicated. With the arrival of mechanical reproduction, an opportunity for non- cognitive audition presented itself, allowing for analysis of our agentive auditory capacities (Kahn, 1999). This disembodied hearing, as executed by the object of the microphone, presented an opportunity to consider our audition as individuated and particular.
47 As was outlined in the contextual chapter’s analysis of the history of phonography (cf. section 2.1, p. 8, the microphone’s rendering of time and place within a given horizon of audition was not identical to the listener themselves. Rather, it offered an alternative perspective in which the dimension of sounds encountered in place were not identical to those maintained by an individuals organic listening. This alternative position thus provided the catalyst for a reconsideration of our abilities and desires as listeners. It was from these initial recordings that listeners started to understand better the roles that audition plays in constructions of the world and ultimately of ourselves as agentive beings.
Voegelin’s (2010) work further expands this understanding of a constructed listening by arguing that listening is embedded in ideological and aesthetic determination. Those determinations are a range of filters associated with the socio- cultural background and political interests that each listener brings to their listening. Her work suggests that the listener influences and shapes their listening. She suggests perception is a form of interpretation. Specifically, she argues listeners may be “listening to the sensory material rather than to recognize its contemporary and historical context” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 3). She adds, “it is a matter then of accepting the a priori influence while working towards a listening in spite rather than because of it” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 3). This acceptance is important for this research project because of the way it positions listening as a critical exercise. Listening cannot simply be an unattended process, as it requires agency and to address the metaphysical.
Listening, Voegelin (2010) argues, will produce the artistic context of the work, “in this sense listening is not a receptive mode but a method of exploration, a mode of ‘walking’ through the soundscape/the sound work.” (p. 4). Thus, listening is about a process of discovery within time and place; it is not so much about what is received as much as what is sought out. LaBelle (2006) also explores the notion of discovery and the inherent artistic contexts of listening and he suggests “listening searches for its own narrative – it speaks, it musicalises, it determines composition, however outlandish or uneventful” (LaBelle, 2006, p. 17).
In similar terms to Voegelin and LaBelle, Michel Chion’s (1994) theories of audition suggest a contemplative consideration of the act of listening, one that also pertains to the distinction of hearing and listening. He argues, “we don’t hear sounds, in the sense of recognising them, until shortly after we have perceived them” (Chion,
48 1994 p. 13). He suggests listening is not synchronic, rather it is a “synthesised apprehension of a small fragment of the auditory event, consigned to memory … [it follows] the event very closely, it will not be totally simultaneous” (Chion, 1994, p. 13). This delineation between the sense and comprehension is a point from which the demarcation of listening can take place. As the sound moves from sense to comprehension and analysis, the activity of listening can be understood to become. This asynchrony recognises that sense and sense making are not the same, but they are relational.
Toop (2010) addresses another aspect of sounds’ microscopy, when he explores conceptions of silence that he argues inform a comprehensive attendance of sound. He writes that by “listening more intently to those microscopic sounds, atmospheres and minimal acoustic environments that we call silence” we can better understand our own perception (p. 11). Toop’s interest recognises that listening acknowledges what Voegelin (2010) describes as “the experience of our generative perception” (p. 14). Voegelin’s idea of generative perception implies there is no universality to how listening occurs and subsequently there is no chance for an objective listener. Rather, listening is constituted by an individual in a given place and time. Their agency and their concerns form the listening, which can be expanded or contracted in conjunction with their ability to perceive.
Following from Toop (2010) and Voegelin’s (2010) views, it follows that two listeners within the same place and time might share very little in their attended listening. Their socio-cultural make up, their aesthetic and political interest and their agentive capacity as listeners may be markedly different. Therefore, it can be understood that the listener’s listening is not uniform, but is developed over time and honed over many performances. It may be virtuosic, but this may only be realised under the conditions of training and attentiveness to the requirements of a practice in field recording.
In perhaps one of the most radical approaches to listening, Nancy and Mandell (2007) argue that listening is both a simultaneous penetration and a reaching outward of the listener. Sound is passing into and through the body as it is simultaneously reaching out into the spaces around the listener and rebounding back in a fluid exchange. A listening occurs inside and outside, from without and from within, ultimately arguing listening begets a form of perceptible singularity. This listening is
49 all consuming for the listener. Nancy and Mandell (2007) refer to “a reality consequently indissociably ‘mine’ and ‘other’, singular and plural, as much as it is ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ and ‘signifying’ and ‘a-signifying’” (p.12). Listening, as it relates to field recording, is an embodied experience that must be undertaken deeply and critically, and must wholly consume the listener in place and time if it is to be properly realised.
3.3.2 The Phenomenology Of A Listener’s Listening
As noted previously, it is the agentive capacities of the listener and the implications of technologies surrounding the reproduction of audition that are at the centre of this research project. Addressing these points, Szendy and Nancy (2008) ask “Can one make a listening listened to? Can I transmit my listening, unique as it is?” (p. 5). These provocations identify the key considerations concerning listening as it pertains to a practice in field recording and the research question guiding this study.
Szendy and Nancy’s (2008) questions acknowledge the complexity of listening in relation to the agency of the listener and moreover their ability to communicate a listening. They confer a point of uniqueness that a listening maintains, suggesting it is individuated within time and place and is shaped within a complex mesh of experiences, preoccupations, and conditions that are only present in, and thus realisable only through, that listener. Their work suggests that even when sharing a place and time, two listeners will likely never listen to the same dynamic events, but will rather uncover an individuated dramaturgy of those events in place and time.
This uniqueness suggests the practice of listening is an active process in contrast to the more passive sense of hearing (Oliveros, 2015). This contrast of active verses passive is critical because it suggests that there is an individuated exploration of sound events in time and place, which opens the possibility for a creative approach to listening that is founded in the interests and desires of that listener. This opportunity for creativity is opened up when a listener’s agency can prioritise questions of aesthetics and other artistic concerns over and above other positions. This conception of the listener as performing a listening in time and place whilst realising a field recording, is referred to as a listener’s listening throughout this research project. A listener’s listening is an emergent theoretical framework through which the conditions of listening as it relates to field recording might be considered. A listener’s listening is
50 intensively practiced, in the sense that it is not ongoing or unattended. It is agentive and the artist-researcher taps in-to and out-of it during the course of their creative engagements with sound in place across time.
The distinction that is drawn between listening, as highly attentive to the dynamics of a time and place and fiercely agentive, and hearing, which is a more passive unconscious state (Voegelin, 2010) is also evident semantically and grammatically. Listening is active: I am listening to you. While hearing is semantically and grammatically passive: I hear you. Additionally, an artist-researcher always hears but they do not always listen. Within a listener’s listening then, the creative, political, social and cultural preoccupations of a listener contour that listening. When a listening of this kind is undertaken, there is an assumption of an agentive focus and position from within a given horizon of listening that is the attended, dynamic and evolving zone of audition that surrounds a listener (Idhe, 2007). Within this horizon, the listener can prioritise a focus on certain sounds, filtering a specificity of place, from within the more general acoustic space or location (Toniutti, 1999).
The agentive nature of listening recognises that participation in field recording requires a listener to experience focus deeply and with intent. This experience is addressed in the research question what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording? As only with intention can the unique experience of a listening be realised. When considered phenomenologically, the separation between the conditions of hearing and listening can be explored. Specifically, phenomenology allows for the development of a relational framework that is critical for approaching a listener’s listening as it pertains to the creative practices of this research project. Using Husserl’s (2012) categories, hearing can be understood in terms of a natural attitude. Hearing maintains a causal familiarity and assumes an underlying habituation that cloaks the possibilities for considered investigation. This attitude reflects the notion that hearing is a state in which sonic events are only manifest when dynamic, surprising or unexpected, rupturing out of the subconscious into a listener’s awareness. As naïve as Husserl’s natural attitude is (Bossert, 1985), it does allow for a departure point for this examination of listening in contrast to hearing.
By contrast, Husserl’s (2012) phenomenological attitude encourages a more considered examination of listening as it relates to field recording. This calls for a listener’s removal from the comfort of habituation and subconscious engagement with
51 the world around them. It requires the listener to commit to the investigation of sound as it relates to the material – the bodies, objects and things – they are surrounded by. From an auditory perspective, this material concern accepts a willingness to engage with the whole of the sonic spectra as it unfolds in time and place.
To approach listening as it pertains to field recording, it is important to address the ways in which this phenomenological attitude is applied. Specifically, Husserl’s approach to phenomenology is in essence a ground zero. It is a position from which a listener must rediscover all that exists around them without bias or predispositions towards the objects or things in that horizon of experience (Stewart & Mickunas, 1990). This view, whilst demanding attentiveness from the listener, is problematic, as it is ultimately reductive and potentially strips the listener of their political and other agentive frameworks. Simultaneously, this position denies or at least reduces the possible affective and intuitive concerns of the listener in a given time and place. The phenomenological attitude demands an engagement without bias or predispositions and subsequently strips away the agentive and creative interests of the listener when engaged in field recording. Thus, the phenomenological attitude requires further development if it is to be useful to this research project and the study’s research question.
Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) extension of the phenomenological attitude is more suited to the process of listening as it is theorised in this research. He broadens the application of this attitude, arguing that any given location is more than the empirical objects within it. Furthermore, he develops the idea that the individual undertaking a phenomenological investigation is implicated in the world they find themselves undertaking this reflection in and vice versa. It is this recognition and the implications of the self in location that offer a more attuned perspective from which listening can be developed within this research project. Critically, the expansion of this primary attitude is useful as it opens up an opportunity through which a listening may reflect the subjective pre-occupations and political agency of a listener in place and time.
3.3.3 The Listener’s Listening In Field Recording
As previously noted in the contextual chapter (cf. Section 2.1, p.8), the invention of phonography changed our understanding of, and willingness to, philosophically reposition listening. The repositioning continues in conjunction with the practice of
52 field recording. The ability to capture sounds on recording devices, store them and replay those recordings in new locations and various times, altered perceptions of sound and its contextualisation. Schafer (1993) argues that the use of recording devices demonstrated that our ears are powerful filters, as much as organs for listening. He noted that our ability as listener is as much to do with what we are not listening to, as it is about the focus of our attention. The listener’s listening recognises that for the field recording to be successful it must deeply reflect the listening and subsequent recording of that place and time. Specifically, the listening is undertaken with a desire to realise the agentive listening in those moments. In terms of the research question, it is imperative to contemplate the role that the experience of listening assumes, one that is attentive to agency, affect and creativity.
In recording situations, the listener’s listening, and thus the horizon of listening, may not be represented at all by what the microphone is receiving. Accordingly, Kahn (1999) notes that it was not one sound but all sound that was recorded by the phonograph. Upon completing early recordings on the phonograph, listeners were shocked to hear not just the voice that had been recorded, but also the recording medium itself (Sterne, 2003). Rather than sharing the agency of the listener’s listening, and sharing that focus within the horizon of listening, the microphone expressed a different auditory perspective, one that did not entirely share the attentions and preoccupations of the listener’s listening. The microphone attended to its own filtering within the horizon of listening, a filtering shaped through its technological design and placement within the location in time. Thus, this repositioning of audition afforded by the microphone represented an opportunity for a new conceptualisation of our ears as selective, subjective listening organs.
3.4 Summary: Towards The Listener’s Listening
In this section, it has been argued that listening requires conscious engagement and training (Voegelin, 2010). Unlike the passive sense of hearing, listening moves beyond a physiologically informed automatism into a more agentive, considered and conscious state of exploration and making (Chion, 1994). It is a process that seeks a subjective situation to be “understood, deciphered, pierced rather than perceived” (Szendy & Nancy, 2008, p. 1). Listening is the manifestation of participation in the act of hearing (Blesser & Salter, 2007). It is the shift in recognition of auditory events and information away from the fringes of consciousness. I argue listening, as it is
53 understood in this research project, makes sound the primary concern of the mind’s apprehension and interpretation.
From the studies discussed, it has been suggested that listening is a critical and primary focus for this research project. This research recognises listening as an agentive, active, purposive position, and ascribes to the listener an opportunity that is affective and may be creative. This approach is a theoretical framework through which the conditions of listening as it relates to field recording can be considered. Approached this way, the listener’s listening is understood as intensively agentive in the sense that it is not ongoing or unattended, but rather temporal, reflecting an artist- researcher’s intense engagement with sound in place across time.
In this chapter, I outlined the theoretical framework that supports the development of my research project. It considers the research question what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording? It started with a broad analysis of sound as vibration. Vibration occurs at all levels of existence and forms a recognition of the material concern of sound to which human expressions contribute, but which precedes and exceeds these expressions (Cox 2011). Sound’s characteristics, forces, intensities and their affective potential were explored.
Following this exploration into sound, place was theorised as the zone in which a listener might exercise their audition during field recording. Place was examined as a zone of entanglement within which its dynamic accommodates the interrelational and intrarelational potentials of all bodies, things and objects within place, of which the listener is one such body. It was argued that place exists as a production (Bourriaud, 2007) that is a creation of the lived moments in which a listener is attentive and present to the objects and things around them (Ingold, 1993).
Finally, listening was theorised as a phenomenological undertaking during which a listener must exercise agency during their audition. Listening is the manifestation of participation in the act of hearing (Blesser & Salter, 2007). A listener must be ultimately attentive to the sound events that unfold in time and place, and through doing so can create a listening that is unique. This process of listening constitutes an emergent theoretical framework relational to field recording that I have called a listener’s listening.
54 4. Methodology
In this chapter, I outline the study’s methodology and research methods. My methodology develops to a phenomenological theoretical perspective outlined in the previous chapter. I begin with the macro concept of a practice-led research before exploring the meso concept of reflexivity, and conclude with an examination of the micro concepts of sensory ethnography and sound specific ethnography. The methods are outlined with respect of their relational interactions and are the most suitable ways through which the research question, what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording, can be answered. The practice-led approach frames the entire thesis at the macro level, as creative practice is at the centre of my research. At a meso level, I employ a reflexive method that allows me to address listening and to consider, through reflection, what constitutes the collection of a listening as understood in a field recording. At a micro level, I employ sensory ethnography and the method of sound ethnography, which allows me to fill in the detail of my practice and directly engage with the technologies required for the collection of a listening and the completion of the field recording.
Each layer of method addresses the practice of field recording, as guided by the research question, and the pursuit of creative and agentive listening. The methods address the tiered hierarchies of phenomenological investigation required to fully analyse the nature of creative practice as it pertains to field recording. The chapter is organised in this way to allow the reader to clearly see relationships between the theoretical and practical aspects of field recording, ensuring the methodology works to translate the theoretical framework of the previous chapter to practice as it is understood in this thesis.
4.1 Practice-Led Research Strategy
A practice-led research design means research question are derived from challenges identified through artistic practice (Gray, 1996). Within the macro framework of the practice-led research design, this research project supports the development and analysis of my practice in field recording, which is related to the theoretical development of a listener’s listening. The listener’s listening is an emergent theoretical framework through which the conditions of listening related to field recording might be considered. A listener’s listening is intensively agentive and performed in the sense
55 that it is not continuous or unconscious, but rather temporal, reflecting an artist- researcher’s creative engagements with sound in place across time. I have chosen a practice-led strategy as it accommodates the complexities of art making, offering a framework through which theory can be tested, while analysing qualitative data about practice (Graham, 2016). It acknowledges that my research question stems from the creative act of field recording and that practice is the root from which all subsequent analysis takes place. A practice-led research design welcomes embodiment and is a central methodological consideration for the artist-researcher concerned with field recording (Grierson & Brearley, 2009). Identifying and developing research problems through practice provides a considered, reflexive, and relational research framework.
Because I am already an artist engaged in field recording, I require an approach that accommodates the relational conditions of the practice. By recognising the complex nature of field recording, this methodology offers a means of analysis that is reflexive, based in experience, and provides a basis for critical qualitative analysis arising from practice. It presents a methodological framework within which the research project can intuitively develop. In addition, it allows me to explore and analyse my existing practice as a means of developing it through the theoretical position of the listener’s listening. It also allows me to focus on the work that emerges from my engagement with a dynamic and intensely curious artistic direction, which drives the research.
Practice-led research encourages artist-researchers to explore the ”entire range of communication expression” relevant to their project (Gergen & Gergen, 2000, pp. 582-83). Through this approach, critical examinations of my practice may take place, with findings driving the research in new directions. This strategy is relational and important to artistic work, as it acknowledges and seeks to invite a multiplicity of positions from which the data, in this case sound, can be analysed and understood (Gershon, 2011; 2014).
This relational strategy recognises that my role, as artist-researcher, negotiates between complex social, political, technological, and linguistic frameworks (Graham, 2016). Those frameworks inform the ways in which an ontology may be constructed and subsequently direct how research may be conducted and expressed. This relational ontological position is of consequence, as I am specifically concerned with listening as a communicable practice. In the theory chapter, I argued that listening is
56 relational and constituted by a range of political and sociocultural concerns. Those political and sociocultural concerns effect decisions and subsequent actions and ultimately shape the ways in which I execute my practice. As an artist-researcher, my relational positions and that of the resulting artworks reflect the ways in which I account for the subjective, experiential and material content of sound that comprises the work. It is my relational perspective that allows for the realisation of an agentive, creative work from a multitude of potential outcomes. A practice-led approach considers the social structure and wider contexts while recognising personal narratives as a type of situated practice (Haseman, 2006).
Furthermore, a practice-led research approach acknowledges that the research project’s interactions with place and time are mediated through socio-cultural, technological and political lenses. These points of mediation, as they relate to the theoretical framework outlined in the previous chapter, affect my ability to recreate what Diamond (2013) terms a seamless production of my listening in my practice. This seamless production represents the means by which I might successfully communicate my listening. Thus, this framework affords me the opportunity to reconcile my actions as listener within place and time, and through this reconciliation generate a platform fro which to critically analyse the practice. The practice of the listening therefore forges the artwork, as “it doesn’t exist unless it’s being done” (Diamond, 2013, p. 4).
This contemplation of practice applies directly to the listener’s listening, the theoretical construct at the core of my research project. It recognises the agentive and creative capacities of listening when undertaking a field recording. Specifically, the listener’s listening is inherently practice based and commensurate with my desire to collect a listening through field recording. This form of listening simultaneously accommodates socio-cultural, aesthetic, political and physiological concerns that frame a position of the listener and their intent as communicator. These concerns shape the practice of the listening that are important for the development of a relational listening condition, as they allow for the latent presence of the artist to resonate from within the work.
Practice-led research means that my artistic works are rooted in the problems, questions, and challenges of the day-to-day rigour of my art making. Moreover, practice-led research strategies grant me the opportunity to explore the
57 “interpretations” (Hertz, 1997, p. viii) that emerge from the artworks I create. Reflecting the relational capacities of my listening. I can reconcile my experiences in the field through a process of constructing interpretations and then translating these by forging artworks. Hertz (1997) describes interpretations in opposition to the reporting of facts or truths suggesting rather that a researcher’s work is an agentive process of interpreting the materials that inform the research project. In relation to this study, Hertz’s concept of interpretation aligns with my research approach because it supports a relational perspective with respect of how field recording is undertaken.
Practice-led research considers the constant feedback cycle that exists between the listener’s listening and the desire to collect that listening as field recording. As a result, the use of a practice-led research strategy has allowed me to remain open throughout the research process. I become more aware of emergent trends, concepts and critical understandings that occur during the research and from which I can apply the theoretical models for ongoing creative processes. Practice-led research strategies permit phenomenological analysis because they afford the researcher a defined direction that is open ended, content driven, self critical, and self-reflexive (Hannula, 2008). Thus, in order to operationalise practice-led research strategies, I use the concept of reflexivity to shape my focus.
4.2 Reflexivity
Reflexivity is a critical method in many research contexts (cf. Schön, 1983; Woolgar, 1988; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Ellis & Bochner, 2000). It is used in relation to practice-led research as an experiential framework that calls upon the artist-researcher to refocus the day-to-day operations of their practice to formalise their research interest. This focus on research frameworks, set alongside an open-endedness that is necessary with any research, provides a context in which experiments can be conducted and documented as part of the practice. The advantage of conducting and documenting research in practice is it affords a rigorous, self-critical examination that is shaped through the research question of this study. Thus, reflexivity is rooted in the experience of the artist. Gershon (2011) notes “it takes a researcher’s presence to turn someone’s daily experiences into data” and the self-reflexive nature of the methods is central to the reflexive approach (p. 260).
58 Reflexivity evokes a rigorous and iterative perspective (Dieleman, 2008). The artist-researcher “reflects upon themselves and [are] able to give an account of their own position of enunciation” (Haseman & Mafe, 2009, p. 219). Reflexivity encompasses theoretical and relational frameworks (Dieleman, 2008) and facilitates the integration of theoretical, practical, and methodological concerns within a research project. It also offers the artist-researcher an important facility through which to periodically assess their progress. This method is critical to this project as it allows me to be self-aware, to recognise significant processes and outputs, and demonstrate what knowledge is gathered and attained (cf. Mills, Durepos & Wiebe, 2010). In this research project, reflexivity is addressed through a number of methods including listening exercises, journaling and documentation and studio practices that are detailed later in this chapter.
Reflexivity acknowledges the internal processes inherent in the artwork produced in the research. It asks questions of ‘how’ the work is completed and allows for a reflective space within which the artist-researcher can move beyond the concerns of “‘what’ is completed” (Hannula, 2008). Its focus on the how means reflexivity is a deeply personal, technical, and experiential element of any artist-researcher’s practice. Reflexivity, due to its personal and experiential nature, must be situated within the social and cultural aspects of the their practices. By situating the researcher’s experiences in a wider socio-cultural context, reflexivity acts as a translation device, recognising the interconnectedness of practice, data, theory and method. In this research project, the practice-led strategy allows me to consider theory in the analysis of my artistic work. Particularly, it provides for a reflexive consciousness, where by the interconnectedness of my experience, my “attention, consciousness, subjectivity and interaction”, can be accounted for and reconciled within the theory as well as within the work itself (Berger & Del Negro, 2002, p. 64).
As a result, reflexivity allows me to think critically about methods and methodologies of my practice in listening as expressed through field recording to answer the research question. Reflexivity acknowledges the capacity of sound to be a data source. Specifically, it recognises that the researcher has an embodied relationship (Gershon, 2013) with auditory materials, ascribing their sensual possibilities to a framework apposite to the research project. Sounds as data contain embedded layers of information that reveal not only the recorded material, but also the artist-
59 researcher as agentive listener (Gershon, 2013). Thus, these concessions of sound as data, that is sound reflecting both the material nature of the recording and my artistic purposes, allows for an experiential analysis of my practice through reflexivity. To expand the reflexive methodology, I use sensory ethnography (Pink, 2009) as a method. In what follows, I discuss what is meant by sensory ethnography and how it is adopted in my work, which is followed by an examination sound specific ethnography.
4.3 Sensory Ethnography
Sensory ethnography is a method that accepts multiple modes of data collection based on immersive, embodied practice (Pink, 2009). It involves rethinking ethnographic methods, and paying particular attention to ideas such as sensory perception, sensory experience and other categories of ethnographic approaches. Sensory ethnography considers the sensory practices of the participants as well as culturally specific categories, conventions, moralities and knowledge that inform how people understand their experiences. For this research project it provides a critical micro-level methodology that explicitly calls attention to sensory perceptions and experience such as listening. It accepts the use of various audio and visual media as the primary drivers of investigation. Additionally, it facilitates a critical linkage between the embodied understandings of a practice-led research strategy and the breadth of interpretative data sources that relate to reflexive methods.
As an artist-researcher, sensory ethnography champions fresh considerations of data sources; new understandings provided by this data and, more specifically, the possibility for all manner of sound (and other media) to become a central focus for research and data collection (Pink, 2009). Sensory ethnography allows me to consider questions of embodied experience, temporality and place as they relate to my practice in field recording. Specifically, this methodology allows me to consider the implications of embodiment as it relates to the idea of listening framed by the research question.
Sensory ethnography acknowledges that “sensory experience and perception has ‘always’ been central to the ethnographic encounter, and thus also to … research” (Pink, 2009, p. 10). Pink (2009) argues that sensory ethnography is embodied because it recognises the complexity of the senses as a means of approaching and
60 understanding the research. The embodied nature of sensory ethnography is pivotal to the researcher’s lived experience of the research subject. As a result, sensory ethnography acknowledges the research process as part of the practitioner’s own artistic practice (Pink, 2009). In addition, it engages the practitioner with their senses as it has emerged from various embodied and performance disciplines (cf. Hahn, 2007). Therefore, as Pink (2009) argues, sensory ethnography is useful to the practice- led research strategy adopted by this study. Its specific relevance to this study resides in its particular consideration of field recording as a data source. Pink (2009) argues that with changing uses and access to media, research outputs previously relegated as secondary to textual analysis, for example film or sound recording, are open to the ethnographer as a primary data source and can be explored in rich and complex ways.
Sensory ethnography offers a research space in which supratextural research can be realised (Nakamura, 2013). Supratextural is that which sits beyond words. It takes into account the visual and the aural, and it prioritises these data sources. Nakamura (2013) argues that sensory ethnography prioritises embodied data sources and also allows for them to be positioned in a framework through which aesthetic arts and research can co-exist.
Additionally, this methodology recognises opportunities for the affective experience of the artist-researcher and for data to embrace this reflexivity, and specifically acknowledges that “mere words may have limitations, the emotions and images inspired by them do not” (Nakamura, 2013, p. 133). Pink (2009) takes the affective idea further by arguing that sensory ethnography is open to multiple ways of knowing that depart from the classic observational approaches. Rather, sensory ethnography is a “reflexive and experiential process through which understanding, knowing and (academic) knowledge are produced” (Pink, 2009, p. 8). Thus, it links to the reflexive nature of practice-led research strategies as well as facilitating my practice in the data collection and analysis process.
4.3.1 Sensory Ethnography And Practice-Led Research
As sensory ethnography explores the relationship between sensory perception and culture, it transcends “the interrogation of how culture is ‘written’ to examine the sites of embodied knowing” (Pink, 2009, p. 15). This recognition of the embodied is
61 central to my study as it recognises the role of the artist-researcher as fundamentally shaping the research. It recognises my central placement within a horizon of audition in which perception is centred and through which I can analyse my experience. As sensory ethnography is able to offer an understanding of the ways the senses perceive the world, it provides a structure through which embodiment in time and place can be analysed (Pink, 2009) in conjunction with reflexive methods, which are described previously in this chapter (cf. Section 4.2, p. 56).
The role of the senses, and their ability to embody knowledge of place, are central to a sensory ethnographic practice (Gershon, 2011). As an artist-researcher who is undertaking a practice-led research approach, sensory ethnography also allows me to interrogate the culturally informed nature of my practice and examine how the auditory senses are informed by modes of listening, understandings of perception, and other cultural factors (Chion, 1994). Moreover, sensory ethnography equips me with the opportunity to represent my encounters and understandings through a self conscious and reflexive attendance to bodily sensation.
By attending to sense, I refer explicitly to audition, and subsequently to the desire of capture a listener’s listening through field recording. The capture of a listener’s listening is the concept that underpins my research question. As such, sensory ethnography is suitable as it directly considers the embodied and affective relations that are the root of this practice. Sensory ethnography also asks artist- researchers and their audiences to become self-conscious and aware of their own subjectivities (Pink, 2009 p.50). Sensory ethnography therefore acknowledges listening as attending “the immediate experience of sound” (Ingold, 2008, p. 245), and thus across time yields knowledge that is “intuitive, engaged, synthetic and holistic” (Ingold, 2008, p.245).
Listening as a method of sensory ethnography is concerned with the identification of place as a proximate zone of events rather than a static location (cf. Ingold, 2008; 2011). It accepts that sonorous immediacy unfolds in time and thus addresses “the actual involvement of ethnographers in the production of the places they research” (Pink, 2009, p. 33). For this research, the significance of the differentiation between a static conception of location and the dynamism of place recognises the production of place as the site in which field recording occurs. Field recording is concerned with the sonic events as they unfold and accumulate in time
62 and though sensory ethnography the complexities of this experience can be approached and analysed.
Wishart (1986) explores issues surrounding events, and proposes that they are structured within time. As such, temporality is of significance to any methods involved in the practice of field recording. Using metaphors of landscape he addresses field recording’s temporal materials, and concludes that all structural sound gains meaning “from its unfolding in time” (Wishart, 1986, p. 53). This notion of unfolding in time is critical to the use of sensory ethnography and more broadly to ideas of place within the study, specifically the rejection of stasis and recognition of flux and change. As a result, it is important to investigate the multiplicity of understandings around place.
Several researchers (cf. Casey, 1996; Massey, 2005; Ingold, 2011) have argued that place (cf. Section 3.2, p. 36) is more than the environment or the mappable geographic location in which we are located. Expressly, Ingold (2011) proposes that environment is about entanglement. He argues that places do not exist; rather they occur. Ingold (2008) argues that place is not something that persists in a static state; instead, it is comprised of numerous human and non-human agents who interact in a fluid way to create a constant state of flux and change (Lefebvre, 1974).
In terms of this project, sensory ethnography allows me to consider my role in the production of place within a location. The idea that place is about entanglement that occurs, rather than exists, is significant because it suggests place is produced (cf. Section 3.2.3, p. 44. The actions of the artist-researcher in place construct the occurrences from the artist’s point of view. Furthermore, the cultural situatedness of listening is also significant to the ways that place is represented through a listener’s listening with respect of field recording. Thus, I propose that listener’s listening, as it relates to field recording, considers place as being produced by the artist-researcher (cf. Bourriaud, 2007).
4.3.2 The Emergence of Sound Specific Ethnography
Sound specific ethnography is an emergent methodology deeply rooted in sensory ethnography. This methodology reflects specifically on sound and addresses its unique challenges and the practices required to approach it. Sound’s position within ethnography, during a majority of the 20th century, was documenting anthropocentric interests in ritual, language, musicology, and other human oriented sound practices
63 (Faudree, 2012). Sound in ethnographic research traces a history through layers of ethnomusicology in the first half of the 20th century, with sound photographs (Filene, 2000, p. 56) of John and Alan Lomax (cf. section 2.3, p.14, and the recordings of Hugh Tracey. Influencing a generation of ethnographers who sought to collect real and objective recordings of their subjects (Filene, 2000). During the later half of the 20th century however, as a more critical and subjective understandings of audition, perception and ethnography began to emerge, there was a shift away from enthnomusicological sound-specific ethnography toward a more integrated understanding of the potential of sound in ethnography. Shortcomings, such as the condensed and exclusionary nature of audio data collection (Drever, 2002), provided an opportunity for subsequent generations of ethnographers to reconsider the way sound might be realised as an embodied data source. During his research into the Kahuli people of Papuan New Guinea, Steven Feld developed an ethnographic approach to sound he called acoustemology. Feld (1994) details a range of approaches to realise a heightened awareness of sound as an epistemological agent. Specifically, he defines the qualities of acoustemology as “how sounding and the sensual, bodily, experiencing of sound is a special kind of knowing” (Feld, 1994, p. 4). He concludes that if we are to understand the notions of place and environment, a spatial sonic understanding can be a rich source of knowledge (Feld, 1994).
Acoustemology (cf. Feld, 1994) provides an array of methods that prioritise the interconnectivity of the ecological and environmental, the social and the aesthetic. It places the artist-researcher in a position that recognises their contribution to forming a tailored understanding through sound, governed by their relational interest. It also provides a starting point through which sound can be recognised more fully in ethnography. Moreover acoustemology realises a series of tools that can be used for an artist-researcher’s investigations.
As artistic practices advance, led by developments in technology and aesthetics, new methods must be developed to cater for shifts in artistic investigation, technological capacity, cultural understandings, and other considerations that shape research. Drever (2002) suggests that for ethnographers to reposition themselves in alignment with these emergent trends, they must eschew the perspective of themselves as scientists, in favour of seeing their role as communicator. He also advocates for a change to ethnography’s core principles from general observation to speaking and
64 listening, (Drever, 2002, p. 24). These provocations mark an important emergent shift in the breadth of ethnographic research and equip a new generation of researchers with tools that have the capacity to address broader and more diverse research concerns. Drever (2002) and others (cf. Pink, 2009; Ingold, 2008; Gershon, 2013) have sought to reframe the possibilities of ethnography and through doing so, open up the possibilities for the methods to take hold more firmly in artistically focused projects. Moreover, Drever’s (2002) appreciation of listening is particularly valuable for my research as he acknowledges a shift away from the historical thrust of ethnography as rooted in visiocentric traditions and language. This recognition of listening and its equal consideration to senses such as vision is crucial for the success of this research project.
Building on such aspirations, Gershon (2013) posits an understanding of sound through the affective vibrations that generate it (Gershon 2013, p. 257). Affective vibrations are the source from which a means for embodied knowledge creation can take place through sensory and relational investigations. They are the bases of phenomenology. Moving away from 20th century concerns of ethnographers, he argues against musicological primacy in favour of a more comprehensive sonic analysis. Building on work by Miller (2005), Gershon (2013) promotes a valuation and awareness of all sounds, not just those that have historically been associated with ethnographic research. Rather than primarily focusing on speech and music, Gershon (2013) suggests that broader readings of sonic materials create new understandings and opportunities for analysis.
Recognising vibration, and thus all sound, Gershon (2013) embraces a comprehensive sonic apprehension that is critical when considering field recording. He prioritises sound as a form of embodied knowledge that carries with it unique propositions for both the artist-researcher and those coming in contact with the artworks and research. Importantly for this research project, Gershon (2013) argues a new positioning that allows for a listening that extends beyond commonplace audition and engages with more complex and interpretive sound. That directly relates to my practice of field recordings.
Specifically, Gershon’s position encourages the artist-researcher to move beyond the approaches popularised in the 20th century and to embrace the entire possibility of sound. He recognises that vibration is always present, and it is experienced both
65 through our ears, but also our body and thus “resonance is theoretically and materially consequential” (Gershon 2013, p. 257) He argues vibration is the key instigator for the recognition of flux and change through which an event is recognised within place. Field recording practice is therefore drawn from, and affected by, vibration. It is the affective nature of vibration that facilitates the possibility for agentive listening and the analysis of that listening through a practice-led research strategy. In terms of the research question guiding this study, it means listening as a completed field recording, can approach many potential sources of sound.
4.4 Methods
Given the material data and methodological focus of this research project, I have devised a series of interwoven methods through which to gather data. These methods respond directly to my research question addressing the emergent fields of audition and sound, recognising vibrations’ capacity to convey embodied knowledge. Methodologies such as sensory ethnography allow me to address the questions of my practice; specifically that listening is an inherently creative and agentive act. However, my research project, concerned with listening and the opportunity to transmit that listening through field recording, presents a series of challenges to data collection. Methods of data collection must afford the tools to (a) analyse and theorise my practice and (b) create an aesthetically considered artwork. The methods outlined below reflect the development and execution of my practice, specifically the movement from conception and listening to the collection of my listening as field recording.
4.4.1 Listening exercises
Listening is the primary focus of this research project, the research question, and my practice. To listen in such a way as I am seeking to investigate in this study is to create a subjective sensual impression of a time and place with the express intention of sharing that listening through field recording. It involves a controlled articulation that moves beyond mere perception into an act that is more considered, self aware and complex (cf. Saricoban, 1999). To achieve this listening, I must be able to appreciate the way in which I listen, and come to understand what reflects my practices and interests. And moreover how I can perform a listening to meet these criteria.
66 I have developed a self-reflexive array of techniques that allow me to recognise certain approaches, patterns and behaviours. I use when listening with the express intention of creating a field recording. The ability to recognise how I listen is a vital component to understanding the fundamental abilities I can call upon to realise artworks. Specifically this method considers the following:
What is it I am seeking to listen to in a given context and why? What is the affect experienced by these choices?
This question references the aesthetic and affective concerns of my practice. It allows the positioning of my listening to reflect my interests and concerns that link into the material nature of the listening. Moreover, the question allows me to consider what elements are the foci of my interior, organic psychological listening, and how this actively shapes listening in light of my artistic interests. It provides a framework through which my choices, personal as they are, can be critically analysed through the framework of this research project. It also reflects the inherent qualities I want presented in the transmission of my listening.
How does the variation of elements within that listening effect focus? How is it my listening can be focused? Can a shift in focus occur while maintaining a relational quality to the listening?
The focus of a listening, that is the recognition and comprehension of a given range of sounds in time, can be shaped by various factors and dynamic changes in a horizon of listening. For example, the entry of a loud sound in a horizon of listening might create a dramaturgical interruption to a sound field. These variations, shifts and interruptions are vital for the recognition of how a listening is both formed, maintained and ultimately how it can be transmitted successfully (cf. Szendy & Nancy, 2008). It allows for questions about how focus shifts and to what effect that shift contributes. Importantly, it offers a reflexive space within which the material concerns of a listening can be analysed and interrogated through the research process.
Can concurrent foci be maintained during a listening?
The ability and demonstration of a listener to maintain multiple layers of engagement and awareness is a central consideration of my practice. This method reflects Ingold’s (2008) recognition of the complexity of sound as a data source and the need to develop tools with which to apprehend that complexity. It recognises that
67 listening is multi-dimensional and plural in its execution as a creative practice. Specifically, it requires me to comprehend and account for the ways sounds mesh together in time and place.
This mesh may involve resonances, frequency, amplitude, dynamic shifts, dramatic considerations and other phenomena that create fluctuation in the listening (Gershon, 2013). Thus, this consideration for the intricacy of a listening allows for the subtlety of my work to be communicated, revealing how I navigate these changes and seek to shape them through the listening. Further, it addresses how I can execute agentive listening, contouring that listening through a series of creative choices that address my artistic interests.
These choices, and the expression of my interests, are undertaken in a constantly changing spatial and temporal environment, the place in which the listening is occurring. Thus, it requires a listener to develop ways in which an inherently complex and changing nature can be recognised and accommodated. Listening, as provoked in this question, requires the artist-researcher to pierce into the sounds around them, to shape them through their listening, rather than simply perceive them (cf. Szendy & Nancy, 2008).
How long can and should the listening be maintained?
Temporality is the key factor to shape listening. A listening can only exist in time and reflects those events in a temporal environment, which are not repeatable (Feld, 1994). The listening must recognise the agency and capacities of the listener as unique (Szendy & Nancy, 2008). In addition, uniqueness is not just confined to the listener, but also that which is listened to. The environment and temporality of place directly informs the material nature of the listening and any subsequent transmission of that listening through field recording. Moreover, these factors may impact on the listening. Shifts and occurrences in the listening’s timeframe effect the way in which the listening is experienced and potentially transmitted.
How is it the relational conditions of internal psychological and external technological horizons of audition be made to interact?
This question reflects the desire for the collection of my listening through field recording to be inherent in the practice. It reflects the theoretical concerns of the relational listening condition of a listener’s listening as it is to be explored this research
68 project. It connects the aesthetic nature of the practice with the technical execution required for the collection of a listening as field recording. This method is intrinsically tied to the method of audio recording, which is used in this research.
4.4.2 Audio Recording
As a method, audio recording is critical to the practice of this research project. It is both the applied practice and the artistic outcome. This method is a form of active documentation. De Freitas (2002) defines active documentation as a method through which artist-researchers create cyclical analysis of their creative practice. It provides me with a range of tools that address the development throughout the creative research. Active documentation identifies and accommodates evolution, both in the practice and the work processes that occupy that practice. It facilitates a means from which analysis of the sonic materials captured can be undertaken and the practice of field recording augmented and developed.
Active documentation seeks to reveal the layers of process, which can be lost across the arc of a practice-led research project. This documentation and mapping of the process, through the recordings, provides the opportunity to analyse data relevant to the capture of listening as field recording and align it with the concerns of my research project.
4.4.3 Journaling And Documentation
To unpack both exercises and audio recordings, I used journaling as “a device for working with events and experiences in order to extract meaning from them” (Boud, 2001, p. 9). I used a range of journaling approaches including textual, vocal, graphical and visual means to allow for a structured examination of my practice that were framed through the listening exercises and subsequent audio recordings. The journaling is actioned upon completion of the other methods, allowing these more directly related practice-led approaches to be fully realised. Journaling in real time is possible in some artforms but, given the immediate, time based nature of my practice; journaling must remain secondary, serving these other methods because the journaling may create sounds that enter the field recording. This documentation, when used to articulate a reflexive methodology allows for both “decision making and a plan of action,” (da Freitas, 2002, p.1) recognising these as both a "valuable learning
69 process and an indispensable script for the writing of an exegesis” (da Freitas, 2002, p. 1).
4.4.4 Analytical Studio Practice
Another secondary method is studio practice. Field recording requires the artist- researcher to become intimately familiar with how their practise is shaped through the external and technological horizon of audition. Whilst listening in the field (both during and following recording) and other field practices can allow for a consideration of how listening is being practiced, the studio environment offers the researcher a more complex engagement with the acoustic data. Specifically, the studio facilitates a ready access to comparative listening opportunities (via various speaker types and headphone arrays), the chance to revisit particular events, detailed software driven analysis and the opportunity to investigate both the macro and micro nature of the recordings. The studio is where the success of a completed listening, as field recording, can be further examined with self-reflexive criticality.
4.5 Methods and methodology: Summary
In summary, this research project engages a qualitative methodology that is informed by phenomenological theoretical perspectives. It uses a practice-led, reflexive strategy in dialogue with sensory ethnography and other sound specific ethnographic methodologies to help me interrogate and deepen my creative practice processes. The methods I employ are listening exercises, audio recording, journaling and documentation and studio practice, each of which emphasise the embodied and relational nature of phenomenology.
70 5. Approaching Nothing
In this chapter, I analyse the creative component, Approaching Nothing. I begin with an overview of the commission for the work that contextualises it within in its historical and geographical circumstances. This chapter summarises details about Vela Luka, Croatia, where the listening practice and subsequent field recordings were completed, and describes the details of the equipment and techniques used to approach the technological horizon of audition. I also consider the work in terms of the research question posed by the study and analyse the piece through the lens of the critical frameworks laid out in the theoretical and methodological chapters. With that analysis revealing the ways in which I realised the field recordings through an attentive, aesthetically informed and agentive listening. I also detail the importance of the relational listening condition. This exists between the organic and technological horizons of audition and is required in the capture of a listener’s listening as field recording.
To address the collection of the listening as field recordings I pose a series of questions that were outlined in the methodology (cf. 4.4.1 pp. 66-68). These questions provide a set of tools that allow me to recognise and address the fundamental procedures and embodied actions that ground my listening practice, expressed as field recording. I go on to address the following questions in this chapter’s analysis section.
1. What is it I am seeking to listen to in a given context and why? What kind of affect results from these embodied experiences? 2. How does the variation of elements within that listening effect focus? Can a shift in focus occur while maintaining a relational quality to the listening? 3. Can concurrent foci be maintained during a listening? 4. How long can and should the listening be maintained? 5. How can the relational conditions of internal psychological and external technological horizons of audition be brought towards alignment? I do not explore the compositional flow of the work, treatments, such as mastering and other technical post-production procedures applied to field recordings for the purposes of publishing it. Rather, my focus is on the field recordings produced by my agentive listening. Accordingly, my analysis focuses on the nature of the field recordings that exist as part of the composition called Approaching Nothing. Each individual field recording comprising the composition is examined as examples of this
71 approach to listening. The chapter also considers the theoretical concerns and methodological questions developed throughout the research project.
5.1 Approaching Nothing: Overview
Approaching Nothing is a 30 minute, 30 second sound work I recorded across four days and nights in Vela Luka, Croatia. It is the creative work component of this research project and is analysed through the theoretical and methodological tools outlined previously in this exegesis. Its realisation through this theory of practice is the direct result of the research outlined in this thesis. The work marks a significant and new development in my practice of field recording. It was commissioned by Petar Milat, the curator at Mama in Zagreb. Approaching Nothing was exhibited in the Time Robbers exhibition at the Split Museum Of Fine Arts. It has also been released on CD by French imprint Baskaru and has been broadcast as a radiophonic work on various European Broadcasters including Deutsche Welle Radio.
The site of Vela Luka is historically significant for field recording. Luc Ferrari recorded his work Presque Rien ou Le lever du jour au bord de la mer there in 1968. Vela Luka has varied environments and locations. The locations reflect strongly a history of human settlement; with many trees removed from the island during the period the island was part of the Venetian empire. The trees were used to assist in the growth of Venice. The town itself is largely constructed of stone, with many small streets and alleyways weaving across it. Most houses are also made from a variety of stone materials. This history is relevant as it creates a very particular sonic quality, one in which the sound and its reflections must be considered when recording in the city. Vela Luka surrounds a small bay that is used daily by local fishing vessels that depart in the early hours of the morning and return across the day and into the afternoon. In this respect, there is a strong macro social cycle day to day and therefore many acoustic recurrences are repeated daily, such as the morning ringing of the church bell, the departures and arrivals of fishing vessels, the ferry which delivers tourists and supplies to the island, and other social conventions such as a mid-afternoon break when the town essentially closes.
The bay also creates a very particular sonic effect because sound on water carries with increased clarity over long distances. Thus, sounds that might not carry over land effectively are heard clearly from one side of the bay to the other. This effect
72 is the opposite to the interior of the town itself where the horizon of audition is significantly reduced by the physical architecture of the streets. The bay is almost entirely surrounded by gentle sloping hills, with just one valley leading out into the centre of the island. The buildings on the fringes of the town are semi-detached buildings with sprawling allotments that are used for olive farms and cropping other seasonal fruits. Some blocks feature large tracts of land, such as low set woodlands, which are accessible to local people and visitors. These properties have many accessible outlooks and vistas that facilitate a macro acoustic (and visual) engagement with Vela Luka.
Approaching Nothing is an assemblage of recordings made during the transition from late summer to autumn when the town begins to quieten into its winter cycle. The tourist season passes and many of the summer resorts are closed. There were less people on the streets and the town’s noise floor did not consume minor acoustic details in a given horizon of audition. As noted in chapter 3 (cf. p. 25, horizon of audition refers to the dynamic and evolving zone of audition that surrounds a listener (Idhe, 2007). This characteristic allowed certain subtle qualities of the town’s architecture to be revealed; including the ways sound behaves in narrower stone streets where acoustic reflection was distinct and audible. Without the presence of large numbers of people, sound moves freely and is not consumed or absorbed by bodies within locations.
I decided to record in Vela Luka because the curator, Petar Milat, offered me an unusual project. This commission offered me a unique opportunity that related directly to the requirements of this research project and provided an open-ended framework within which the emergent theoretical and methodological frameworks could be explored in the field. Through Muma, his organisation in Zagreb, he provided a residency situation for me on the island as part of an ongoing cultural exchange program. I must also acknowledge my privilege in being afforded access to this location and the commission. This privilege operates not only in terms of the access to these physical locations, but also the opportunity to travel to this environment and others like it more broadly. Many artists do not have such opportunities and I readily acknowledge how this can impact on the development and potential opportunities made possible through of my work.
73 Having known of Vela Luka through its connection to the work of Luc Ferrari, I was interested in visiting this location to investigate how it has changed sonically since Ferrari’s visit. This area has always been of interest to my practice, as I have known the islands of the Adriatic to be renowned for their sonic diversity and the richness of their environments. It was these factors that drove me toward realising the project Approaching Nothing as the focus of my residency. In the months before the field trip, I spent time preparing a portable but flexible collection of recording equipment that could respond to the dynamic nature of the environments I would likely encounter. At the same time I undertook research into the island’s history, topography and its flora, fauna and environments. This process, in conjunction with consultations with Milat, allowed for a rough schedule to be developed prior to my arrival in the village. These preparations shaped the recording because they allowed for a greater engagement with the village and its surroundings from the moment of arrival. Using the information prepared prior to arrival, and informed by the research conducted as part of this project, a quick survey of possible recording locations could be undertaken and minimal time was lost before commencing the project.
5.1.1 Approaching Nothing: Technical Overview
The creative work, Approaching Nothing consists of 18 individual sound recordings. The recordings were made using two primary microphone arrays. The majority of the recordings on Approaching Nothing were made using a pair of DPA 4060 miniature omni-directional microphones (cf. Appendix 1), which were amplified by a Sound Devices Mix-Pre preamplifier (cf. Appendix 2). This preamplifier connects through a tape-out port into a Zoom H2 (cf. Appendix 3) hand held recording device. Omni- directional microphones collect sound at equal volume from all sides of the microphone and offer the potential for approaching wider sound fields. The DPA 4060 miniature omni-directional microphones are particularly versatile. I chose them for this project as they allow for a flexible engagement in a horizon of audition. This engagement can approach a wide environmental field or similarly a highly reduced horizon, for example, recording inside a door’s keyhole or small piece of conduit.
This flexibility is critical to the creation of works such as Approaching Nothing as typically, the environment presents both macro and micro horizons of audition that may be of interest to an artist-researcher. The DPA-4060s maintain a very low noise floor and offer a transparent sound, meaning that the recordings are not unduly
74 transformed by the microphone’s character (cf. Appendix 1). They are also small enough to be concealed, as such they can be used in a broad array of situations and environments. This combination of their size and their omni-directional pattern means they can be used effectively for macro environmental recordings within which the dimension of both far and close sound events can be successfully attended, such as those heard on Approaching Nothing between 2:50-5.50. Equally, the size of the microphone means it can be mounted in any direction. They allow for very close, quiet and detailed sounds to be collected, should they be the object of a listening. An example of this can be heard on Approaching Nothing from 15:15-16:45. The Sound Devices Mix-Pre preamplifier (cf. Appendix 2) was used for all recordings made with the DPA-4060s. This preamplifier, which assists in the clarification of sound events within the technological horizon of audition through a gain control structure, is critical when seeking to attain a relational condition between the listener and their microphone. It is also useful as a monitoring device permitting a cross referencing of the audition between horizons to take place.
On six field recordings included on Approaching Nothing, I used the Zoom H2 as both recording device and microphone. I selected the Zoom H2’s front 90-degree cardioid directional pattern for these field recordings (cf. Appendix 3). I used the Zoom for these recordings in Approaching Nothing because it facilitated a particular collection of my listening. For example, during the recordings of the children playing football, heard between 22:10-23:00, the cardioid pattern provided an excellent focusing of the recorded sound events. In this particular recording, the Zoom H2 recorder provided a successful collection of the listening, and reflected the experienced sound events themselves. This particular sonic relation of the sound and its reflection is the object of the listening in this case, and subsequently that of the field recording. The Zoom H2 recorder also allowed for the proximate conditions of the horizon of audition to be realised for some events. For example, a player’s passing by feeling very close with no reflection while other sound events much farther away generate a greater reflection off the stone surfaces of the soccer court.
In the final passage of Approaching Nothing, two other recording approaches are explored. These recording approaches are concerned with the considerations of the affective vibrational ontology I examined in Chapter Three (cf. 3.1.1 pp. 27-31). In addition, I employed recording technologies to extend the range of audition and
75 reveal vibrational phenomena existing in excess of commonplace audition. The first is an ultrasonic recording device, the Pettersson Elektronik AB - D230 (cf. Appendix 4). This device offers access to frequencies from 10-120 kHz and is specifically designed for the identification of chiroptera and some species of insects using high frequency sound that are expressed above the threshold of human audition. The second recording device is a pair of hydrophones, an omni-directional underwater microphone, the Aquarian Audio H2A (cf. Appendix 5). I used these to record the sounds within Vela Luka’s inlet. Both of these recordings can be heard commencing at 28:10. They represent examples of sonic phenomena that exist outside of commonplace audition. In both recordings, the technological horizon of audition shapes the interests held during the listening and subsequently the captured field recording.
5.2 Approaching Nothing analysis
Approaching Nothing is the result of many hours of listening exercises and the execution of other methods outlined in chapter 4. This work led to approximately 18 hours of field recordings being completed during my time in Vela Luka. From these 18 hours of field recordings, 30 minutes and 30 seconds of field recordings are assembled to form this piece. Approaching Nothing reflects a chronology of a day into an evening, within which the field recordings are laid out to create a particular compositional flow. To analyse the field recordings created for Approaching Nothing, I develop a series of temporal segmentations that allow for analysis and are useful when considering the questions outlined at the beginning of this chapter (p. 70). These divisions are from 00:00-12:00, recordings made in the morning, 12:00-20:00, recordings made during the day and 20:00-30:30, recordings made in late afternoon and evening.
Within each of the segmentations, I consider the theoretical and methodological relation between my listening and its capture as field recording. This approach recognises my preoccupations and interests, as well as challenges in approaching materials such as sound in place across time. It also recognises my embodied experiences within those places and how it is that my listening was undertaken with a desire to create field recordings. Through using sensory ethnography, I can analyse and appreciate the sonic materials completed as field recordings that form the creative component of this research project. As outlined in the methodology, sensory ethnography prioritises emergent embodied data sources and also allows them to be
76 positioned in a framework through which art and research can co-exist (Nakamura, 2013).
5.2.1 00:00-12:00 From Dawn
The first field recording on Approaching Nothing is that of the Vela Luka church bells (cf. Figure 1). The bells ring daily at 6am during the off-season from September through March, as well as other times according to daily services and events. The material content of the field recording is the result of a series of listening exercises I conducted on the first two days in Vela Luka. I became interested in a very specific and recurrent pairing of sound events that the bells presented. This pairing, the strike of the bell followed by a quieter rubbing of the leather straps that were used to pull them, became the focus of the listening. It was also a pivotal moment in the consideration of the methodological question can concurrent foci be maintained during a listening? During the preliminary listening exercises, the leather strap that sounded directly following each
Figure 1. Bell Tower. This image is taken from the organic listening position during the first dawn listening exercise.
bell strike was wholly audible only during certain moments. The most focused moments of audition upon this particular object were those at the beginning of the
77 bell ringing sequence, for example 00:30-00:45. I attempted to maintain a focus on the detail of the leather strap but the macro-effect of the bell ringing proved difficult to record especially once the bell started to self resonate following successive strikes. I explored the bell’s striking from a number of perspectives, and recognised that certain positions, for example standing half way between the church entrance and the bell tower, allowed me to ascertain the detail of the strap with greater clarity if my head was tilted significantly upward. I became conscious of how small changes in my position and the way in which my body was held impacted on the possibility of my listening. As a result of my listening exercises, I devised an approach to the field recording based on the embodied experiences undertaken during listening. I required the technologically informed horizon of audition to be realised by the microphones approximately 10 metres closer to the tower at the point where the organic listening was being undertaken.
Prior to the recording heard in Approaching Nothing, I undertook earlier audio recordings and listening exercises. During these exercises, I adjusted my location and that of the microphone. These differing positions were documented and following a process of reflection were used to inform further iterations of the listening. Initially, both the physical centre points of the horizons were shared, as I held the microphone in hand. Upon inspection at my mobile studio space later that day, I judged those field recordings were an unsuccessful collection of a listening. Other positions were trialled and a final position selected through this iterative process. The final positioning, using the 10-metre difference in horizons, allowed for the presence of the leather strap sound events to very closely reflect the listening apparent in the organic horizon of audition. Furthermore, the resonance of the bell was more successfully collected with this particular relational listening condition.
The recording presented between 02:45-06:30, was made on the jetty used for the arrival and departure of people and goods via the Jadrol ferry service (cf. Figure 2). This recording relied on a process of documentation and journaling for its successful completion. The field recording, made on the final morning in Vela Luka, is an edit of a longer durational recording. During the listening exercises conducted on preceding mornings, I undertook a mapping, photography and a journaling timeline exercise, and took note of when certain boats departed and sought to document the periods of activity and inactivity between 6.30am and 9am.
78 The timeline across both days indicated that most departing marine traffic was concluded by 8.30am, with the majority of the departures occurring just before and after 7am. The journaling and documentation (cf. Figure 3) also included a series of maps concerning the carriage of sound at certain locations along the jetty. I marked
Figure 2. Jadrol Ferry Terminal. A satellite image reflecting the original hand drawn documentation map of the field recording site (Google, ND)
Figure 3. Documentation Example. An example of the original mapping diagrams used for the Jadrol ferry terminal, showing markings of listening exercises and final microphone placement.
listening locations at which certain acoustic phenomena fell at, or just beyond the horizon of audition. For example, locations at the island end of the jetty revealed more sounds from the town, such as traffic from the Obala Boulevard and also sounds of early morning industry at the dockyards. In the locations towards the Obala Boulevard, the sounds of boats departing for fishing were reduced, and in some cases they fell outside the horizon of audition due to the increased amplitude of proximate sound events. The dotted line in Figure 3 indicates the fringes of the horizon of audition as it relates to the lowest listening position marked by a crossed circle on the
79 documentation. At the other end of the jetty (the upper section of Figure 3) that extended into the bay, the sound of the road was greatly diminished and the carriage of sound events from the dockyard fell almost entirely outside the organic and technological horizon of audition. The sounds of the boats increased towards the far end of the jetty and other sounds from the opposite side of the bay, such as birds could therefore be more readily accessed.
The average horizon of audition at the end of the jetty, marked on Figure 3 with a solid curved line, stretches much further as the ambient noise floor was low and sound could travel across the surface of the bay with great clarity. In the field recording used during Approaching Nothing, an unexpected dramaturgy presented itself, as a flock of small birds and then a pair of crows entered the horizon of audition and became a central focus of the listening. Their movement within the psychological and technological horizon of audition was captured through a relational listening condition. This field recording successfully reflected my listening of the birds and their movement within place, which was spatially and dynamically represented in the field recording. The sensation in the field recording, as the birds fly away from the centre of the horizon of audition, is one of the most affective experiences of listening completed during the project. I say affective because the field recording activated an intuitive response within me.
The field recording also reflects deeply the piercing of my listening as the birds’ wings moved through the air and how their calls diminished in amplitude, but not in the timbral detail, which was one of the preoccupations of the listening in these moments. My position during this field recording required me to push my auditory capacity as far as I could, focusing with a great psychological and also physiological intensity. I had to ensure my body created as little sound as possible, through incidental movements, and simultaneously be aware of how my listening to such detailed and distant sounds is effected by the minor gestures and physical shifts.
The final recording of the morning market, 06:00-12:00 is the result of a listening exercise undertaken from outside the market place, which was located inside a hollowed out stone building one street back from the Obala Boulevard. My listening focused on the particular sound of the voices as they emerged from the resonant marketplace. The marketplace maintained an unnatural hollowness and timbre influenced by the spatial characteristics of the location, and there was an air
80 conditioner that emitted a particular tonal rhythm throughout the field recording. This recording was made using the cardioid pattern of the Zoom H2. This microphone was selected as it could be positioned low to the ground in a corner outside the marketplace where the reflection of the air conditioner and the sounds of the marketplace were commensurate with the attention being paid to them during the listening.
5.2.2 12:00-20:00 Through Day
The field recordings between 12:00-17:00 are primarily concerned with two questions outlined in the methodology. How does the variation of elements within that listening effect focus? How is it my listening can be focused? These recordings are also reflective of the primary research question of the thesis. The field recordings focus on multiple related sound events; in this case, a variety of insects located close to the roadside and were intermittently interrupted by passing cars. This recording addresses questions of how variations in sound events affect a listener’s focus and shape their ongoing interest and preoccupations (for the proximity of the recording location to the road cf. Figure 4).
Figure 4. Field Recording Set Up. Preparing equipments for the recordings of crickets along a hilly roadside on the outskirts of Vela Luka.
In the case of these recordings, the arrival of the cars created a significant shrinking of the horizon of audition in that the interests of the listening to the point of the arrival of the car, the tiny sound emissions from roadside crickets recorded at close range by the DPA 4060s are wholly lost to the amplitude of the car’s proximity to the
81 listener. I employed this close range recording technique to reflect the closeness of the listening expressed in the organic horizon of audition. In an embodied sense, I was drawn towards the ground physically by these sounds. By moving towards them, their acoustic qualities became richer as more detail of the timbral aspects of the sounds was revealed through proximity. By positioning myself close to the insects, below the edge of the hillside I was about to appreciate a very particular and specific quality of their sonic emissions. Though the sounds were quiet, an intense focus was expressed during the listening, reflected in how I physically approached that place, and developed an iterative response to the horizon of audition hold by the microphone. The detail of the field recording, including the sound of wind moving across the roadside objects in that place, is a particularly accurate expression of the organic listening undertaken.
This recording also responds to the methodological question posed; can a shift in focus occur while maintaining a relational quality to the listening? The arrival of the cars during these recordings was unexpected, because the location was some distance from any homes or farms. During listening exercises conducted before this field recording was made, no cars were encountered. Their arrival however is an example of the unpredictability of field recording and also the importance of being open to the influence of such occurrences. The events that unfolded during the completion of this field recording reflect the theoretical consideration that sound is a state of constant flux and is a complex heterogeneous product of varied materials to which an artist- researcher undertaking listening must be attendant. The critical reflexivity required during the unfolding of this field recording, meant that the recording was more vibrant in spite of the interruption of cars to the focus of listening to that point. I only later appreciated the potential meaning and dramatic implications shaped through a dynamic relation between two extreme moments of audition, the quiet and the loud, in the immediate future of the field recording.
The field recording of the waterfront located between 17:00-20:00 was made using the Zoom H2 recorder located low to the ground at the end of the small pier where a series of boats were docked. There was some wind creating an intensity of movement on the water, which bustled the boats and masts. To achieve a collection of the listening, the technological horizon needed to be adjusted so it reflected both the sound events of the masts and that of the water against the pier. In other unsuccessful
82 audio recordings, the organic listening was not represented in the technological horizon of audition and the masts dominated those failed attempts. There were also issues of interference and distortion caused by the wind on the microphone that created an unsuitable collection of listening.
5.2.3 20:00-22:10 Into Night
At 20:00-22:10, a field recording begins that is directly concerned with the relational listening condition that is at the core of the success or failure of a collection of listening as field recording. In the case of this recording, I managed to capture my listening as field recording despite an earlier unsuccessful attempt to collect a similar sonic perspective. The reason earlier attempts had failed was due to the inability of my listening to be adequately reflected through the field recording. This represented an inadequate relation to the technological horizon of audition being maintained during the recording. The unsuccessful field recordings either failed to collection the dynamic events and the varied amplitudes of these events resulted in distortion or the recordings did not reveal the dimension of place experienced during the listening. Through this field recording the following question is considered: How is it the relational conditions of internal psychological and external technological horizons of audition be made to interact? Of all the field recordings completed during Approaching Nothing, this example represents one of the most complex explorations of listening. Whilst the sonic materials might not be striking or unusual, the dramatic and place relations presented by them are strongly relevant when considering the questions outlined earlier.
The place I explored in this field recording is a street corner one block back from the Obala Boulevard at the far end of Vela Luka where the bay terminates. From this corner, a horizon of audition extended irregularly across a dynamic zone (cf. figure 5). What made this place a particularly challenging environment for my listening was the fact that the sound events I focused on greatly varied in amplitude and occurred from many directions within the horizon of audition.
During the field recording, both horizons of audition expanded and contracted across the duration of the recording. To successfully collect the listening required me to develop a particularly wide angle of acoustic reception from the technological horizon. I achieved a wide, 110-degree difference, using the DPA 4060s, placing a long, low set foam buffer between the microphones to address any phase issues. I also
83 actively approached sounds through physical manipulation of my orientation and that of the microphones. Between 21:15 and 21:45, examples of the dimension of the
Figure 5. Street corner documentation The approximate horizon of audition is noted by the line and the location of the listener marked ‘X’.
listening can be heard, specifically between the appearance of the family and motorcycles heard in close relief against the eruptions of high-speed traffic that emerges momentarily on several occasions from the Obala Boulevard. The sound from the Boulevard is passing traffic framed between the tight boundaries of the buildings on either side of the street leading to the bay. The gap between the buildings contours the horizon of audition, as on either side of the street no audition from passing traffic was possible due to tall stone buildings that acted as strong acoustic filters. The effect of sound events travelling through the narrow architectural space created a unique and compelling, dramatic quality.
As noted earlier, the recordings from 22:10-23:00 focus on a series of sonic events that revealed a particular expression of those events in the place explored during the field recording. This particular recording addresses the question: What is it I am seeking to listen to in a given context and why? What is the affect resultant through these choices? Following a listening exercise (cf. figure 6), the focus of the listening in this field recording was discovered. The physical placement of my body impacted hugely on the affective quality of the field recording. On the side of the quadrangle on which the
84 courts highest wall was positioned, the quality of interplay between sound and place was significantly reduced. The reflective qualities that were collected in the published field recording were not relational to my listening from several recording locations were trialled during the listening exercises.
My listening was focused on the activities of the children at play, specifically the dynamic relation between voices and bodies interacting with the surfaces of the court, and the reflection of sound events within the physical architecture of the courtyard (cf. figure 6). The relation of these sound elements created a specific affective quality, which became the focus of my listening. The affect, related to the counterpoint of the social interactions of the children against the materialist sonic phenomena manifest by
Figure 6. Listening Exercise, Soccer Recording. This image is taken one day before the recording used because that day’s recording was unsuccessful.
that place, was particularly relevant to me as it embodied both dramatic sound events and a relation of those sound events to specific physical architectures. This condition encouraged an exploration of place and its relation to space, that was not as clearly expressed in other sites during this field research.
The association between sound events and their direct physical reflection provided me with a unique and captivating example of the types of sound relations that can become the focus of deeply attentive listening. Through this attention, the affective potential of the listening is realised and in some cased heightened.
85 I address the question of how long can and should a listening be maintained in the two durational field recordings completed between 23:00-28:00. Both of those recordings were fixed on the dynamic relations of small groups of people interacting during the collection of fish from boats at dusk and the preparation of food at a Konoba (Dalmatian cuisine restaurant). They were concerned with the relational listening condition that was closely aligned with the organic and technological horizons of audition. Due to the limited scale of the horizon of audition, with sonic events all unfolding in close relief, a very accurate listening was readily available. These recordings address questions of temporality and how long a listening can and should be maintained. In an embodied sense, these recordings proved difficult not just in terms of the ability to maintain the focus and determination of my listening, but also to remain conscious of my body during that process and how it impacted on the potentials of the listening and resultant field recording. The field recording I made in the Konoba was the longest completed during this research project. I chose to sustain a listening as an opportunity to test this question of temporality in practice. The field recording, which spans approximately 50 minutes, tested my capacities to sustain a focus during listening. It raised questions around the way my listening unfolds in time, specifically how periods of activity and inactivity suggest different intensities of listening across the span of a field recording’s completion.
At the conclusion of Approaching Nothing a pair of field recordings are presented between 28:00-30:30. These recordings explore a sonic phenomenology accommodated by the technological horizon of audition. These recordings were made using two different technologies that facilitate access to the spectral fringes of sound. The first recording was made with an Pettersson Elektronik AB - D230 ultrasonic transducer to record the echolocation of chiroptera (micro-bats), and the second recording was made by the Aquarian audio hydrophone (underwater microphones) to access a variety of marine life and the atmosphere of the bay itself. The chiroptera recordings were initially approached through listening exercises I conducted in the early evening at the dockyard on the edge of Vela Luka’s bay (cf. Figure 7). Though not the original focus of the listening exercises, the chiropteras quickly became a point of fascination, specifically as one species was audible within human audition. This species, which is also heard in the final moments of Approaching Nothing, created precise interactions with that location, not unlike the experiences encountered during the
86 recordings of the children playing sport in the courtyard. The reflective nature of the physical architecture created a unique interplay between the emission of sound events and their rapid reflection.
Figure 7. Chiroptera Listening Exercise. Using the Pettersson Elektronik AB - D230 to uncover chiroptera calling above the range of human audition.
During listening exercises involving animal species such as these, the ultrasonic receiver is a critical tool that accesses a different perspective on the object of listening. Upon using the receiver, I detected a second species of bat using a much higher frequency (approximately 32kHz). This recording represents an important recognition of the role that sound existing beyond audition can play in affective listening. Specifically, the access to these sounds provoked my recognition of the limitations of my aural approach to the world, as well as serving as a reminder to approach field recording with an open ear. Through the technological horizon of audition, offered by the transducer, a spectral appreciation of that place could be achieved. Bringing with it a powerful affect that informed the focus of my listening in this circumstance. Similarly, the recordings made of Vela Luka’s bay by the hydrophones revealed another somewhat hidden sonic phenomena. Whilst the sounds of the popping shrimp, which make up the majority of the focus of the field recording, were audible to the naked ear (underwater), the horizon of audition is expanded by the
87 hydrophones, which greatly increase the ability to explore the notion of place as it exists in environments such as these. The recording, present in Approaching Nothing, is the result of my exploration within the technological horizon of audition. The recording contained particular qualities that reflected my interests sparked within that horizon of audition.
5.3 Approaching Nothing: Summary
This analysis of Approaching Nothing addressed the key question posed by this research project and was concerned with the execution of the theoretical and methodological frameworks described in chapter three and four. As outlined, the practice of listening in field recording is the result of an attentive, agentive engagement in audition. This engagement is rooted in my affective embodied undertaking of listening and relies on a relational condition between two horizons of audition: the organic psychologically shaped listening, and the technological audition of the microphone. This analysis examined a series of reflexive listening exercises, journaling exercises and other methods, which I used to reflect on my listening, the implications of my body during the practice and to shape the realisation of the field recordings that exist on Approaching Nothing. The analysis of my practice reconciled my interests expressed during the completion of the field recordings and the challenges posed during their execution. In what follows, I discuss the emergent theoretical framework of a listener’s listening, and the conclusions and further areas for research emanating from this study.
88 6. Contributions and Conclusion
The primary research question guiding this study was:
What experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording? In this thesis, I described a position for a practice in listening in relation to field recording. Listening, I argued, is an embodied process in which the agency of the listener and their affective capacities are paramount. It is not a practice that is granted, but is rather the result of a profound dedication to audition. It requires attentiveness, and willingness on the part of the artist-researcher to wholly embrace sound materials, and be actively removed from processes of habituation that might otherwise reduce one’s capacities to comprehend the continuous flux of sound in place over time. This comprehensive embracing of sound considers emergent ideas of a vibrational ontology as a means of approaching sound in the absolute; that is sound that exists above, within and below human audition. This framework for listening accepts the broadest possible reading of sound and equips artist-researchers working in field recording with the conceptual tools to seek out new sonic phenomena and situations. Furthermore, it recognises that listening and the field recording that is the subsequent manifestation of that listening, is not ongoing and infinite, rather it is temporal and enacted by the artist-researcher, moment to moment. In summary, my research indicates the following:
• Field recording is an episodic, embodied, relational practice dependent on the artist-researcher embedding themselves temporally in a field of audition. Field recording is a proximate, qualitative encounter, one that is apprehended through affective means and concerns itself not with the super-representational aspects of sound, but rather the sub- representational.
• This emergent theory of the listener’s listening outlines the framework through which the act of listening, as it pertains to field recording, is understood. This particular approach to listening requires the listener to heighten their attention and embrace multiple aspects of the embodied relationship that listening requires. This position is an intermediation of the artist-researcher, sound, place, and technology.
89 • Sound, as the object of listening, and thus field recording, is an ongoing, chaotic flux through which a listening interacts. The listener, as an agentive practitioner, carves out a unique listening that reflects their interests and preoccupations, from any number of other possible listenings in that place and time. Therefore, even if the place and time of listening were shared, no two artist-researchers’ experiences would be the same.
• Place is not merely the static, physical characteristics in which sound unfolds. Rather, it is a dynamic and shifting production that reflects the listener’s affective relation with environment. Place is as an affective atmosphere and a lived-in zone, that is framed within both space and location
• A listener’s listening is affectively shaped by the senses, and acutely tuned to the resonances of place in time. It accepts sound in the absolute, reflecting the opportunity for sounds, and non-sounds that exist beyond everyday audition, to have affective potential for the listener.
• Field recordings are the collection of a listening that unfolds in a relational field of audition that contains two horizons of audition. The first horizon of audition is the organic, interior and psychological listening of the artist-researcher. The second horizon of audition is forged by the prosthetic ear of the microphone and is accordingly external and technologically bounded. These two horizons of audition necessarily overlap in a field recording. Field recording is the manifestation of a listening that occurs temporally in place. The relation established between the two horizons of audition determines its success or failure.
In what follows, I outline the emergent theoretical framework of the listener’s listening. This framework directly relates to the concept of listening as it is expressed by an artist-researcher during field recording. It considers an exacting state of agentive, affective and embodied listening executed by an artist-researcher that provides the shaped, sensory materials from which a field recording is completed. This completion requires the listener’s listening to be enacted through a specific relational listening condition. This condition recognises the listening of the artist-researcher in
90 place and time, and also the implications of the technologies they use. Explicitly, this relational listening condition seeks to formalise the a priori understandings that exist in relation to the listener’s organic, psychological listening and the capacity of the prosthetic ear of the microphone. These understandings, which assume an aligned relation between listener and the technology they use, are problematic and require a rigorous framework to be developed if their relation is to be properly understood.
I address the research question, which asks what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording; through the framework of the listener’s listening. The consequent relational listening condition that exists within a listener’s listening, considers the requirements for how the unique experience of listening, created by an artist-researcher, can be successfully completed as a field recording. This emergent theory explicitly considers the practice of field recording as it relates to the artist- researcher up until the point at which a recording is presented to an audience. The findings are reflective of the practices and considerations required for an artist- researcher to address their unique listening. The framework also establishes a position from which an artist-researcher can critically examine the collection of their listening in field recording.
6.1 A Listener’s Listening
The findings of this research project culminate in a proposition for a new theoretical framework that I refer to as the listener’s listening. This framework relates to field recording and has relevance to other creative recording situations and other listeners. It concerns listening that is agentive, embodied and relational. It seeks out a unique perspective within the flux of sound in place, and across time. The framework is informed by my practice in field recording over the past 15 years, and was developed and executed in the creation of Approaching Nothing. Specifically, my practices inform the recognition of the conditions required for the success of the listener’s listening through a relational arrangement shared between the audition of the listener and the technology employed to complete the field recording of a listening.
When considering the research question, what experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording a listener’s listening represents the discrete recognition of experiential elements and their relationship to an artist-researcher undertaking a field recording. Such a listening is agentive and attentive to affect. The
91 listening is not an ongoing or usual state; it requires an attention and agency that cannot be maintained indefinitely. In this sense, the listening is a durational undertaking of the listener’s preoccupations and interests in sound, place and time. The listening, as a creative act, is forged by a commitment to an intensive execution of audition that reflects wills and desires. The listening is accumulated during the unfolding of sound events moment to moment, and also seeks an affective engagement with sound.
This affective engagement is unique to a listener in those moments in place, and is informed by the collective practices, socio-cultural backgrounding and political concerns that a listener has accumulated. The listening is also the product of temporality and the understanding that sound’s possible meaning, especially as it relates to field recording, is revealed in its immediate future. By reveal, I mean the sound, as temporally understood events, requires an artist-researcher undertaking a listener’s listening to be attentive not only to the unfolding flux of sound moment to moment, but also the cumulative dramatic forms emergent in the field recording. As the artist-researcher collects the field recording, its drama and dynamics represent an accumulation of sound events in place across time in inter and intra-relation with one another. The corresponding accumulation of sound events produces possible meanings available to the artist-researcher. Thus, the meaning of the field recording is only revealed in the immediate future of the sound events themselves. The individual sound events must coalesce in time and place to forge the field recording; one event itself is not enough. An example of this is present in the Approaching Nothing work between 12:00-17:00. This recording of the roadside insects is radically repositioned by the arrival of a passing car. The unexpected event creates a new dynamic in the field recording not initially anticipated. The meaning then is forged from affective and resonate forms of the accumulated sound events.
This corresponding listening between individual events and the unfolding drama of a field recording asks the listener to maintain an acute attentiveness to their listening. The listener must continuously attend their investigation, focusing upon the chosen points of interest in the horizon of audition as they emerge, evolve and decay. An example of this attendance is found on the field recording located between 20:00- 22:10 on Approaching Nothing. The objects of listening in this recording are in a rapid flux in terms of their relation to place and their amplitude. I was required to maintain
92 an unfaltering focus to achieve a suitable relational condition for the successful completion of the field recording when negotiating this flux. This perspective, revealed in the field recording is invested with, and shaped by, my interests and preoccupations. It reflects a type of listening appreciates how sound evolves in place over time, and the listening act itself. It demands the willingness of a listener to be attentive and willing to constantly address the way their listening is executed.
A listener’s listening then bears the marks of the agentive capacities of one who is seeking to realise a distinctive and creative auditory perspective within place across time. As a framework, the listener’s listening, is not so much about the extraction of information as it is about creating a unique, embodied and affectively shaped listening with its collection as a field recording. This uniqueness means that two listeners may share the same place and time, but what they experience and focus upon in a given horizon of audition is never identical. The listening is shaped by the abilities of the listener who considers acquiring particular types of listening as a skill which is refined and informed by physiological as well as affective, psychological concerns.
Listening, as it is understood in this research project is deeply grounded in affect. Affect relates to a listener’s agentive navigation of sound phenomena within a horizon of audition by asking that listener to be attentive to the resonances and forces that can be lost in habituated engagements with the world. It allows the listener the capacity to undertake a listening that is open to the influence of sound events that present themselves within a given horizon of audition. Bearing in mind that sound events exist as spectral traces and can influence in ways not always understood, but affectively sensed. Examples of this include low and high frequency sounds that sit at or beyond the fringes of human audition, but create impacts upon objects and things in place. This affective listening is both attentive and driven, in that it seeks to express a certain kind of agency informed by the political, aesthetic and creative interests of a listener. More importantly, this position allows the listener to be fluid and responsive to changes that emerge from the flux of sound. This fluidity allows the listener to guide and shape their listening according to a reflexive engagement with affect which allows them to approach the multiplicity of possible sound events existing within any horizon of audition. Their actions in place and time determine how the possible affective condition for the collection of the listening is made possible. This approach is specific to each listener, as the enacting of their listening, and their desire to create a
93 field recording directly addresses the preoccupations and interests of their unique listening in those moments.
The undertaking of a listener’s listening must unfold in stages. It involves preparation, for example through listening exercises, as well as the listening itself. The preparatory phase involves a period of listening into place and pushing the sense of audition out across time. It considers the dynamic relations of sound in that place. Furthermore, this preparatory phase readies the listener, in a phenomenological sense, because it shifts their engagement with audition towards investigation and away from the everyday attitudes under which they commonly operate. Those preparations are not the listening itself, but an intuitive process that marks the intent of an artist- researcher to begin the execution of their practice. It is the sensual data gathering that informs the way the listening may be undertaken. Listening merely to sound events singularly without considering their ongoing relation in place across time is not enough when approaching this practice. The listening required for field recording exceeds the appreciation of singular sound events in its desire to be creative and affective. A listener’s listening then is about the eradication of the habituations of everyday audition that reduce the possibility for a listening to be rigorously attentive and free from the filtering that usually shapes the dimensions of our auditory engagements.
In summary, a listener’s listening is a framework that concerns agentive listening and is rooted in affect. The listening is attentive to the political, socio-cultural and aesthetic interests of a listener and temporally defined. It is not an ongoing state, but rather is reflexively undertaken and is a process of being constantly attuned during the moments of the listening within place. The listener’s listening is a creative positioning where an artist-researcher can be concerned with an absolute approach to sound, and furthermore with a desire to realise this approach to listening through field recording. The listening must focus both in the moment, as sound events unfold, and simultaneously embrace the entirety of the field recording’s dramatic dimension, the meaning of which is an accumulation in time and exists in the field recording’s immediate future. The listener’s listening exists in excess of everyday audition. It is an embodied undertaking of an intense auditory investigation forging a listening uncovering an affective relation unique to that listener who seeks to collect that listening through the field recording. For this collection to occur, a relational
94 condition must be established between the two horizons of audition; the organic and the technological.
6.1.1 Capturing The Listener’s Listening
The successful completion of a field recording is achieved when an artist-researcher creates a relational condition between their horizon of audition and the auditory horizon of the prosthetic ear of the microphone. This emergent finding considers what is required to collect a listening as a field recording. Specifically, this condition is contingent on the artist-researcher being able to devise a means through which their listening can be analysed and understood. As previously noted (cf. section 3.3, p. 42), this study concerns itself with an artist-researcher’s agentive and affective listening. This research project considers this question, of how an artist-researcher can equip themselves to critically analyse the collection of their listening. The reception of the field recording by an audience is not within the scope of this research. For a successful completion of a field recording to occur a number of qualifications, emerging from the theoretical framework of the listener’s listening, must be met. These relational conditions are both technological and philosophical in nature and I detail their relevance to this emergent framework in the contextual and theoretical chapters of this thesis.
6.1.2 Listening Across Two Horizons
To understand how the relational listening condition is expressed as a consequential function of the listener’s listening, it is critical to define and analyse the two horizons of audition that are required to collect a listening as field recording. This analysis (cf. section 3.3, p.45) recognises that for the collection of a listening to be successful, the artist-researcher’s preoccupations and interests must be reflected simultaneously in the both horizons of audition.
The relational listening condition, as I refer to it, recognises that two horizons of audition are always necessary to be recognised during the practice of field recording. The first horizon is that of human audition, in the case of field recording, the listening is concerned with the agentive, affective psychologically informed listening of the artist-researcher. It is a psychological listening, when shaped by the agentive and affective position of the listener. It is an expressionist listening, when it is empathetic to the listener’s desires and creative compulsions. The second horizon is that of the
95 technological audition device that shares none of the agentive interests expressed in the human horizon. It concerns audition as a pure receptacle within which sound is captured but not considered. It is through these devices that collection is made possible, but in order for it to be useful in realising a listening, the technological horizon must be made to serve the agentive desire of the listener. As outlined in the contextual chapter, this relational condition is the product of the recognition of a shift in the understandings of our audition, brought about through the development of the prosthetic ear of the microphone. The relational listening condition therefore attends to these two horizons and allows them to be brought into relief with one another. The greater the relief between horizons, the greater the opportunity for a listening to be completed as field recording.
Technology in isolation, as demonstrated through the analysis of the history of phonography (cf. section 2.1, p.8), is not enough to adequately address the complexities of listening as it pertains to creative endeavours such as field recording. Rather, for a listening to be collected, a framework is required through which that listening can embrace and overlap the two horizons of audition present during field recording. To this end, I have proposed that for the completion of a listener’s listening to be successful, it requires a relational listening condition to be developed and consequentially deployed as a procedure during field recording. This relational condition is a philosophical and practical nexus that is required to align the artist- researcher’s listening, expressed through the listener’s listening framework, and the technologies used to realise the field recording, which becomes the lingering manifestation of an artist-researcher’s listening.
For a field recording to be successfully achieved, the artist-researcher must occupy these horizons with equal commitment and understanding. The failure to comprehend the importance of one horizon or the other reduces the opportunity for the listening to be successfully completed as a field recording. As outlined in chapter five (cf. 5.1.1), this concern was evident in the preliminary listening and recording exercises I undertook in the completion of the field recording of children at play during Approaching Nothing, which is heard between 22:10-23:00. This alignment provides the criteria through which the successful completion of a listening as field recording may be understood.
96 Thus, the relational listening condition seeks to align these two horizons. It provides a structure through which artist-researchers can analyse the success or failure of their listening as it is collected through the practice of field recording. It also considers the critical nature of the role of the prosthetic ear as a device that facilitates a listening being collected and therefore being able to resonate into the future. This condition is one then that is concerned with the possibilities of a listener to be creative, and to use their ears not so much as tools for extraction of information, but more as tools of production. It asks the listener to practically consider what is it that is being listened to/for within each horizon of audition, and ultimately how that listening might be successfully completed as field recording. Importantly, the condition required to align the horizons of audition may mean differing physical locations are required for the focal position of the organic and technological horizons. Specifically, the points from which the horizons of audition reach outward toward one another may not be physically the same.
As each horizon maintains a differing engagement with the dynamic sound events around them, the ways in which they might be brought together to complete a field recording is not necessarily about each horizon physically sharing a focal point. This differentiated focal point is demonstrated in Approaching Nothing during the field recording of the church bell that commences the piece, where the organic and technological focal points of audition were located 10 metres apart. The focal points are relational to the desires of the listener seeking to realise the field recording. Thus, the centre point of the two horizons may be considerably different, reflecting the demands of each horizon required for the collection of the listening as a field recording. The use of listening exercises and preliminary audio recordings prior to the commencement of the field recording, allows the artist-researcher to ensure their listening is adequately reflected in both horizons of audition.
The relational listening condition has grown in importance with the acceptance of field recording as one of the streams of sound art. It opens the way for recognition that as artist-researchers working with sound, agentive and affective listening plays a critical role in the conception, creation and execution of audible (and other sonically concerned) artworks. The condition invites listening to be contemplated in excess of the technical function of perception that is hearing, and highlights the innate creative possibilities of listening as understood through these emergent frameworks. It asks the
97 artist-researcher aspire to challenge and raise their audition to a meta-position that pushes well beyond the functions of quotidian listening.
6.1.3 Two Horizons Two Directions
In recognising the relational listening condition, it is critical to recognise that any relation is not fixed in direction. It is not the case that one horizon of audition must override or occupy the other at all times. Rather, this relational condition, framed within the listener’s listening, is a continuous agentive investigation rooted in affect. Therefore, this condition is one in which the artist-researcher is reflexive and responsive to new discoveries that might arrive in either horizon of audition. An example of this continuous agentive investigation is represented in the ultrasonic recordings of chiroptera found at the conclusion of Approaching Nothing, and is representative of the reflexive processes outlined in the methodology chapter (cf. section 4.2, p.58). As sound events occur, their expressions within either horizon can create affect in the artist-researcher and influence the ongoing interest expressed during the listening. The dimension of the sound experienced through one horizon can affect the dimension of the listening, and accordingly the artist-researcher’s will and attention must remain fluid during the completion of a field recording. An emergent event or timbral quality in one horizon may result in the discovery of a new focus within one or either horizon, which in turn may become the dominant preoccupation of a field recording. A relational listening condition must be accepting of the capacity of one horizon of audition to influence the other and through doing so affect the artist-researcher.
In any field recording, where the listener is attentive to the two horizons of audition, interests may move within either horizon or equally may shift between horizons during the completion of a field recording. A listener must remain fluid to the influence of the relational listening condition. Just as the artist-researcher seeks to align their listening, by drawing the technological audition of the microphone into their horizon of audition, so too can the microphone draw the artist-researcher’s attention toward its horizon. This reflexive fluidity, which may result from the interaction of the two horizons of audition, is important as it recognises an artist- researcher must be equally attentive across both horizons of audition.
98 This attendance to the horizons accepts then, by default, that the two horizons maintain different dimensional relations of the same sound events. This dimensionality of the sound, offered through these relational horizons is a rigorous and iterative position that the artist-researcher can use, as it provides them with a reflexive tool through which their experiences during listening exercises can be contrasted before and during the completion of a field recording. Through the development of their practice in field recording, the artist-researcher can employ the differing dimensions between each horizon of audition as a gateway through which a phenomenological shift in their interests and agency as listeners can occur.
6.1.4 New Acoustic Phenomenologies
The listener’s listening embraces the concept of sound in the absolute, a term referring to all sounds including those above and below commonplace audition. Accordingly, the relational listening condition used in the completion of a field recording must provide a position through which this comprehensive embracing of sound is facilitated. The hydrophonic field recordings of Vela Luka’s bay, found at the conclusion of Approaching Nothing is one such expression of absolute sound as it relates to field recordings. These sounds are not readily approachable through everyday audition. The relational listening condition allows a listener the opportunity to reach beyond the commonplace auditory facilities of their audition and discover inter and intra-relational connectivity, which is created through the technological and organic horizons of audition. It recognises the ways in which listening is open to unexpected discoveries and demonstrates the reflexivity of the artist-researcher in practice. Accordingly, this perspective reveals an increasingly broad reading of sound found in contemporary field recording practices. Specifically, the technologically formed horizon of audition can either be recognised as extending the possibilities of audition into zones previously undiscoverable or in excess of the organic horizon of audition. Examining this horizon from a practice-led perspective, the technological auditory devices available to artist-researchers can radically expand or contract the possibilities for listening. What might be only dimly audible in an organic horizon of listening, or be inaudible but nonetheless affective to how a field recording is completed, can be brought into a heightened auditory focus through the technological capacities of the microphone.
99 To illustrate this point, I return to the hydrophonic recording of Vela Luka Bay, at the conclusion of Approaching Nothing. This field recording was the result of a discovery made within the organic horizon of listening. Whilst I was in the water of the bay, a sonic spectrum of audible life underwater was very present. The nature of the sound though, was greatly influenced by how my physiological audition functioned in the atmosphere of the water. Specifically, this atmosphere produced a very particular dimension to the way sound events unfolded, and whilst I could approach certain areas of sonic interest, my physical capacity to maintain the listening (expressly, my abilities to hold my breath) were incredibly limited. The following day, I returned with a hydrophone and the listening I was able to experience was far in excess of what had presented itself on the previous day. The opportunity of the technological horizon of audition opened my organic listening and created a deep sense of affect that shaped my desires to complete that field recording. By using two hydrophones at approximately 12 metres apart, and by adjusting the depth of the hydrophones during the listening exercises before the field recording was undertaken, an entirely different depth of the listening ensued. In contrast to what was experienced underwater in the organic horizon of audition, the technological horizon revealed a deeper and more dynamic sound world, one in which individual sound events could be listened too more closely, revealing the sonic dimension of that place. Without the relational listening condition as a means of successfully capturing the listening as is required when undertaking field recording, sound in the absolute cannot be approached meaningfully.
6.2 Conclusion
The thesis is the result of research I have undertaken into listening as it relates to field recording and is comprised of two main sections. There is a written exegesis and a related creative piece, Approaching Nothing, a field recording work (30 minutes, 30 seconds) recorded in Vela Luka, Croatia. As outlined in the previous chapter, the creative work exists as a culmination of my practices in listening. In this thesis, I examine the research question:
What experiential elements are involved in conducting and completing a field recording? In this research project I contextualised this study through an exploration of the development of field recording as a practice. I examined the history of phonography as the starting place from through the sound recording emerged and thus field
100 recording commenced (Kahn, 1999). From there, I traced the development of field recording as a creative act, and examined the development of various practices that concern themselves with the ways in which a listening, through field recording, might express a deeply affective, unique exploration of sound events in place across time. I detailed how field recording has moved beyond the narrow phonographic interest in objective ethnographic documentation to increasingly forge a creative practice (Filene, 2000). In recognising the role of listening as it pertains to field recording, the agentive and thus creative capacity of my practice in field recording was realised. Field recording recognises both the subjective nature of listening and the desire to realise a listener’s listening through field recordings.
Following the contextual chapter, I provided a theoretical framework that established the means through which I approached my practice in field recording. The theoretical framework was grounded in phenomenology and developed three key theoretical areas relevant to this research project. These areas are interrelated and form an integrated means through which an artist-researcher can account for practices in listening and subsequently field recording. These relational concerns were (a) sound in the absolute, as the naked nature of what a listener may perceive; (b) place, as the location in which sound exists and within which listeners interact and; (c) listening, recognising both the human capacity of listening and the opportunity for appreciating other phenomenon, made available through technological means.
The methodology worked to move from the theoretical framework to the practice as it was applied in this thesis. To address this need for translation between theoretical and practical, I developed a methodology that employed a practice-led strategy at a macro level. Practice-led research encourages artist-researchers to explore the ”entire range of communication expression” relevant to their project (Gergen & Gergen, 2000, pp. 582-83). I employed a reflexive approach within this strategy. Reflexivity, the methodology’s meso-concept, encompassed by both theoretical and relational frameworks, allowed me to integrate theoretical, practical, and methodological concerns within the research project. At the micro level, the methods of sensory ethnography and the emergent sound specific ethnography were used to provide detail to the methods.
In the analysis chapter, Approaching Nothing, the creative work was examined. The methods and theoretical implications of the frameworks outlined were used as a
101 means of critically analysing the processes and decisions made during the completion of the work. The piece was analysed with a specific focus on the discrete field recordings contained within the composition. This approach allows the focus to remain solely on the decisions of listening as they pertain to the focus of this research project, that being field recording.
In the previous section of this chapter, I described my contribution to new knowledge. This contribution can be summarised as a new theoretical framework applicable to the practice of field recording. I title this theoretical framework the listener’s listening. This emergent framework of the listener’s listening reflects an exacting temporal state of agentive, affective listening that provides the conditions for the successful completion of that listening as field recording. This theoretical position is one that directly relates to the concept of listening as it is expressed during field recording. Critically, it considers the agentive, aesthetically aware condition under which a listening is undertaken. This collection of the listening as a field recording requires the artist-researcher to embrace a specific relational listening condition that recognises not only their listening, but also the implications of the technologies they use to collect that listening as a field recording. Explicitly, this emergent relational listening formalises the a priori relational condition of the listener’s organic, psychological listening, and the capacity of the prosthetic ear of the microphone with a desire to collect listening as a field recording.
6.3 Further Research
As a practice-led project, this thesis is concerned with a reflexive investigation of my practice as an artist-researcher. However, the scope of research is relevant to a wide array of investigations shared by other artist-researchers who are interested in exploring the conditions of listening. As this research project considered listening as it pertains to the practice of field recording, up until the recordings are communicated with an audience, the research is open to a number of future explorations.
The first future research area is how an audience encounters the listening of the artist-researcher’s field recordings. The development of the listener’s listening as a framework for the collection of listening through field recording creates opportunities to analyse and explore the reception of this framework. A qualitative analysis which, for example, compares points of focus and other factors of the listener and audience
102 would reveal new ways in which a listener’s listening might be further theorised. Specifically, questions around issues of habituation and the requirements of training and attendance to sense such as audition could be extended beyond those explored in this thesis. An audience’s engagement with field recordings is a complex and rich area of research that taps into other fields beyond the scope of this study, including psychoacoustics, theories of communication and other socio-cultural enquiries.
The exploration of sonic affect, outlined in the theoretical framework of this thesis (cf. Berlant, 2011; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010), is a research topic that warrants further investigation. Sound’s ability to function in ways that operate outside commonplace emotion, and in the zones outside of everyday awareness, is aligned closely with the current developments of affect theory. The operation of sound, and also non-sound, through materialist and phenomenological frameworks has implications for the way that affect theory could be developed. Sound as it functions as the raw material of affect (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010), invites greater explorations into the implications of sound that exists at the fringes of phenomenology. Questions such as how it is that the material matter of sound and vibration might affect the body and the mind are presently underrepresented in readings that concern themselves with qualitative analysis. Furthermore, research focused on the affect relations between the listener’s listening expressed through field recording and the affective encounters of potential audiences is also a critical area that could be developed into the future.
In terms of the completion of field recordings and their presentation to audiences, the relation between the two horizons of audition is one that requires further investigation. In this research project, the practice-led framework directly addressed my explorations into this relational condition. It could however be valuable to examine these relations more closely, drawing out a quantitative as well as qualitative reading of the interactions between each horizon of audition. Through mapping that process of exploration in time and place, a greater understanding of the desires of listening could be developed and through doing so new technologies be explored. These technologies, such as more exacting or responsive microphones or the development of some kind of intuitive feedback system allowing for a range of potential adjustments to the technological horizon of audition to be made
103 instantaneously could greatly benefit those working in fields such as field recording, film and other sonic media.
6.4 Concluding statement
The development and theorisation of the listener’s listening, and the consequential condition of relational listening that exists between the organic and the technological horizons of audition in any field recording has greatly advanced the understandings I carry forward through my practice. Specifically, this project has allowed me to formalise and make apparent the a priori aspects of a practice in listening as it relates to field recording. I have been able to consider how listening as an agentive, affective embodied practice influences, shapes and ultimately forms the materials from which field recordings are completed. Moreover, I have been able to establish a means through which I can analyse how the successful collection of my listening can be understood through its manifestation in field recording.
104 Appendix One https://www.manualslib.com/manual/744164/Dpa-4060.html
105
Appendix Two http://cdn.sounddevices.com/download/guides/mixpre-d_en.pdf
106
Appendix Three https://www.zoom-na.com/sites/default/files/products/downloads/pdfs/E_H2.pdf
107
Appendix Four http://www.batsound.com/inc/files/pdf/D230UsersManual.pdf
108
Appendix Five http://www.aquarianaudio.com/AqAudDocs/H2a_XLR_manual.pdf
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