Month: January 2025

“More often than not, urban living causes narrow focus and disconnection. Too much information is coming into the auditory cortex, or habit has caused narrowed listening to only what seems of value and concern to the listener. All else if tuned out or discarded as garbage.” ~Deep Listening – Pauline Oliveros

I have been taking field recordings as I make my way around the city to better understand and observe the aural environment, along side my meditation/deep listening practice. I have also been making use of the h5 as I travel to record my thoughts and the particular thought below seems relevant.

Over the past few months, I have been trying to spend time every day at home or in Victoria park meditating, or deeply listening to my surroundings in attempt to reconnect with my natural environment, which has stemmed from my work in the Specialising and Exhibiting unit. Overall, since beginning this practice, I feel an improved sense of awareness of my surroundings and a greater appreciation for the small quiet moments in life. As someone who is always looking for new sounds and sources of inspiration, I usually have music playing wherever I go, but I have found through my meditations a lessened need for constant aural stimulation. A celebration of the dynamic range in life, something I feel many cultures have lost.

I have found, with my new ways of listening, that I have become more receptive to the underlying inspiration that exists everywhere in the world. I feel the importance of polar forces; we cannot truly appreciate the light without darkness, warmth without the cold, a scream without the whisper, life without death.

“Ways of listening are often prescriptive and offer strategies ad techniques. They give us of entry to new zones of understanding, to new ways of hearing that may otherwise be far away lands; they offer means to experience the other.” ~The Listening Artist -Daniel Scott-Cumming

“Recognising the dynamic interplay of polar forces to enhance the richness of the work.” ~The Way Of Effortless Books – Joshua David Hester

“If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment.” ~Deep Listening -Pauline Oliveros

“What if, in our quest for solutions, we not only look to nature for inspiration but also invite nature to co-create and help guide our endeavours?” ~Asking Questions Of Nature – Patrick M. Lydon

The reading I have done so far for this project has been incredibly interesting and is helping me broaden my perspective on my relationship with music and environment. However, the more I read the more I feel I am straying away from a topic I can explore in its fullest with the time allowed for this hand in.

I have been wanting to explore what we are listening to and how our aural environments affect us, including things like short form content, advertising, noise pollution or listening to music in headphones for prolonged periods. How these things disconnect us from our natural environment is of interest and how these things, in my view, lead to a break down of community on top of the individualisation and alienation already caused by capitalism and the atomised lifestyle of the West. My reading has been pulling me more towards the relationships with oneself, their practices and the feedback between performers and audiences in an improvisational sense. It think going back through Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening will be useful.

“Music can communicate nothing to unprepared and unreceptive minds” -Music, Culture and Experience -John Blacking

“Each habit might seem small, but added together, they have exponential effect on performance” ~ The Creative Act -Rick Rubin

“As soon as the listener learns how to open himself totally to it. It carries him away to himself” ~Through Music To The Self -Peter Michael Hamel

“It is possible that playful participation can result in peak musical product, but the critical factor is that music is not held at a distance and objectified but instead lives as a process into which all members of the group enter, experience and enjoy” ~ Free To Be Musical -Lee Higgins, Patricia Shehan Cambell

As I read, think and have conversations with my peers more questions have risen. I feel the potential topics are starting to show, so I wanted to share some of these thoughts and quotes here as a sort of check point for my ideas.

How can we bring about change to a system that seeks to silence the oppressed?

In an age where most people have a voice thanks to social media, who or what are we listening to?

When does sound become music?

Don’t consume more than you create!

The transformative power of habits on practice/ The importance of discipline in a technological age?

Are we spending too much time listening to over compressed audio from small loud speakers? (appreciate silence)

“science is a search for truth that is somehow embedded ‘out there’, where art is a search for truth embedded within ones soul ‘in here'” -Structures and Synthesis ~ Mark Fell

“You and your instrument are one. It’s almost like there’s no separation. It’s like you’re at one with the universe” -Improvisation, Creativity and Consciousness ~ Ed Sarath

“It is through communing with nature that we move closer to our own nature” -The Creative Act ~ Rick Rubin

Recently I have been thinking a lot about the form of audio papers in a more holistic sense: what is an audio paper? what does it mean to use an audio paper over any other format?

My intention by asking myself these questions and really mulling them over is to find a question that I can use as a stepping stone into research or as a base for my own audio paper. I think there are many possible routes that I can take so it will be interesting to see where my research will lead.

Looking beyond the personal, how can we make our work relate more universally?

The nature of communication/ How can you get your point across when the form impacts the work?

How can a format that has not fully formed concern the mainstream?

Is asking to make an audio paper is like asking someone in the 1800s to make a film?

What are we listening to?

People have been experimenting with recorded audio for many decades, what does it mean to experiment in an academic sense?

“When Practice becomes fixated on goals and end points, it distorts itself.”

Structures and Synthesis ~ Mark Fell

This is my first time hearing about an audio paper and I have lots of ideas and lots of questions (most of which I don’t think I will get answers to).

During class I was thinking about how sounds can be so emotive and affective, how we can use it as a tool to enhance other media with score or sound effects, or create worlds of our own.

Here are some more ideas/ questions that may be developed in the future?

How to make something sound alien? (cinema)

Using sound design to enhance points in ways that wouldn’t be possible with written text

How sound can be used to craft a world, immerse you in a place or character?

How can score be used to change the emotion, feeling or context of a scene? (affect)