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