My audio paper has passively conceptualised itself to follow through a day in someones life as they live in London. I plan to track as they wake up, consume social media, take the tube, pass by construction and spend time in the park. My intention is to highlight our ‘audio diet’, what or aural environment consists of and the effects it has on us.
I have spent countless hours throughout this project adjusting my ways of listening and have found myself in awe at the inspiration that can be drawn from the world, but also disheartened at the fact no-one really seems to pay attention to it. Since I have started listening in this new way I have also come to realise how oppressive the modern soundscape is. I believe there is a large portion of what we hear in the city to be considered ‘noise’ that our brains have to spend processing power to filter out, alongside the hundreds of social media posts and other short forms of content most of us consume everyday. As AI begins to filter into these platforms it isn’t hard to see why people have been calling these videos ‘brain rot’ for a reason.
Advertisements are something else I think plays a large part in this noise, we cannot seem to escape them, now with our wearable tech, phones and other smart devices, companies can beam product placement at us no matter where we are; where we look, especially as regular people become tools for advertisers through sponsorships deals. Everyone and everything is calling for us to over-consume.
This over-consumption and noise, in my opinion, are the main causes of isolation and disconnection between ourselves, our community and our environment. ‘Deep listening’(2005) has been a primary text in my reconnection with the environment as she writes, “One ought to be able to target a sound our sequence of sounds as a focus within the space/time continuum… Such expansion means that one is connected to the whole of the environment and beyond.” (Oliveros, 1989, xxiii)
I hope to highlight this theme of reconnection with recordings of various parks around the city, as I believe nature and its diverse soundscapes to be a crucial step towards building a better relationship with our surroundings. Daniel Scott Cummings ‘The Listening Artist’ (2017) is another text that has been helping me manoeuvre through these thoughts, he writes:
“Ways of listening are often prescriptive and offer strategies and techniques. They give us strategies 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.”
I have been making recording with a H5 microphone as I travel the city, capturing any environments I find particularly abrasive or oppressive. In contrast to these recordings are scenes from Victoria park to highlight, what I believe to be, more positive aural environments. The H5 has been a great tool, allowing me to quickly capture and share my thoughts as I move through London and its various soundscapes. These thoughts are scattered throughout the piece and I have chosen to keep them as unedited as possible, as my way to resist the shortening of our collective attention spans.
I came into this project looking for ways to be more present in the ‘here and now’, but through the process of all my reading, thinking and meditation, I have arrived at a much broader; a much greater issue at hand, one which all of us are grappling with in one way or another. I do not believe it is possible to tackle all the thoughts I wish to discuss in this 10 minute time frame, especially given the abstract leaning form of my audio paper. But this topic is one I care about deeply, as our attention is being colonised by corporations that fundamentally do not have our best interest at heart and seek out only one goal, profit. So I’m sure that I will return to this discussion once again, if the opportunity does arise.
I do not think I have really come to a conclusion throughout the my time working on this project, and for a while, it was stopping me making progress as I was thinking I needed to have a grand point with a big narrative and a call to action to finish off the piece. But I have realised life is not always about drawing conclusions but, learning, building on what previous generations knew and sharing what we do know, now.
References
Oliveros, P. (2005) Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. iUniverse.
Scott-Cumming, D. (2017) ‘The Listening Artist: On Listening As An Artistic Practice Beyond Sound Art’.
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