Listening Diaries
Headphone Installation
Listen as Podcast on: iTunes | Spotify | Soundcloud
Listening Diaries is an online headphone installation exhibited as a podcast.
The work focuses on exploring urban areas and situations through the mediumship of the Listener from within a first-person perspective.
Impromptu walks guided by intuitive compositional processes are recorded with microphones placed inside the ears for the most realistic recording possible.
Unlike conventional stereo recordings, this process captures sound after it has been sculpted by the very specific shape of the human ear.
This dynamic is crucial in allowing the brain to form an idea of what is going on.
As sound passes through the ear, it is filtered in a way that encodes information about many key aspects of the environment such as its size, your location, the relationships of persons and objects within time and space, the speed at which things are travelling and so on.
This realtime analysis of the soundscape works in collaboration with other sensorial and cognitive processes which combine to form the tangible experience of reality we take for granted at any given time. But how do we come this understanding, and to what extent are Listening processes involved?
Consider the following example:
Imagine you just entered a crowded restaurant, you hear the familiar sounds of chatter and the occasional clink of cutlery and the pouring of drinks. Someone asks you if you have a reservation.
How do you know this person is talking to you?
How do you even know you are in a restaurant at all and not a bowling alley, or in a park?
Now imagine, you enter the same situation, however this time you are blind.
How can you tell if you have entered the restaurant?
At what point did you transition from an outdoor space to an indoor one?
When you sit down at the table you become aware of how many people there are as you realise how noisy it is.
What are the people talking about? Do you care? How do you know what to pay attention to? Is it possible to follow every conversation at the same time even if you wanted to?
A moment later you remember a conversation with a friend you had earlier in the day that made you very upset.
What are you Listening to now? Is it the sound of the room, or your thoughts? How can you Listen to your thoughts if they contain no sound?
You hear footsteps come up behind you and without thinking about it you begin to turn around as you feel a sudden sensation of anxiety and anticipation.
The footsteps are then followed by a voice which seem to confirm and heighten your emotional state. The voice carries only the one word “Hey” yet you can tell the speaker is sad rather than happy.
Why?
In just these brief moments, a complex interplay of decisions, questions and challenges are carried out almost instantaneously. The results of which define the experience as well as contribute to your identity, agency and sense of self.
Within a real-world setting, our senses are convolved as they work in tandem. So much so that when you take that first bite into a delicious meal, you may not experience your senses at being seperate at all, and nor are they in actual fact.
Yet it is this convolution of sensorial information that makes it difficult to understand some of the underlying mechanisms that contribute to its whole.
By displacing the auditory content from its original context, the moment is bleached of its relevant supporting meta-data as all other sensory information has been lost.
In this event, it is far more difficult to determine things we usually take for granted in the moment, such as where we are or what we’re doing.
Our sense of Listening therefore is provoked and accellerated into a more active mode, as it is tasked with challenge of creating meaning from noise.
This process of displacement suggests a compelling framework in which we are better able to study issues connected to Listening and Environment and to interrogate the complex relational dynamics that arise from the two.
Listening Diaries seeks to challenge our understanding of everyday life and the ways in which we experience it by re-presenting them, turning the everyday into something extra-ordinary and allowing for shared introspection and reflection in an immersive and dynamic way.