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

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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

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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:

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• 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.

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• 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

TheListener’sListening................................................................................................ 1Keywords .............................................................................................................................iAbstract .............................................................................................................................. iiListoffigures ...................................................................................................................iiiStatementoforiginalauthorship.............................................................................. ivPublicationsduringcandidature.................................................................................iAcknowledgments........................................................................................................... ii1. Introduction.............................................................................................................. 11.1 ArrivalatAudition.............................................................................................................21.3 ArrivalAtFieldRecording ..............................................................................................31.4 ThesisOverview .................................................................................................................41.5 ApproachingNothing ........................................................................................................62. ContextualReview .................................................................................................. 72.1 TheAgeOfPhonography .................................................................................................82.2 Thepracticeoffieldrecording ................................................................................... 122.3 Pre-echoes:Towardscontemporaryfieldrecording.......................................... 132.4 PresqueRienouLeleverdujourauborddelamer........................................... 162.5 Aworldsoundscapeofenvironments...................................................................... 182.6 Fieldrecordinginthepresent .................................................................................... 202.7 Fieldrecording:Summary ........................................................................................... 212.8 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 223. TheoreticalFramework ......................................................................................243.1 Soundphenomena .......................................................................................................... 25

3.1.1 TowardAnAffectiveVibrationalOntology ............................................................. 273.1.2 TheMatterOfSound.......................................................................................................... 323.1.3 EverythingVibrates ........................................................................................................... 333.1.4 Timbre ..................................................................................................................................... 363.1.5 SoundSummary .................................................................................................................. 38

3.2 Place .................................................................................................................................... 383.2.1 ProximatePlaceandPerspective................................................................................. 413.2.2 Place,AtmosphereandAffect........................................................................................ 423.2.3 PlaceandProduction ........................................................................................................ 443.2.4 Place:Summary ................................................................................................................... 44

3.3 Listening:Introduction ................................................................................................. 453.3.1 DifferentUsesForTheSameOrgans.......................................................................... 463.3.2 ThePhenomenologyOfAListener’sListening ...................................................... 503.3.3 TheListener’sListeningInFieldRecording ........................................................... 52

3.4 Summary:TowardsTheListener’sListening ........................................................ 534. Methodology ...........................................................................................................554.1 Practice-LedResearchStrategy ................................................................................. 554.2 Reflexivity.......................................................................................................................... 584.3 SensoryEthnography..................................................................................................... 60

4.3.1 SensoryEthnographyAndPractice-LedResearch............................................... 614.3.2 TheEmergenceofSoundSpecificEthnography.................................................... 63

4.4 Methods.............................................................................................................................. 664.4.1 Listeningexercises ............................................................................................................. 66

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4.4.2 AudioRecording .................................................................................................................. 694.4.3 JournalingAndDocumentation .................................................................................... 694.4.4 AnalyticalStudioPractice................................................................................................ 70

4.5 Methodsandmethodology:Summary ..................................................................... 705. ApproachingNothing............................................................................................715.1 ApproachingNothing:Overview................................................................................. 72

5.1.1 ApproachingNothing:TechnicalOverview.............................................................. 745.2 ApproachingNothinganalysis..................................................................................... 76

5.2.1 00:00-12:00FromDawn.................................................................................................. 775.2.2 12:00-20:00ThroughDay............................................................................................... 815.2.3 20:00-22:10IntoNight ..................................................................................................... 83

5.3 ApproachingNothing:Summary ................................................................................ 886. ContributionsandConclusion ..........................................................................896.1 AListener’sListening..................................................................................................... 91

6.1.1 CapturingTheListener’sListening ............................................................................. 956.1.2 ListeningAcrossTwoHorizons .................................................................................... 956.1.3 TwoHorizonsTwoDirections....................................................................................... 986.1.4 NewAcousticPhenomenologies .................................................................................. 99

6.2 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................1006.3 FurtherResearch...........................................................................................................1026.4 Concludingstatement ..................................................................................................104AppendixOne .............................................................................................................. 105AppendixTwo ............................................................................................................. 106AppendixThree .......................................................................................................... 107AppendixFour............................................................................................................. 108AppendixFive.............................................................................................................. 109References.................................................................................................................... 110

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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

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.

Signature: Date: 28-08-2017 QUT Verified Signature

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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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

10

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

11

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

12

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

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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

14

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 Horspiel, 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

15

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 Horspiel, 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.

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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

17

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 Horspiel, 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

18

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.

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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

20

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

21

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

22

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?

23

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.

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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

25

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

26

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

27

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

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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).

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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

30

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

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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

32

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

33

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-

34

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

35

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.

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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

37

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,

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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

39

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

40

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

45

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.

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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

47

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.

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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,

49

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

50

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

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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

52

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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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“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).

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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-

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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

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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

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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

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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

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(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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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

Figure 1. Bell Tower. This image is taken from the organic listening position during the first dawn listening exercise.

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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.

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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

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

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.

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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

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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).

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

Figure 4. Field Recording Set Up. Preparing equipments for the recordings of crickets along a hilly roadside on the outskirts of Vela Luka.

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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

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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

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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

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

Figure 5. Street corner documentation The approximate horizon of audition is noted by the line and the location of the listener marked ‘X’.

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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

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.

Figure 6. Listening Exercise, Soccer Recording. This image is taken one day before the recording used because that day’s recording

was unsuccessful.

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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

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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.

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

Figure 7. Chiroptera Listening Exercise. Using the Pettersson Elektronik AB - D230 to uncover chiroptera calling above the range of human

audition.

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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.

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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.

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• 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

100

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

101

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

102

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

103

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

104

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.

105

Appendix One

https://www.manualslib.com/manual/744164/Dpa-4060.html

106

Appendix Two

http://cdn.sounddevices.com/download/guides/mixpre-d_en.pdf

107

Appendix Three

https://www.zoom-na.com/sites/default/files/products/downloads/pdfs/E_H2.pdf

108

Appendix Four

http://www.batsound.com/inc/files/pdf/D230UsersManual.pdf

109

Appendix Five

http://www.aquarianaudio.com/AqAudDocs/H2a_XLR_manual.pdf

110

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