Month: December 2025

This week I have been developing my ideas for the audio paper thats due in next week and the more I think about it the more I realise how much tuning in is already part of my everyday life. Not just in a musical sense, like tuning an instrument, but tuning myself to environments. adjusting, filtering, absorbing, blocking out. It feels personal but also strangely universal, especially living in London where everyone seems to move through sound with their own kind of armour: headphones, playlist, podcasts or complete disengagement.

What Im interested in

I want my audio paper to explore the act of tuning in as both a conscious and unconscious behaviour. There are sounds that ground me like bird noise hidden out of sight, light bits of chatter drifting from somewhere I can’t see, doors opening softly, the gentle hum of a space that feels calm. These sounds make me feel present, almost held.

Then there are the sounds that overwhelm me like busy roads, sirens bouncing off concrete, overcrowded stations and that tight rush of bodies moving too fast. These sounds don’t just fill space, they take it. They change me physically like shorter breaths, quicker steps and a lesser awareness of myself. I tune out to cope.

I want to use these contracts as the structure of my audio paper. The sonic environments that open me up and the ones that shut me down.

Ideas from Quantum Listening

Reading Pauline Olivero’s Quantum Listening added a lot to this idea. The text talks about listening as something bigger than hearing something expanded, intentional and almost mediative. She suggests that listening alters the listener, that the act itself can reshape perception if you allow it. This really clicked with me. It made me think that tuning in isn’t just absorbing sound, it’s choosing how to meet it.

Quantum Listening also talks about the relationship between attention, awareness and imagination. That helped me realise my audio paper doesn’t need to just show recording. It needs to explore how my body and mind respond to sonic environments and how listening becomes a personal practice of navigating the world.

My audio paper aim

I want to create something that brings the listener into that relationship. The comfort of soft sounds and the tension of loud ones and the delicate shifts the body makes cope with both. A piece about environmental sound but also emotion sound. A piece presence, protection and sensitivity.

My Structure So Far

• Part 1: Sounds that hold me, quiet environments, birds, light chatter, open sonic spaces
• Part 2: Sounds that push me away. Crowds, traffic, mechanical noise
• Part 3: What it means to intentionally tunes in or to tune out
• Part 4: Reflection through Quantum Listening, how attention becomes practice

Reflection

Working on this idea had made me realise how much listening shapes my sense of self. Ive never thought of tuning in as an act of care before but now it feels like a way of paying attention to the world without letting it swallow me. Quantum Listening reminded me that perception isn’t fixed, its elastic, changeable and alive.

This project is pushing me to notice the small sonic details that I normally pass through and to recognise the emotional weight that certain environments carry. Tuning in, for me, is becoming a way of understanding not just the places I move through but the person I am inside.

In this session we began to explore how listening can reveal hidden structures of power, identity and experience within everyday environments. With my audio paper in Aural Cultures idea coming into fruition we looked today at expanding my ideas for my Tuning In audio paper. I plan to create an audio paper that investigates how environments speak, how they shape us and how we in turn shape them through acts of listening.

Lauren Rosati

We were introduced to a series of artists and theorists whose work examines how sound becomes political. Lauren Rosati’s question ‘What sounds have been left out of media history?’ felt especially relevant. It made me think about the environments I move through everyday and how certain sonic elements remain unheard simply because I’ve been trained not to listen. Christopher DeLaurenti’s work with Occupy Wall Street recordings also highlighted how sound can act as a direct documentation of collective resistance. I found his description of asynchronous chanting and driving rhythms fascinating proof that even disorderly sound can carry political meaning. The lecture also touched on acoustic justice, something I hadn’t properly considered before. The idea that listening practices can either reinforce or challenge inequality stuck with me. It reframed listening as something active and ethical rather than passive.

Activity

Sound walk, listen to noises that represent power. We were told by Mark to roam the LCC campus and tune into noises that could be associated with power.

Front reception

• The beep of student cards at the barrier
• Security talking
• The heavy opening and closing of gates
• The hum of the front desk
• Footsteps of lost students not sure where to go
• Quiet conversations
• Bags rustling

Power indications

• Security barriers acting as a literal threshold of permission
• Signs on the barriers saying that you can’t enter this way or another way
• Staff positioned behind a desk as a symbolic statement of control

Cafe

• Coffee machines hissing and steaming in loud bursts
• Dense layers of conversation
• Music played overhead

The lecture then shifted into a more practical territory and how to generate research questions and how to structure an argument through sound. I noted down some useful tips. begin with with a clear introduction outlining aims then break the paper into one or two main sections, draw from sources and constantly ask why.

Reflections

This session helped me clarify what direction my audio paper might take. Im interested in exploring how everyday environmental sounds reveal subtle power dynamics. Sounds we ignore or don’t pay attention to might quietly effect our behaviour. My aim will be to tune into the unnoticed layers of an environment and examine what they say about about control. I want to create something that not only presents recordings but asks the listener to rethink how they navigate the space around them.