Category: Aural cultures hand in

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.

Place, composition and subjectivity

What makes these things important?

• Place
• Presents
• Voice

This week session is the consideration of space and our place within it. For example we see some woods as a particular place but what do we recognise in the spaces? The awareness of the space changes with ones intentionality.

The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World by Murray Schafer (1977)

• In the book Schafer brings light into the importance of paying attention to the visual and sonic environment around us
• He notes that modernisation has changed our sonic landscapes, cars, machines and amplified technologies have flooded our everyday life
• He talks about a major concern in the noise pollution and the loss of subtle sounds
• Its a great insight too look into how the world around can be digested sonically

Questions to think about when listening audio

• What makes a place sound good?
• How does sound create a sense of place?
• How are you involved in the production of place?
• What makes you feel out of place?
• How to record a sense of place?
• How do you effect place?

Recording in a space changes the mindset of how its listened, its important to look into this.

Reflection

This session made me think differently about how I move through and listen to places. Ive never really questioned how much of place is something I actively help produce rather than something that just exists around me. The idea that my awareness shifts depending on my intention really stood out once I started listening more carefully, the space changes.

Schaefer’s ideas helped me understand why this matters. His concerns about noise pollution and the loss subtle sounds feel even more relevant today. We’re so used to constant mechanical noise that we barely notice it anymore, yet it’s shaping how we experience the world. It makes me realise that recording a place isn’t just about capturing what’s there, its about acknowledging what has been masker or erased by modern sound.

Overall this session helped me see sonic environments as something active relational and subjective. It reminds me that listening is a form of engagement and that understanding a place through sound requires patience, curiosity and a willingness to notice things that normally disappear.

Week 6 reminder of class crits for the audio paper

What fiction do I know?

A lot of the fiction that I digest is through books, I read a lot as it calms my mind before going to sleep. I love to get lost in these stories and tap into a fictional world so far from my own. Not only books but when I listen to music, music allows me to tap into fiction from what the music is doing or going and puts me into another headspace.

It’s also good to note sounds ability to trick and deceive us and make us question our own reality. Sound is sometimes misleading, as a piece of bacon can sound like falling rain when listened to quietly, foley allows that effect too take place within film.

Foley

On previous blog post I’ve talked about foley and the creative expression that comes with the art. It’s created in a studio outside the actual shoot, we talked about how a lot of the nature documentary’s don’t take audio from the actual shoot as animal can be dangerous and hard to get close to with a mic. This is a great example of why foley is sometimes deceiving and it can flip the perception of someone watching, it shows how we are constantly mislead sonically.

Listening exercise

We listened to a piece of audio with our any visual context and we had to figure out what is what. The audio without context was strange because I could hear humans talking but not in a language I understand. What I wrote down in my notebook: “Feels like a big room and from the point if view from a fly or insect flying around the walls”. The word the popped into my head at the time surveillance.

Turns out the audio was from this little fella. A type of mimicking bird that is near human civilisations that copies their voices. I was wasn’t far off!

Do I use voice in my practice?

In the past I have really used voice as the forefront for a lot of my university projects. The last hand in for year one was a piece that works around a narrator of some old flats that got demolished. I like the voice in my work as it is a power driver.

How can voice change you?

The voice can carry so much with it. I think the voice as a medium is what grips us to the art work, I find it to be a useful tune to create art with. I like the memory and reflection you can add with voice.

• The Walkman effect is an essay concerning the rise of people wearing Walkmans when walking though a space.
• This essay came out just when Walkmans where on the rise, and it shows some good insight into how listening technologies can shape everyday sound experiences

Key Concepts

The key concepts that I noticed when reading this essay where how portable listening was reshaping public spaces. It shows how the listener creates a bubble of audio, that’s a private soundtrack that overlays into the public world, which in turn changes the simple act of walking into a performative art. I think it’s important to notice how much this had become a norm within the modern world and how our own playlists or music can shape the way we interact with public and private spaces.

From a sound artists perspective

When listening to your own music in a public space, I think you start to notice how sound maps into the space around us. This gives us a spacial layout of sound that can feed and change from where we are and what music we are listening to. Also, it takes note that when we listen to the same song in a different environment it can change the way it is heard and vice versa. I think another big part of this for me is the sonic isolation that accuses from listing in these formats. It could be an idea as a sound artist to redesign sound in a way that can make it important to engage with people environment. Maybe the challenge now is to find is too suggest new ways to privatise the world sonically. For those of us in sound arts, Hosokawa invites us to think about how sound shapes our space and environment.

How listening shape our relationship to the environment?

I find that personal listening reshape our own environments, we live through and filter out our surroundings with the sound we choose to listen to. Depending on what we are listening to it can make the city feel alive, calming or even sad. The downside of this is that it makes us loose touch of the natural acoustic ecology in the world around us and it in turn looses its texture that gives this place its identity.

Is the “Walkman effect” a positive or negative change?

Personally I would say it is both. These is some positive waves of being able to be the author of your own world and to use this creative empowerment and emotional regulation. However the downfall of this is that it isolates listeners and makes them oblivious to the acoustic ecology that goes on around everyone. I think it sits on that fine line, on one hand its great to give you feel free. However as a sound artist it can contradictory as it takes you out of the communal experience of being in a certain place.

We met Mark and did the usal discussion about who we are and what we are interested in. Mark talked about his enjoyment for this work and the type of studies we will be doing. “Its very driven creativley through an audio paper, it has a lot of critical thinking.” Im looking forward to trying to use critical thinking more in these classes. Ive realised that I can often take things at a very base level when it comes to information, and have notyiced that other seem to be able to break things down more. This is definitley soemthing I would like to work on.

What we are working towards

The assignment breif talks about an audio paper and a compressed concept plan and finally some meaningful blog posts that show my research and work towards my final hand in.

Form of the lessons

The first half of thre lesson we will focus on themes and forms of art and theory. The second half will focus on our activities, ideas and planning.

What do sound studies and aural cultures mean?

• Exsploring through sound
• Theories and frameworks for patterns you recognise
• Ethnography (the study of people, cultures and their habits)
• Phylosophy of sound, how we think and listen to sound
• Identifing agreements via sounds
• Exsploring other cultures through sound

Talking about what sound culture is, some see it as a extreme reaction against the allaged domination of the Western eye. To fight back agaisnt the Western forces of culture.

Audio Papers

Audio papers are very indifferent to essays and written work, this is because they can add more depth into what we talk about. We looked a specific example of an audio paper on seismograph, which are carving a path into the audio paper universe. More Than A Back Ground by Francisco Mazza which an ex sound art student is about the sounds that where emitted in the high street of Peckham Rye. It’s good insight into the how the council tend to demolish cultural hotspots to make flats or new builds and how the noise that represents the community is being destroyed.

When listening we break it down into four questions

• What are the core ideas and questions?
• Whats the argument being developed?
• What are the sound selections and sources?
• Does it have meaningful editing and composition?

The ongoing battle of articulation with these audio papers

How do we get our point across that’s the main issue, the freedom of articulation is a useful tool to add depth. However, it can be the papers downfall because it can become misleading. It’s important not to get ahead of ourselves, to know what’s important with what you say and the editing. Audio papers integrate academic discourse with sonic elements like music, sound effects and media snippets.

My initial idea

In week ones session I had a look into my minds eye and the thought of tuning came to mind. The thought of having ti tune an instrument but also tune into your environment and the equipment we use to do this.

I think that tuning in for me is a personal discovery because of my own fondness of tuning into sonic sound. I always see people walking around London with headphones on and usually to block out the noise, it has accrued to me the importance of tuning in in my generation.

Heres an initial mind-map of random thoughts and questions that spring to mind when I was brainstorming