Filed under: words
I presented a concept which I take from deep listening, a rather counter-intuitive one, called focused listening. Sometimes strategic, such as location based practices (like the street corner), other times unplanned or spontaneous, focused listening can be a great way to de-familiarize or re-familiarize sites and sounds. The familiar/unfamiliar dialectic who’s symptoms include “Oh, I know that,” or “what was that?” serves to provoke strong desires to focus listening; perhaps driven by epistemological judgement, or by knowledge-as-power, knowing and categorizing sound is often the first move we make everyday. It rules our time both awake and asleep. As expected, many of the students found that there were many sounds that were around them that they had never heard before. And voices as well.
This de-familiarization of everyday sound and speech also provoked a different response, one that I found to be at once visceral and also quite conscious. Students began to become self-aware of their focusing, in a strange way, by training themselves to focus on different sounds, the ear as thinking-microphone became a new organ or bundle of organs. Using the binaural microphone kit created by Mike Rosenthal from the Tank and eyebeam, there became an extreme awareness of the body: quite simply, where the head was positioned determined the imagined recording. “Where should i put my head?” The binaural experience forced us to look at ourselves as microphonic prosthesis, our bodies extensions of the recording apparatus.
In some ways, D+G have addressed this in their claims about cinema as optic and aural, but I think that the tension between the conscious and unconscious acts of hearing stimulated by quantifying, materializing, “getting”, forces a new kind of focused listening. Recording as focused listening, focused enframing, when extended from the body, not only performs the deep listening suggested by oliveiros, but also a de- or re- famliarization with the body or the organs without a body.
We are reminded here more of the discussions of experimental radiophonics than of recording per se. Gregory Whitehead’s wireless imagination articulates this on the plane of performativity. The schizo-feeling of machine as body, body as prosthesis, seems to invert traditional modes of spatio-temporal negotiation. When I speak into the radio microphone, and broadcast, I imagine my listeners, receiving the call, and my voice is without body, extended. And so we find Whitehead creating the sound-image of the voice as prosthesis.
But couldn’t this paradigm be dialectically opposed such that the ear-brain-imagination triad is the prosthetic imaginary of the recording apparatus? With binaural microphones in particular, we are encouraged to ask where to place my body so the artificial ear, extended from my ear, can focus. How can I best simulate the work of my own brain, my own unconscious, for the benefit of my imagined community of future listeners?
This extension of the body as instrument of the apparatus is at once aligned with film, with the aural-optic reception of the apparatus of the projector onto a screen. But eyes are different than ears, and recording is different than listening.
So the stragies of listening deployed by my students upon everyday sound were both conscious and unconscious acts of focus. A relearning of the body is required. Perhaps this tension and desire to focus, while being forced to acknowledge this same focus, is why oliveiros feels that
Babies are the best Deep Listeners.
Babies listen to everything, not just because babies have a certain openness to the sounds that surround them and come from them, but because learning of the body in relation to sound-recording is being opened as well. Is it as if the early sound-memories (a la Bergson) are the grooves that are written into us. After, we use ourselves as the microphone to extend it to other time-writing devices. Focused listening through recording opens us to both internal recording onto the body and imaginary, as well as the physical writing of our bodies into machines.
you can see more photos from the presenatation