Would we hear differently, would we listen differently if we ("humans") were not beings that walked upright? It's quite plain to me that we see differently because we face forwards and move for the most part forwards through space.
I'm not sure I'm so sure about sound and verticality: our ears are on the sides of our head making our hearing a combination of two quite different sonic qualities even if we hear a single source.
Our ears don't face forward to the extent our eyes do perhaps for this reason sound is immersive. We feel as if we are surrounded by sound but we are constantly aware of directing and focusing our visual attention somewhere in particular: in fact it is difficult to look at nothing in particular although in some ways that is the state I am after in a lot of visual art.
I noted in my site analysis that we are bathed in sound and I would like to take off from this as a fundamental aesthetic goal as well: I am after an immersive quality in all my work so far.
I would not be the first person to point out that our ears do not close like our eyes can: hearing - which is always hearing in and from a particular situated, perspectival, embodied and finite position that no other perceiver can exactly share, absolutely unique at that moment where we are in the world - is in some senses more intimately connected to openness.
Our hearing already has something like the future "in its sights" or, better put without an unnecessary visual metaphor, our hearing "listens out" for what is coming, our hearing is anticipatory in ways that our sight is not always or even often: in hearing we are outside ourselves and that is perhaps why a sudden loud noise is a more effective scare than a flash of light.
It's the thunder that really spooks you, not the lightning even though the latter is obviously more dangerous.
Looking at monochrome paintings, slowly changing coloured lights (in a James Turrell installation for example like the one outside the NGA), or just the way natural light changes (again the source of the effects Turrell achieves in his work) are the closest visual experiences I can think of where we become aware of a slow process of transformation which is what happens in most sonic environments. I try to think of what I tend to hear as the constant drone of the sounds (other than the grinding poprocks sounds the decaying bones of my neck make whenever I move my head) around me as forming a ground, or rather, the space itself, which is the thing that is in common (or is fairly regular or at least does not suddenly change) in my normal experience, that space is the ground of my experience in it.
Space is thus always a resonant body in some way or to some degree. I think this is one reason I was excited to try some different synthesis techniques that would play with the ways that hundreds of parallel narrowpass resonant filters could be used to extract pitch data from sounds with non-tempered pitches such as the sound of currawongs: as if the virtual space of the filters was echoing with the precise frequencies most prominent in their songs. In the original raw recording there are at least two currawongs bouncing back echoes of the same three note motif: the delay in the real place was taken up as a formal principle for most of the remainder of the piece where multiple delay lines and filters capture small fragments of the field recordings and transpose them, delay them, multiply them, feed back into the system etc. This is also one reason why both the currawongs and the bat flying past are presented first of all in "raw" form and then after a delay, the variations upon that sound start to dominate the rest of the texture.
In so many ways this whole project is now about that event: how it took place against a "ground" if you like of currawong calls, passing cars, the sounds of other distant birds, footsteps on gravel and the mechanical drone of the lawnmower at the golf club next to the park; how it is in some ways the only unrepeated event in the field recordings I made. In some ways the piece I presented in class midway through the semester was a kind of virtuoso solo for an "instrument" made from up to 90 separate layers of transformed versions of that one beating of wings past the microphone all being overlapped and mixed and crossfaded and panned. One big reason why I tend to play with reverb settings and modules a great deal in my work is because of the ways one can make a completely artificial space transform itself over the course of a piece, closing down, becoming distant or close etc. In the "sketch" version each of the tracks were recorded with slightly different settings for reverb in terms of size, decay, brightness or complexity and so on. I wanted to create the sense of multiple superposed worlds at the climax.
This carries over into my earlier work where I do the same with a totally synthetic sound source and it's something I want to explore further. I think space and spatialisation in multichannel sound projection is the way I need to go in the future.
There is definitely a sense that the slowly changing unbroken sound is something that ends up representing a kind of ground, to the extent that large or significant changes, say one of pitch, have an enlarged importance, coming to act as the presentation of a different ground, as if the listener had moved, or the previous ground was opened up to reveal a new ground underneath or revealed that the previous ground was in fact a veil over the newly opened ground.
A lot of my soundwork this semester was about figure and ground, about how sometimes to transform one into the other
This is perhaps why when I painted the intention was always to make a place from out of a field with small incidents: the drone is a similar kind of presentation of a ground without figure, the drone is literally a series of variations on a ground, a series of puns on the idea of the ground bass. The presence of the drone, or a slowed down progression of different drones but always timed so the individual pitch lost its audible or memorable relations to the one that preceded it or followed it: this pays tribute to an attempt to use the way our hearing is anticipatory as a material for composition. For this reason, I tend to time events lately by when I start to lose the ability to remember what or when the last event was.
We hear in our sleep but cannot see. Hearing, hearing one's own voice for instance, has often been taken as the very sense of "interiority", the intimacy that is implied by the concept of "consciousness" or "mind" has therefore an acoustic dimension. Derrida calls this "phonocentrism" but I'm not sure that's such a bad thing anymore.
If we think of consciousness, especially a rational one, as being something like talking to oneself without opening the mouth, then that would also be because we can hear ourselves speak when we do speak. Our voices sound very different heard from "within" with its echoes, resonances, resoundings grounded in the embodied and situated selves that we are. Hearing our own voice reflected back to us in space becomes a source of "spiritual" experience in various sacred spaces (not excluding the concert hall).
And when we hear a singer are we not also hearing an imaginary or virtual version of a possible voice for ourselves speaking to us as we sing along in our heads?
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