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Notes Week 1

Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art - Salomé Vogelin

A philosophy of listening as an aesthetic practice is difficult in part because of the philosophical emphasis on seeing and aesthetic practices. Hearing is subsumed into seeing. sound chased away by image. "Sound fleshes out the visual and renders it real; it gives the image its spacial dimension and temporal dynamic."

Challenges with a philosophy of sound:

  • Ephemeral invisibility
  • Seeing always happens from the distanced meta position (away from the seen) whereas hearing happens among the heard
  • Hearing is full of doubt (so good)
  • There is no place where one is simultaneous with the heard

    • "A philosophy of sound art must have at its core the principle of sharing time and space with the object or event under consideration." This emphasis on sharing time and space is challenged by the computer screen and web which, in my opinion, seeks to flatten space and alienate the listener/seer and compress/explode time.

    Based on that tension there are some ideas to be explore around tracing physical distance and time between the source of a sound and its ultimate presentation to the listener on the other end. How can you render the the continual production of listening and inter-subjectivity.

  • A sound file that decays the longer it has been hosted or more times its been listened to
  • A sound that is modulated by the distance from its origin/server to its listener/client, measured in any way
  • A sound that is only available at certain times, under certain spatial conditions

    • Explore listening as an act of engaging with the world. Hearing is not "pure", they are ideologically, aesthetically, culturally determined. Working towards as listening in spite of this determination – suspend genre, purpose, art...

    Discussion of listening as an act that builds its own reality and does not construct the reality that is described by genre, purpose, etc. This is sort of like the "to read or not to read" wall text internal debate.

    Seeing vs hearing again: seeing seeks knowledge though stability (maps, borders), stabbing in the dark, hearing finds the heard. View from above or down below. A mode of walking and wandering.

    How to develop tools that help wandering, that are anti-map. The web can be very wander-y at times.

    Experience of sound as temporal relationship, the auditory is generated by listening.

    Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Cezanne paints from doubt not certainty. But the viewer views his work with certainty not doubt.

    Notes on my project

    A few sounds in a shifting relationship.

    Giving a simple web-y physicality to mp3 files. Where they are affects them.

    No tools for syncing.

    I would like to tackle self-uploaded files next.

    I think there is a ton of room to explore here:

  • Synthesis and multiplayer. Each person on the site's cursor is a single frequency. Positioning them generates sounds together
  • Blocks "emit" sound as waves or signals which are picked up by other receiver blocks. Visually programming a soundscape not with wires and sync and control, but with proximity, space, and interference.