Case Study
In this text, I want to to explore some ideas about the affective in listening to space and how through practices of attentive listening it is possible to understand it as a dynamic entity that modulates our perception of both it and ourselves. I will address the topic on two levels: collective or group listening on the one hand and individual and intimate listening on the other. I will primarily use personal experience examples to describe sensations, emotions, perceptions and sonic ideas that prompt me to reflect on this subject.
Collective Spatial Listening
Collective listening is undoubtedly an experience that enriches our ability to perceive spaces. In "Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?" by Linda Ruth and Barry Lesser, a temporal arc of thousands of years is described during which humans initially gathered to listen to and create music together. At that stage, there were no divisions between musicians and audience; musical creation and listening were a collective and horizontal situation. Gradually, segmentation occurred, in wich some became musicians and others became the audience.
From then on, listening spaces were configured in fixed forms such as theaters, concert halls and auditoriums. We could say that listening shifted from being a collective activity to an individual and passive one. What interests me here is understanding collective listening as a way to actively connect with others and with space. In that practice space becomes a dynamic agent that is activated and activates through joint exploration. Listening attentively with others is a powerful learning experience that can provide us with information about the space and how we perceive it when we are with others.
During my early encounters with free improvisation and experimental music I participated in several sound walks with acoustic instruments and sonic devices, that is, improvised walks of listening and sound creation where space, sound and listening develop around the group and movement. I myself organized several sound walks, sometimes with instruments and other times practicing Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening.
The first time I participated in a collective sound walk was near an abandoned train workshop in the city of La Plata, Buenos Aires. The walk took place on a pleasant spring night. We started at the edge of the workshops and walked through tall grass, illuminated by just a bit of light. The space unfolded like a map that we built by touch; at each stop or pause, we all tried to discover some novel aspect of the territory by playing clarinets on rusty metal barrels, throwing heavy metal sticks onto cement floors in vast warehouses or simply listening to our own breaths during the walk.
We reached an outdoor spot where there were some flickering lanterns and about ten meters away, a large white wall. One of the musicians aimed his trombone at the wall and played a short, forceful note at high volume, like a small sonic explosion. The sound returned to us almost immediately, but with enough temporal distance to perceive it as an echo. It returned transformed, like an imprecise sonic hologram. We were struck and waited in silence before making further attempts. We discussed it while having beers and continued experimenting until we were bored. This experience was etched into my sonic memory because I understood that space and the experience of listening are filled with secrets that allow us to break the linearity of sonic space as we know it in everyday listening, revealing hidden sonic trajectories where the apparent nature of sound breaks and we hear it behaving in unheard ways. That trombone, played in that way, at that distance, pointing in that direction, duplicated into a sound with unique characteristics that could not exist in another space. The roughness of the cement of the wall, the surrounding silence and the collective attention focused on listening all created a different sense in our perception, positioning us in a perhaps more empathetic form of listening, where we can understand the listening point of others and at the same time extend our own listening to others. Thus, collective listening and space connect, creating traces in our sonic memory and expanding the possibilities of how to interact with space in unique ways. This makes me think that space is not a fixed boundary where sonic experiences are deposited and returned, on the contrary, it is dynamic and modulates our perception and often expands it.
I previously mentioned Pauline Oliveros, her Deep Listening method is an excellent way to approach sonic space and her practices are often focused on group experience. One of these practices is the slow walk, in which a group of walkers is asked to walk extremely slowly and at each moment, try to walk even more slowly. I have done this experience in various places: a street in the city, a theater stage, a house patio in front of a mountain in Córdoba and the patio of my own house. The group situation, whether with two, three, or ten people, sensitizes us in a different way than if we were alone. In all these experiences, I perceived how my anxiety and that of others (due to the demand of walking slowly in a hyper-accelerated world) transformed into a connection with the space we were walking through: the minimal crunch of leaves underfoot, distant footsteps of passersby fading away, cars appearing and disappearing in the silence, bursts of bird songs, the breath of others meeting my own, the effort to listen and the pleasure of doing so blend together. In this slowness, the space unfolds slowly and activates as a vibrant entity where everything is in motion. We can see how sunlight bathes a small flower on the sidewalk and each of its petals receives light in different ways. Everything changes speed around us and we simply see the space unfold and happen as a continuum of events that exist at a different speed. Here is where I believe we can connect with space in more powerful ways, allowing ourselves to be affected by the micro-sounds happening around us.
Spinoza's work, Ethics, presents a theory of affects, illustrating how bodies influence and are influenced by one another through an endless chain of interactions. These affects produce both positive sensations, which empower action, and negative ones, which constrain us. Could we allow ourselves to be influenced by our surroundings to improve our listening? I believe that group listening enriches our connections with others, as we become receptive to others' attentiveness and the way a space comes alive when we occupy it.
Individual Spatial Listening
The affective nature of spatial listening unfolds gently in our memory of sonic experiences. As a child, I remember how it felt to hear secrets whispered in my ear. At some birthday party a friend's voice whispering a confession or something totally absurd and funny. The closeness of the voice imprints a warm saturation in the air, the music and voices at the party in the background, the plastic tablecloth falling on the sides of the table. This created a micro-private and intimate enclosure existing within another, in this case, the house where the party was taking place. This sense of closeness with the sound enables us to understand space as a linking medium between people and affective knowledge. The sound of a secret represents a blend of auditory sensitivity, trust and a sense of belonging that makes listening a special event. Space mutates into an entity that brings sounds and people closer and enhances their interaction. A hiding spot under a table at a birthday party, a space within another.
Such experiences necessarily include the whole body in the act of listening. To reach this level of perception, one must be crouched, which changes how the body is positioned. Our conception of space changes because we alter our posture: the hunched body, hands on the cold floor, crossed legs and the excitement of being hidden. I remember the top of my head pressed against the table thus, involuntarily, I used my skull as a conductor of sounds coming from the surface. Hands and metal bracelets resting, glasses and cutlery moving, subtle vibrations in the wood—things that cannot be heard with just the ears. In Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, Brandon LaBelle mentions how listening in a space is completed by physical sensations in the body. He gives the example of being in a café with the elbow resting on the table, and a subway line underneath. Thus, we can hear the subway passing with our ears and perceive a faint vibration with our elbow, providing another layer of information. Spatial listening is completed by the interaction of space with our body, in addition to our ears.
The emotional and physical factor I experienced as a child appears and disappears repeatedly. I think about the sounds I hear when I am alone at my home: resonances that linger in corners of the house when my voice reaches a certain frequency, vibrations in the windows with the passage of heavy trucks, the sound of my own footsteps in the living room, the noise of the fridge when its motor turns on, my dog shaking and rattling her collar tag, the sound of the water pump turning on and carrying water to the ceiling, heavy and hurried footsteps passing by the sidewalk, the sound of my cat scratching the window to get in. This sonic space is built with my ability to continue listening to it and discovering it, as well as with my emotional and mental states that enable and make a receptive listening permeable.
In my sound practice, I often encounter sounds that seek to create a sense of closeness such as whispers, voices and domestic field recordings. When I started using audio editors to create electronic or experimental music, I instinctively began to create compositions that evoked these sensations, seeking to immerse myself in a personal sonic habitat, almost like an internal journey. Thinking about this raises some questions: Is it possible that spaces are only external, or can we also practice listening to the internal spaces of our bodies? Do thoughts and memories of sounds in our imagination count as 'sounds' too? What type of listening corresponds to remembering, imagining, and creating sounds in our mind? In various classes and workshops, I have practiced one of Pauline Oliveros's exercises, Ear Piece, which consists of a series of 13 questions about listening that guide us from external to internal sonic perception. One of the questions is: 'Can you listen and at the same time, remember a sound?' It would be interesting to consider how our sonic space is configured if we can overlay two sonic planes: one internal and one external. Perhaps this reveals that space is part of us and we are part of space.
To conclude, I would like to revisit the reading of Spinoza's Ethics, linking these ideas with what the author calls "the good and the bad." The good occurs when a body directly composes its relationship with ours and increases our power to act, for example, food. On the other hand, the bad happens for us when a body disrupts its relationship with ours and harms us. We seek to compose combinable relationships, to organize encounters with what naturally benefits us, thus increasing our power—that would be the good for us. Therefore, it is possible that exercising listening as a practice in space is a way of encountering the good; connecting affectively with the territory we traverse, the homes we visit, the spaces we inhabit, and the places where we share experiences, learning, knowledge, exercise, fun, emotions, rest, ideas, etc. Those spaces where we connect with sound and with others through listening, they are necessarily good.
Bibliography:
Pauline Oliveros (2019) Deep Listening, DOBRA ROBOTA
Spinoza, B. (1677). Ética demostrada según el orden geométrico. Caronte Filosofía. (Edición de 2023)
Linda Ruth y Barry Lesse (2007) Spaces speak, are you listening? MIT Press
Brandon LaBelle (2019) Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. Bloomsbury Academic
Deleuze, G. (1981). Spinoza: Filosofía práctica. Tusquets. (Edición de 2001)
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