Abstract:This essay develops an ontology of sound and argues that sound art plays a crucial role in revealing this ontology. I argue for a conception of sound as a continuous, anonymous flux to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds these expressions. Developing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's conception of the perceptual unconscious, I propose that this sonic flux is composed of two dimensions: a virtual dimension that I term 'noise' and an actual dimension that consists of contractions of this … Show more
“…Again, the sense articulated here, of an experience that reveals taken‐for‐granted habitual ‘filtering out’ of noise, is typical of how sound art amplifies background noise to produce new intensities (LaBelle, ; Cox, ). One practitioner suggested that becoming more aware of this filtering enabled her to empathise more with children who find it hard to ‘tune in’ amidst the noise.Practitioner 1: It just felt very cluttered with noise and light, and all the sensory things, and I'm just thinking gosh it's no wonder that sometimes they do find it hard to tune in when we're asking them to listen to a story, or listening to some instructions, when they're so used to filtering a lot, and not always tuning in very acutely to what's going on around them, because there is so much there .…”
Section: Effects On Professional Practicementioning
confidence: 96%
“…Several said that the walk had made them realise how much of the sonic ambience they normally ‘tune out’. Cox () argues that this attention to background noise is what makes sound art distinctive as a field of practice. Sound art amplifies the jumbled mass of unorganised sounds that are normally ignored or suppressed, and listening walks are one way to do this.Practitioner 1: When you work in a busy and sort of noisy and chatty environment… sometimes I think you lose some of that awareness of the sound around you because you're just used to that in terms of everyday working experiences… then yes going outside, walking to and fro, and yes you are more conscious of noise around you and different noises .Practitioner 2: Yeah, because it wasn't totally silent was it anywhere that we went, even when we were in very quiet places, there's some sort of something, buzz maybe that you could hear, made me more aware of things like that .…”
Section: Tuning the Sensesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Several said that the walk had made them realise how much of the sonic ambience they normally 'tune out'. Cox (2009) argues that this attention to background noise is what makes sound art distinctive as a field of practice. Sound art amplifies the jumbled mass of unorganised sounds that are normally ignored or suppressed, and listening walks are one way to do this.…”
Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill‐equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy for this purpose. Using interview data in which early years practitioners reflect on a listening walk, we show how the method can: (i) produce heightened multisensory experiences of spaces; (ii) generate forms of difficulty and discomfort that produce new learning; and (iii) influence practice, particularly practitioners’ ability to empathise with young children. Listening walks function by disrupting everyday sensory habits, provoking listeners to listen anew to their own listening, in an open‐ended way that is not tied to predetermined learning outcomes. The method therefore has wider pedagogic potential for rethinking education and childhood beyond rationality, representation and meaning.
“…Again, the sense articulated here, of an experience that reveals taken‐for‐granted habitual ‘filtering out’ of noise, is typical of how sound art amplifies background noise to produce new intensities (LaBelle, ; Cox, ). One practitioner suggested that becoming more aware of this filtering enabled her to empathise more with children who find it hard to ‘tune in’ amidst the noise.Practitioner 1: It just felt very cluttered with noise and light, and all the sensory things, and I'm just thinking gosh it's no wonder that sometimes they do find it hard to tune in when we're asking them to listen to a story, or listening to some instructions, when they're so used to filtering a lot, and not always tuning in very acutely to what's going on around them, because there is so much there .…”
Section: Effects On Professional Practicementioning
confidence: 96%
“…Several said that the walk had made them realise how much of the sonic ambience they normally ‘tune out’. Cox () argues that this attention to background noise is what makes sound art distinctive as a field of practice. Sound art amplifies the jumbled mass of unorganised sounds that are normally ignored or suppressed, and listening walks are one way to do this.Practitioner 1: When you work in a busy and sort of noisy and chatty environment… sometimes I think you lose some of that awareness of the sound around you because you're just used to that in terms of everyday working experiences… then yes going outside, walking to and fro, and yes you are more conscious of noise around you and different noises .Practitioner 2: Yeah, because it wasn't totally silent was it anywhere that we went, even when we were in very quiet places, there's some sort of something, buzz maybe that you could hear, made me more aware of things like that .…”
Section: Tuning the Sensesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Several said that the walk had made them realise how much of the sonic ambience they normally 'tune out'. Cox (2009) argues that this attention to background noise is what makes sound art distinctive as a field of practice. Sound art amplifies the jumbled mass of unorganised sounds that are normally ignored or suppressed, and listening walks are one way to do this.…”
Mainstream education promotes a narrow conception of listening, centred on the reception and comprehension of human meanings. As such, it is ill‐equipped to hear how sound propagates affects, generates atmospheres, shapes environments and enacts power. Yet these aspects of sound are vital to how education functions. We therefore argue that there is a need to expand listening in education, and suggest that listening walks could provide a pedagogy for this purpose. Using interview data in which early years practitioners reflect on a listening walk, we show how the method can: (i) produce heightened multisensory experiences of spaces; (ii) generate forms of difficulty and discomfort that produce new learning; and (iii) influence practice, particularly practitioners’ ability to empathise with young children. Listening walks function by disrupting everyday sensory habits, provoking listeners to listen anew to their own listening, in an open‐ended way that is not tied to predetermined learning outcomes. The method therefore has wider pedagogic potential for rethinking education and childhood beyond rationality, representation and meaning.
“…and an actual dimension that consists of contractions of this virtual continuum.'' 21 Cox develops his argument, referring to Leibniz and Deleuze, around the concepts of virtuality and actuality, claiming that Leibniz made it possible for us ''to grasp the distinction between signal and noise not as one between part and whole, ignorance and knowledge but as one between the singular and the ordinary, perception and its conditions of genesis, the actual and the virtual''.…”
Section: Virtually Noisementioning
confidence: 99%
“…26 A crucial fact which should also be mentioned in relation to this, is how the attention paid to the ''sonic field ignored or suppressed by everyday hearing,''*as it has been described elsewhere by Cox*was actually made possible in the first place by real time recording technology. 27 In short, this concerns the influential point made by Friedrich Kittler about the emergence of recording media such as the phonograph which radically changed the fundamental conceptions of sound. Kittler notes that the phonograph did not symbolically transcribe and detain worldly phenomena in coded systems like text or musical notation which transmit ''steady'' signals to be decoded from a certain order.…”
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