Reorienting Audition Through Bodily Listening in Place

Reorienting Audition Through Bodily Listening in Place Ellen Waterman (bio) Bodily Listening in Place, exercise no. 10, 31 March 2022 Sunlight streams through the window of my music room, spilling out across a low chest and onto the variegated maple floor. Sunlight plays across the dark shiny grain of the old wooden chest, reflecting and shifting as I move. I slide the sunbeam across the surface of the chest by moving laterally. A blue and yellow Ghanaian batik runner threads the middle of the chest, interrupting the reflection, the colours intensified in my sustained gaze. I stand sock-footed in the patch of sunlight on the floor. Warmth of light, chill of floor on my feet. I am holding my flute. I resist the urge to close my eyes and bathe in the familiar intimacy of sound. Instead, I keep my eyes open and play long, low tones while focusing on the play of sunlight, the warmth, and the feeling of toes and heels as I curl, lift, and lower them while never losing contact with the floor. I am acutely aware of my flute. Of how it feels in my hands, under the pads of my fingers, stale, sour, metallic smell of old breath lingering in the head joint. I focus on my finger pressure on the keys. Inadvertently lifting my right middle finger causes a slight leak, a small squeak. I try to let sounds emerge as a by-product of my interactions with flute, feet, light, and space. [End Page 319] It's hard not to produce sounds consciously, but I am intent on trying to make music that decentres the sonic. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Bodily Listening in Place, exercise no. 10, 31 March 2022. Listening holds a central place in Music and Sound Studies both as a process integral to musicking and sounding and as a metaphor for certain kinds of attention. For example, composer Pauline Oliveros's philosophy of "Deep Listening" is a metaphor for empathy producing good relations, while Indigenous Sound Studies scholar Dylan Robinson's concept of "hungry listening" is a metaphor for extraction producing bad relations. For many critical improvisation scholars, moreover, listening is understood as essential to an ethics of co-creation (Caines; Fischlin et al.; Ramshaw and Stapleton). Listening is often evoked as a bodily metaphor, as in the advice to "listen to your body" and not overstrain sore muscles, or "listen to your heart" to make a good decision. In practice, however, for most scholars, listening is unquestionably oriented to the sensory regime of [End Page 320] audition, despite increasingly well-documented practices of haptic, kinetic, and visual musicking by musicians and sound artists such as Evelyn Glennie, Christine Sun Kim, and Pamela Witcher (Cripps et al.; Holmes) and conceptual links drawn between Deaf and Sound Studies (Friedner and Helmreich; Sterne). Bodily Listening in Place is a proposition to explore environmental musicking beyond the confines of the auditory. The goal is to decentre, and thus reorient, audition through play with visual, kinetic, and haptic senses in place. If we understand "listening" as a metaphor for contact, attentiveness, and relationality, then the construct "music" expands beyond the auditory to encompass intersensory modes of environmental experience. Bodily Listening in Place is also an instructional score for intersensory improvisation by diverse bodies (hearing and non-hearing, seeing and non-seeing, by any means and with any level of mobility). I have developed this work in consultation with SPiLL Propagation, Artist Center for Creation and Production in Sign Language in Canada (www.spill-propagation.com).1 While preparing to compose my score, I engaged in a series of creative exchanges with Deaf artist Tiphaine Girault and hearing artist Paula Bath between February and May 2022. For example, I recorded audio files of my improvisations that Tiphaine listened to via the Woojer vibrotactile vest with embedded transducers that translate sound to vibration.2 Here is Tiphaine's response to my piece Ellen for Tiphaine: I feel like I am in a car. A small car that allows me to feel the environment outside. I pull over. It is raining. I feel the raindrops tap slowly. One by...

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