coe014_english.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Welcome everybody back to the Cultures of Energy podcast, welcome. We are coming to you sort of live from Fondazione Library and we want to thank the Sundance Institute here at Rice for making cultures of energy possible. That's the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences. And today we have a really, really wonderful conversation. Yes, with a man named Lawrence English, that's Lawrence with a W.. And he's based, we believe in Brisbane, Australia.

Speaker2: [00:01:06] He's from Brisbane.

Speaker1: [00:01:07] He's from there. But he's a very cosmopolitan fellow who is just getting a lot of the time because he works as a freelance sound artist and he's also a musician. And it would be interesting to know the difference between music and sound art. And I don't think we got to that question with him, but

Speaker2: [00:01:25] I would say he's a professional sound artist. I mean, freelance makes it sound like he does it

Speaker1: [00:01:30] Part time well. He described it as freelance, but I think he is doing it full time.

Speaker2: [00:01:35] But one of the big one of the amazing things he does is he goes around the world. Well, yeah, and doing a lot of field recordings, right?

Speaker1: [00:01:41] He does his field recordings and has very sophisticated microphones. And as I wrote to him and an email a couple of days ago, actually in many ways is more Indiana Jones than even US anthropologists because he has to be so intrepid to get to these really remote locations and in some cases, dangerous locations to get these field recordings right?

Speaker2: [00:02:05] He talked about, for example, and we didn't follow up on it in the interview, unfortunately, because we were so fascinated by what he had to say otherwise about his sound art. But he was struck by lightning once doing one of these recordings, and there were some other stories too.

Speaker1: [00:02:18] Well, he was. It sounds like he was nearly attacked. Or maybe it was attacked by a gang of wild dogs in Australia, out in the outback. Like these feral dogs that form packs and yeah, not dingoes, but dogs. Anyway, it sounded pretty, pretty scary. So he goes to great lengths to get these recordings, and one of the really spectacular ones that he played during a conference out of out of which we were able to meet him was the sound of an Antarctic fur seal. Laying in the sun, and he has a sophisticated microphone where I can actually pick up one nostril of breath. Oh, and yet it's playing on, you know, a stereophonic system in this beautiful space at Brown University, and you can hear the the very intimate breathing in and out of this little Antarctic seal as he or she is. It's just sort of lying in the sun, relaxing,

Speaker2: [00:03:21] If I'm not mistaken, we're actually going to put that that sound tape at the end of our

Speaker1: [00:03:25] Podcast. At the end of the podcast, we'll have a collection of a number of field recordings. Will will will pull together a smattering of those. But one of the cool things that Lawrence does is when he's doing his sound art, he takes those field recordings and mixes them live. So that's where the art comes in, is that he's able to, you know, pot up and pot down these different sounds. So voices of of creatures, birds and animals and crickets, insects, wind, all of these ambient sort of environmental sounds. And then he's able to mix them together and in a way that really is musical and harmonic,

Speaker2: [00:04:04] Beautiful sonic mash up.

Speaker1: [00:04:05] Yeah, sonic.

Speaker2: [00:04:07] That's great. And we are able to present those sounds to you. Thanks to him because he very graciously allowed us to reproduce some of those recordings in our podcast episode. And I have to say he we met a great, many nice and generous people doing this podcast, but he has to be one of the one of the most. Also a great sense of humor because we were recording this tape under less than optimal conditions as we sometimes have to. And the first room that we went to in this hotel where we thought we could record him, there was this blower that was just horrendously blowing, and the only thing you could do was, you know, set the temperature of the air that blew. You couldn't change the blower. It just blew, you know? So, you know, I'm freaking out as the person who's responsible for this, the engineering side of this because he's a sound artist. He's going to hear everything. I'm thinking he's got almost kind of superhuman listening and he's going to hear if I can hear it, he's going to be totally troubled by this and that's going to drive him crazy and vex him. And then we went up to our room, which is better and recorded him there. But but even there, I find myself like hyper attuned to everything that was happening in the room, every crinkle and crumple and, you know, sort of shifting. And then at one point it was we could have laughed. And I know you and I exchanged a glance, like there was this terrible ice machine out in the hallway that just disgorged what sounded like, you know, a dump trucks worth of eyes and blood like that.

Speaker1: [00:05:35] It was like a glacial calving event out there in the hallway. Yeah.

Speaker2: [00:05:38] And he was like, Come on, like, but then we kind of got around to it. I think we made a little bit of a joke of it, as I recall later. So I guess it was okay. He was he was just a very, a very kind, wonderful person, I thought.

Speaker1: [00:05:50] There was also a lot of accidental sounds of a child giggling about YouTube videos in the background.

Speaker2: [00:05:58] And that's just, yeah, that's just par for the course override cultures of energy.

Speaker1: [00:06:02] Well, one of the one of the questions I asked him during the conference during the Q&A after his presentation was the different forms of listening because he's really he's really interested in kind of engaged listening and a real attunement to our our listening capacities and capabilities. And one of the things about the podcast is that you realize that many people, if not most people, are listening to the podcast with earbuds or earphones. Mean maybe, maybe, maybe are listening in, you know, in your car or whatever or at home through the computer. But I think a lot of people do listen through kind of the headphone medium. And it's it's sort of a strange sensation to think about one's voice being inside people's heads. You're actually literally your voice. One's voice is inside the almost to the brain cavity, like you're inside, you're inside and inside this aural space. It's just kind of a strange sensation anyhow.

Speaker2: [00:07:04] So I asked about that. Should we be doing subliminal messaging? Is what you're saying, like we should be like, vote

Speaker1: [00:07:09] For in your head. We are in your head. Yeah, yeah. That's an X-Files premise. Yeah, yeah. Right now, I don't think there's anything subliminal here unless there's some kind of programming that we haven't been attuned to, so to speak. But yeah, but see, that's a pretty, he said. It's pretty recent phenomenon that you have pretty intensive listening happening through headphones. And for most of human history, we've had shared listening experiences like at, you know, concerts or concertos or, you know, live music happenings. And that's been historically how we listen. And really importantly, we've been listening in the world and listening environments. So this this really intimate form of of listening that we do with with earbuds is is novel and strange in terms of the history of listening in humans, which is

Speaker2: [00:08:00] Which becomes a big theme in in the discussion. Yeah, that that there's something about vision. And I think also about the earbud type of listening, which is kind of, you know, listening in the visual era, which is really focused. And, you know, it's got like a small field of vision or field of sensation that it's focused into. But the kind of audition that I heard him calling for is one that is more ambient, one that's more attuned and open to its surroundings. So in a way, the shift from vision to audition is something that can help fully reacquaint ourselves to our environment in a more intimate way. Earbuds are no

Speaker1: [00:08:38] Right.

Speaker2: [00:08:39] So with that, shall we?

Speaker1: [00:08:40] Without further ado, let's let's hear from Lawrence, because he's got lots of wonderful things to say about sound and about listening. Here we are live broadcasting from near Brown University at the lovely Hampton Inn Hotel in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, and it's a spectacularly beautiful day outside and a wonderful day to be thinking about atmospheres which look very good out there. When one of the other things that we've been doing at this conference that we're at is thinking about sound. And so we're really happy to have Lawrence English here.

Speaker3: [00:09:35] I'm very happy to be here,

Speaker1: [00:09:36] Who is a certifiable, recognized, world famous sound artist.

Speaker3: [00:09:40] Is that a is that a? I'm not sure that's a term. Is it certified? It's like kind of being organic, you know, certified organic. Ok, excellent.

Speaker4: [00:09:49] Finally, yeah, I get that little.

Speaker3: [00:09:52] The certificate maybe would be nice. I always like a certificate. So happy to have that certification.

Speaker1: [00:09:57] Yeah. I mean, one of the one of the things that you were talking about yesterday that was fascinating was kind of thinking about listening and our our role capacity. I'm a you are a process not oral as in the spoken word processing and not as a verbosity like I'm doing right now, but oral as in our capacity to listen. And so I'm wondering if you can tell our listeners something about how the story of how you got interested in thinking about sound and listening?

Speaker3: [00:10:29] Yeah, I mean, for me, it was a very kind of organic discovery. I think you could say I grew up in Brisbane, which is a town sort of subtropics of Australia, so it's in the middle section. If you look at Australia, it's the kind of fattest part on the East. And it's, you know, it has an interesting history like political history, particularly. It was very problematic during the 70s and into the 80s. We have quite a difficult government and that kind of took away part of the history of the city. A lot of it was demolished, but also a lot of industrial capacity. The city went into kind of ruined essentially, and this very large tract of port was not too far from where I lived as a kid, and my father, who was a man of great leisure, would like to go down there and take myself and my brother down there and basically killing afternoons. He'd sit down and sketch and, you know, read and do all the things that he liked to do at the same time relieving my mother from the burden of these two overly energetic boys. And we would go down to this particular area that was a large floodplain for a creek that came onto the Brisbane River. And as the water from the flood would run into the floodplain, it would kind of take over the dirt, dry out and form these huge biscuits that you could walk on had the most incredible sound, and there was one section of this area that was lower than all the others.

Speaker3: [00:11:51] It was like a swamp, essentially, and it always had water in it. So it had reeds and, you know, mosquitoes and everything that goes with the swamp. And in this particular section, there was a pair of these very particular and beautiful sounding birds called red warblers. And, you know, I often described them as the great kind of like nature's answer to the ultimate hand-held synthesizer. You just stick a stick, a kind of knob control in the back of this bird, and it's just unbelievable sounding. So I was quite fascinated with these things, and my dad was a very keen bird watcher. And during that time, we would often go bird watching together. And, you know, there's something about it a child and a pair of binoculars that's just like a it's a cruel torture, really. You know, at that age, we don't have any kind of capacity for our own sense, really. And visually, to give a child a second set of eyes that are so much more powerful than their own and ask them to use it just it's it's just cruel. So I would go looking for this bird and I'd be have my binoculars up and looking around in these reeds, and it's a very difficult spot. It's small, it's brown.

Speaker3: [00:13:00] And of course, in the reeds, it's completely camouflaged. So after several weeks of frustration with these binoculars, my dad just said to me, Look, what you need to do is you need to basically go stop looking through the binoculars and put them down and use your ears. Listen to where the sound is coming from. And so, you know, I did this and as I as I sat there and I listened, I suddenly realized there was this other dimension to the space that I was in that was completely unlike the visual environment. So, of course, you know, I listen to her where the bird was. I put the binoculars up to my eyes and as I did that. Well, of course, I could see the bird. The mystery was revealed. And in doing that, I, you know, not that you think about it necessarily in those terms at that time, but it's probably the first time I realized the capacity of sound as a sort of sense making device and also, you know, architecturally how it kind of allows us. Infiltrate certain kinds of, you know, horizons that maybe our eyes don't let us do. So it was a very for me foundational way of sort of coming to sound and I think probably as well it gave me a route that kind of grew into a very, very big tree. You know, many decades on. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:14:32] One of the questions that you posed to our group yesterday is how you counter if you can listen to a listeners listening,

Speaker4: [00:14:44] It's pretty metal. Yeah, pretty menagerie.

Speaker1: [00:14:47] Should we roll it again? Can one listen to a listener's listening? Now I do need or something.

Speaker3: [00:14:53] Yeah, I do need to to credit the master of this wonderful provocation who is petitioned. This French academic writes very broadly across cinema and sound and various other things, and he has this wonderful, you know, aptly titled book Acute Listening, you know, and in this book, it talks a lot about a whole range of different questions provocations, problems with the way that we think about listening. And he had this wonderful provocation, very, very nondescript location in the book. It was just, you know, tapped in between a couple of other sections. And I read it and I thought, Wow, can one listen to a listener's listening? And I thought straight away, it's a great kind of anchor in a way for how it is that you could conceptualize the listening in that it's not it's not going to be the same. You know, people sharing time and space are not going to be listening to the same things. I thought that was an interesting kind of qualification. And also, he had a sort of secondary part of this provocation, which was, you know, if you can listen to a listener's listening, can you transmit that listening as unique as it is? And I thought, Oh, that's interesting to draw delineation between the desire to listen and then a desire to transmit, which is essentially what I felt I had been doing in the practice field.

Speaker3: [00:16:17] Recording very much for me was about a kind of subjective preoccupation that I had with a time and a place in a space. And I wanted to share that preoccupation with other people. So for me, the this idea of listeners listening kind of tapped on the kind of critical point for me, which is, I guess in some ways, it's a license to reconsider the relationship between hearing and listening. You know, I think about hearing very much as a kind of passive sense state, you know, we use it in different ways, largely subconsciously. I would argue. Whereas listening is a is a kind of antithesis to that, you know, it's a very much about a focus. It's about an agency. It's about, in some respects, a kind of performative ity that takes place when you are participating actively in the possibility of of the sense of hearing. So for me, it's almost like, you know, extracting signal from empirical noise, you know, a hearing is a is a kind of sense of empirical noise. And what listening is is the opportunity to extract a signal out of that empirical noise.

Speaker1: [00:17:24] Mm hmm. I love that image of sort of abstracting that signal out of the noise, right? I mean, one of the other things that we were talking about was that there's a way in which these sound waves or the experience of sound and listening comes to feel like an occupation of the body, right? And occupation in the sense of something that we undertake as a task or as a calling, but also an occupation of of of being and a kind of dwelling of sound within the body. And so thinking about that, I'm wondering what the kind of dwelling practices are if we think about field recording and gathering audio texts in a field and how that can sort of play out within an environment or how it can add to our sensibility of an environment? So what are the kind of the kind of textures of field recording that can tell us something about a place and a time and a and a moment?

Speaker3: [00:18:26] Well, I think all your recording can do that to varying degrees, and I guess it comes down to the intention of the person engaging in that. And I think about it very much as a kind of political act. You know, this kind of politics of perception, your capacity to perceive in a time and space, you're if you like your kind of ability to exercise your listening, it's not the same for everyone. Some people, you know, are never have the opportunity to build that muscle, if you like to do that. So it's always multidimensional in terms of this kind of occupation of the body with sound. I think it's a really interesting delineation. I would say it's almost like part of my other life as as a kind of composer. You know, I'm very interested in the way that the body performs under certain kinds of pressure and under certain kinds of agitation or abrasion or occupation. And a lot of the performances that I give are very much about this activation of the body. And it's kind of interesting because it's. It's utterly subjective in that you are suddenly made aware of your capacity of your body as an air, you know that there are vibration, can can be traveling to your ears quite often, but it can also be traveling as in your, you know, the ears attached to the side of your head.

Speaker3: [00:19:43] You're kind of psychological listening. And there's this other physiological capacity of the body to transmit sonic information, and you get that, you know, in a very practical way. You might have that when you're out and a bus goes very close by you and you step back because you sense the bus coming because of that physical vibration of it or that you and you know, we have largely lost our ability to sense these frequencies. But quite often when you look at things like the tsunami that happened in Southeast Asia a few years ago, the vibrations that that tsunami gave the earthquake gave out in the ocean ahead of time were picked up by dogs, were picked up by birds, were picked up by elephants. Everyone left, you know, all of the other species left except for human beings, which were like, Hey, look, the water's going out, there's a lobster. Let's go grab that lobster, you know? So there's there's

Speaker4: [00:20:32] A kind of,

Speaker3: [00:20:33] Yeah. And you know, we have we I would argue that's part of this kind of question around how our capacity to perceive is not universal. And you know that there are qualifications, some physiological qualifications, but also kind of sociological qualifications for how it is that we kind of choose to sort of interact with sound and with listening. So for me with this, this notion of the body, it's very much coming out of that situation because in the natural world, it is a very rare that you encounter a sound that is so strong that your body becomes activated by it like it. It's not that it's impossible. Things like waterfalls, things like waves, you know, various kinds of storms like thunder. You know, there is sometimes a physical capacity to a clap of thunder that is really very powerful and telling. Being a lightning strike survivor, I can speak to that very personally. Wow. So it is another story and ironically involves field recording is everything does field recordings like one of those great, you know, preoccupations life missions. Then you inevitably end up doing stupid things I've realized, I think is really it. Or maybe I'm just a stupid field recorder. I'm not sure, but considering I've I've swum in the Antarctic to rescue equipment, I've been hit by lightning making recordings of a metal roof. I mean, these are all.

Speaker3: [00:21:55] Maybe these are just like the entrees to kind of a fool's mistake, you know, the the kind of youthful field recordist. But yeah, I think there is a real, you know, there's a state where very rarely you'll encounter those sounds. So it's not like it's a common thing. So I think what's been fantastic about certainly the last sort of 25, 30, 40 years as technology has improved the capacity to realize some of these bodily effects has been made much more readily available, and the opportunity to experiment with that is really powerful. And before, when I was talking about this idea of the kind of individuated experience that you have, the kind of effect of the singular body. What's really interesting about sound, I mean, partly the fact that it is so encompassing and it occupies the body in that time and space. And to escape that, you need to physically remove yourself from it, which I think is a really interesting political question around how individuals and groups experience certain kinds of phenomena. And particularly with sound, it's that there is a collective thing going on, like the notion of the concert or this coming together of people to experience something a performance in real time and then to have these very individuated experiences, whether they be the kind of psychological responses, the emotional, the whatever the case might be that goes on when you're listening to music.

Speaker3: [00:23:15] But also then this kind of physically effective kind of phenomena going on. It's an interesting question because it it's unresolved how it is that we all come in contact with that and also what we draw out of that. And I think it's interesting and certainly for me, working with something like field recordings and I mean this morning, the kind of in the material content of the sound when I use these materials in a concert, I have these very particular recordings of a very big storm in Patagonia that I recorded, and I probably played those sounds in at the beginning of my concert for the better part of 18 months. I love them. That's one of my favorite recordings that I've made for numerous reasons. And what was amazing was at the end of every single concert, someone would come up and say, Wow, that sound of being trapped on the ship in the ocean, that was amazing. I was like, Oh, great, or wow. That time that I was at my grandmother's. It was like I was at my grandmother's house when I was a kid and there was the storm at the beach. I was like, Oh, that's great. No one ever really assumed it was a wind storm or tonight, or they always took something out of it.

Speaker3: [00:24:22] Because what sound does and what I love about the promise of of sound and audition is that it invites us to fill in the blank of the material content of the sound with our all of that wonderful sociocultural baggage we carry with us. So we seek out the things that that allow us to have some idea of sense in that moment. And that's fantastic because I think as well as you know, if you're gifted with a great imagination, the the possibilities with sound are just endless in a way because you're constantly able to dig deeper and deeper. As the sound continues, that initial thought you have give gives away to others. And I think that kind of experience the individual and the group in a kind of performative situation is really one of the great. Great situations you can find yourself in, I think, as an audience member, but also as a performer because you recognize that there's this kind of strangely unspoken language that no one else understands. It's kind of in the air of the room and you kind of as much as you want to apply yourself to it is the capacity or the output of the result of that experience that you have. So your application is to pay off. Hmm.

Speaker1: [00:25:44] I mean, just going back to this idea of the concert, right to be in concert with one another, right? So you have individuals that are gathered in a hall and the musicians are in concert with each other and audiences in concert with them as well, hopefully. So just kind of picking apart some of those news linguistic ways that we think about sound or even this idea of audition. Mm-hmm. I mean, I haven't looked up audition in the dictionary recently, but I imagine that the first definition has to do with a kind of performative audition. But it's very interesting that it uses audio or the auditory as its point of reference, right? So the audition, we think of it as a performance, but specifically and literally it is a sound performance, right? It's a way of, you know, singing or speaking or performing, but it's totally based on sound. So it's fascinating. And I think to about this question of thunder, right? Because, you know, parents tell kids all the time. Don't be afraid of the thunder. It's just a sound. It's only a noise. And from what we've been hearing from you, it really is more than that. Like, it really is a vibration and a frequency that that gets into your body. And there is something really frightening about that. It's not just a sound. Yeah, it actually is. It's there's reasons why I would say universally children are initially scared of thunder.

Speaker3: [00:27:09] Yeah, absolutely. And I think as well, it's interesting when you say, you know, this idea of just a sound somewhere deep inside us, I think, is that recognition that the just as sound was the bear or the wolves or the whatever in the dark. You know, we have think thankfully, we found the wheel and we found fire. And since then everything's been looking out for humanity until now, strangely enough. And I think in that process of finding the light and being able to control in some respects the dark hours, which was our great time of kind of anxiety because it was when we were pray more often pray than not. And it was probably during that time that we were using our ears. A great deal because when on those dark nights where we couldn't see, we were really concentrating on listening and I, I still find, you know, there are illogical moments where I'm out on my own field recording and I am consumed with a kind of, you know, nonsensical anxiety sometimes. And you know, there've been a couple of occasions where I can hear something and I don't know what it is and your mind floods to all of those horrific, frightening kind of childhood places that you think that you've completely, you know, left behind but are still there. And I think particularly there's also a kind of sense of being alone. You know, field recording is about being alone. Listening is is about being alone. And it's very easy to become accustomed to not being in that state. And I think when you're really out somewhere a long way away from people and you are on your own, there is this.

Speaker3: [00:28:59] Threshold almost that you need to come through. And the more regularly you do it, the better you are. But I found that there have been circumstances where I haven't done, you know, I used to do a lot of field trips where I go somewhere for an extended period and make recordings. And the last little while, I haven't really been doing that quite as much, you know, for a whole number of reasons, mostly to do with, you know, commitments and touring, it's not possible to go somewhere and record for many weeks. And last year, I went to the Australian Outback, basically the central desert and made recordings out there. And you know, there's not there's not that much out there that's going to kill you. I mean, there is, but not the kinds of things that you would imagine as frightening as snakes and the spiders. There are wild dogs and dingoes. Dingoes are less concerned, and we have a lot of feral dogs and feral cats in Australia that are massacring our wildlife. The feral dogs, I've had a one experience with feral dogs like a group of feral dogs. That was actually really not what it's something I need to repeat. And so I'm very conscious of that, but that's about the worst that you're going to have out there. It's not like there's bears or tigers or anything like that. But when I was out in the evening doing these recordings and it was a very, very dark. I had that moment of as you have like, the uneasiness of of the night.

Speaker3: [00:30:17] And I mean, it's it's kind of a beautiful experience to be unsettled like that. And it's actually in some ways, incredibly humbling because you recognise you are this insignificant speck in this very, very broad plane of experience. And it took me some time to kind of navigate through this, this uneasiness. But then about forty five minutes into the recording, and particularly because I think you're listening so intently while you're recording, you know, you're really conscious of every tiny little sound. I just it just everything expands out after that moment of you. There's a great kind of interior. I think their anxieties are kind of interiority. And then once that passes and you sort of just become part of the land and you become attuned to the land, and I forget that quite often that you know that it's not it's not a free past you've got to put in to get that connection to place. And I think unfortunately for most of us as urban dwellers, to get to that stage either needs this kind of practice like any kind of exercise would. You need to prepare the body and the mind to be able to perform a certain way? And when you spend time, I've been, you know, fortunate to spend time with a many indigenous folks in Australia over the years. And when you spend even a few days with them, you recognize their capacity for sensing a place. That just extends out in a way that in some respects, we can't even really conceptualize. And I'm always jealous of that. I mean, obviously there are sacrifices and conditions that go to that and connections that take them back many tens of thousands of years.

Speaker3: [00:32:05] But it's something that we, I think that we could. We, as you know, white Western First World could take a huge benefit from, you know, increasingly there's something about that recognition of what is around us. And we're so we are so good at filtering, particularly with sound. You know, I always say that as a species, human beings are much better at filtering out sound than they are at actually listening to it. And the easiest example to give is, you know, as people are listening to this now on their computer or in their car, wherever it is, they're listening to it. Generally, there is a whole lot of sonic information going on around them at that very moment, whether it's a television in the next room, whether it's, you know, a roommate or whether it's the sound of the car, whatever the case might be, that sound is going on. And hopefully we've our dulcet tones have held you and captured you and focused your ear on our voices at the expense of these other sounds that are going on all the time. So that's such a kind of subconscious process that we just never really engage it. It's like it's almost like we don't have the language, so we can't ask the question. And I think we need to really start developing the language so we can ask better questions of ourselves and of our ears, of our audition, of our interests and of the value of what it is that this practice can actually do.

Speaker1: [00:33:27] So is there such a thing, then this is a provocation. Is there such a thing as noise pollution? Ok, from your point of view?

Speaker3: [00:33:36] Well, I mean, it's a question of aesthetics. Ultimately, this is and the idea of a kind of I mean, for there to be pollution, there needs to be a baseline, right? And I would argue that the baseline that maybe was talked about by thorugh has long since become extinct and where there might be areas that are still what we would consider pristine. But even in the most pristine environments, there are incursions. There are always going to be incursions, whether that be incursions of the natural world, whether that be fire or flood or an earthquake. I mean, they were they were Mother Nature's incursions into the kind of pristine ness of the environment. And then we had the indigenous people, certainly in Australia, you know, our indigenous radically transformed the Australian landscape, and from doing that brought about another kind of state that is what you know, the colonialists encountered when they got to Australia. So for me, I think I think you can say there is noise pollution, but it's this kind of subjective judgment of what that is. And I think there are, you know, there are qualifications that need to be said. There are there is evidence that certain kinds of exposure to certain kinds of sounds causes a physiological change in the body. It also causes a massive psychological change, and you only have to look at some of the sound experiments to do with sensory deprivation and various other kinds of like torture techniques of the last, you know, twenty five years old.

Speaker3: [00:35:04] And, you know, sadly, probably the last decade particularly, you know, Guantanamo Bay used extensively sonic torture. In fact, they used some of my favorite music skinny puppy to torture inmates. And I guess one man's torture is another man's pleasure. So here we are today, you know, decide lives on. So I think there is a, you know, there there is room for debate. I don't think anything is singular. Once we're talking about sense, you know, this idea that somehow it's an absolute ism, it's really tedious for me. I think it's much more interesting to have a discussion around what is it about that particular quality of sound that you find uneasy? And I think probably our difficulty with the breadth of the discussion around a question like noise pollution is we we don't have a very strong aesthetic language for sound and aesthetic discussion around sound when it comes to the the visual world, which is where we spend most of our sensing time. We have such a long history to call on. We have the iconography of the, you know, the buffalo on the wall and then we have, you know, the human hair and then we have painting and portraiture and photography and cinema and now VR environments. You know, this kind of the wealth, if you like and the and the timeline of us understanding the world through visual terms and through the representation of visual materials the world is, is 40000 years, maybe more in terms of the idea of being able to represent the sound world beyond the kind of architectural representations to God of churches in the.

Speaker3: [00:36:47] 14 to 17 century, where they were designing certain architectural spaces in which particular compositions could be made, that would allow decay of the voice to maintain a certain kind of timbre quality, whatever the case might be. Beyond that, as a kind of means of reproducing a certain kind of sonic phenomena, we have had no ability to do that until the fun autograph, which is, you know, 160 something years ago. I mean, the original design is eight or nine, but it wasn't actually manufactured for another sort of 50 years. And then obviously, Edison, with the phonograph and onwards from there kind of meant that there was opportunities to reproduce sound. And I think it's great when you go back to those early discussions and those early experiments, you know, when they made the first recording, first recordings of voice and a song and whatever, they make the recording and then they'd play it back. And of course, it was nothing like what had gone in. The input was not the output. And everyone in that circumstance had been listening to the voice and and thought, OK, that's great. What they failed to recognize is the medium through which that transmission is going to take place and the mechanisms through which the opportunity for that transmission to take place become evident in the transmission. So there was this great

Speaker2: [00:37:59] Medium is the message.

Speaker4: [00:38:00] Oh, absolutely.

Speaker3: [00:38:02] Yeah, we still miss you. Come back.

Speaker4: [00:38:07] Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:38:08] So, you know, in terms of that experience of of revisiting the sound, suddenly they realized that it didn't just record what was intended, but it recorded everything and it failed to, if you like, extract signal from empirical noise. And I think from that point on, we suddenly recognize that there's a subjectivity to the conditions of our listening. We all those people in the room were sitting, listening to the voice going in. No one was listening to the machine that was recording the voice. So I think that's a wonderful turning point in kind of the the the twist at which we start to recognize, Oh, OK, there is these conditions that we need to be aware of if we're going to engage in this sense and in this desire to represent the sense somehow. So from that point on, we've been able to tap into this history. And you know, when you look at the development of sound recording of sound reproductions, it's a rapid curve that in the last 15 years has obviously it's turned from a linear curve into an exponential curve, just absolutely skyrocketing in terms of the opportunities, the kind of cost opportunities as well for regular people to be involved in it. I mean, we stand here now with a wonderful handheld recording device that 25 years ago, one would have been unthinkable because there wasn't the technology to to serve as the recording device. Within that, and to the cost wise, would have probably been in the range of sort of 25 $30000, whereas now it's probably like $200 or $150.

Speaker3: [00:39:42] And so it allows this kind of wealth of opportunity for people to kind of explore these ideas. But, you know, technology is always only the first step. It's it's kind of meaningless and particularly with something like a recording device. Excuse me, if we go back to the original provocation from Peter Chandi about this, you know, transmission of the listener's listening, I think it raises a really interesting question because we've talked about this idea of a listeners listening. So we understand that as listeners, we have a performative. We have an agency that needs to be expressed in the times and places and spaces that we are and that our organic is, you know, the ears attached to the side of our head are very much expressing a kind of interior, psychological listening, all of our anxieties, pre concerns of interests are expressed through the listening. If we're going to transmit a listening, if that's our desire, then we need to recognize that there has to be some kind of device that allows that transmission to take place. And for me, working with field recording, obviously it's been a microphone or a recorder. You know, these very simple tools. And I think innately that's always I think most field recordings would say, well, that's how obviously how it takes place. But we never really question what the relationship is between ourselves and the equipment. And when we do that, it's important to kind of begin to consider what might be the differences between ourselves and the technology and most of the time.

Speaker3: [00:41:19] And I use this example quite a bit. We don't necessarily get to that point until we have our first experience of recording. You know, there's always the great story of the fantastic bird that's in the tree and you're standing next to a highway and you're recording the bird, and it's the most incredible, beautiful song you ever heard. You think, Oh my God, this is just this is transcendent, you know, I'm completely fixated and captivated by this bird. I cannot wait to get this recording home to listen to it. And of course, you go home and you. On the first thing you hear is traffic, miles and miles of droning, rising and falling cars, and of course, you realize that as you were there, you were listening to the bird. But the recorder with its own kind of, you know, technological physiology was just listening to whatever was going on. It had no kind of no hierarchy. It's a kind of diplomatic, democratic listener of sorts. A friend of mine, Francisco Lopez, describes the recorder as it's the kind of non-cognitive listening of machines, which I think is a beautiful way of describing it. And he's right. They have none of those interior psychological interests that you have. They have this. They're an external technological prosthetic listening device. And so when we think about if you like the prosthetic ear and the organic here, we have to recognize them. Like with the bird and the highway that each of those ears has a different horizon of listening, which is a kind of idea that Donita describes in his book from 1976 sound and voice.

Speaker3: [00:42:53] And in that book, he describes a whole range of various filaments. It's a still a fantastic text about sound and listening. But specifically, with this question of the horizon of listening, it kind of determines that, you know, the horizon of listening is not like the horizon of vision. The horizon of vision is fixed. Light is a linear medium unless we're going to drift off into quantum mechanics, which we're not because I'm not capable of talking about that with any authority whatsoever. Yes, exactly. So, you know, for the sake of argument, the light is linear spectrum, and it allows us to have a very fixed horizon. So as we sit here now, we can see the walls, each other's faces, people listening can see the road in front of them, the office next door. Whatever the case might be, there is a point at which that stops, whether it be the actual curvature of the Earth as the final point. I think that's interesting. You know, it tells us a very kind of if you like the straightforward, linear narrative story about how we're coming the world sound, by contrast, is not like that sound is promiscuous. It's constantly dynamic and it's in flux. So, you know, as we sit here now, I can hear the sound of from outside the window seeping in. We hear from time to time people walking in the corridors around this, this, this place,

Speaker2: [00:44:15] The atmosphere changes.

Speaker3: [00:44:17] Yeah, exactly. Yeah, OK. That's what that was good. Children laughing in the background. Yeah, I mean, there are. Yeah, and they are emerging and decaying. You know, there's this kind of rise and fall of these activities. So as that occurs, our horizon of listening shifts. So as the ice machine delivers its wonderful icy load, suddenly we're transported out the door and down the hallway to wherever that machine is. And the same way that, you know, if you're listening now in a cargo space for those moments, your horizon of listening extends out into the street or further away, and the horizon of listening is constantly in flux. It's not like the rise in ambition. It's this dynamic changing environment. It's not static, which is really in some respects, fatiguing, you know, because you have to kind of if you were paying attention to it, it requires a lot more than that. The visual horizon and you know, it's interesting. A lot of this new research is just coming out around the continuity field to do with vision and how we're seeing a kind of composite history of the last 15 seconds to make sense of the world. So as you're talking with someone, you're not refreshing the wall that stays the same, you're refreshing their facial gestures or whatever the case might be, which I think is fascinating. I'm sure there will be a lot more research around sound in that way as well, because I think sound functions in a very similar way in that as it occurs, it's gone forever. So we're actually using our short term memory to piece together a kind of soundscape that's evolving all the time.

Speaker2: [00:45:45] Well, I wanted to if I if I may ask McLuhan, follow up a little bit of a McLuhan nerd. Sometimes I think we all are. Yeah, a little bit. I hope. I mean, anyway. So I guess it would go something like this at times what I'm hearing you talk, it sounds like, including what you're just saying. Sound isn't abundant, you know, subversive, subversive, a visual culture and the sort of, you know, the visual and the visual culture that McLuhan talks about. And also in that case of the storm recording from Patagonia, where everyone's imagining themselves into it, it's very much what he would call a cool medium it's participatory to invite to. And in fact, necessarily you have to be there to complete it, right? Like a cartoon or what have you said about television, although that was a really lo fi television that he was talking about. And I think that, you know, that's then I know that some of the work you're doing is very is very high fidelity at the same time to where you're doing really precise recordings of capturing specific moments and time, the the breathing of a of a baby seal on the ice, something like that. And I was just curious then you know, that would be in McLuhan terms, like a hot thing. It would be like giving a lot of information across across a across the bandwidth. And, you know, how do you think about it? Because generally it sounds like what what you're saying is that is that this, you know, recapturing or retuning ourselves to sound is a way of experiencing an abundance of fairness or connection with the world that in some ways we are constantly shutting out, maybe because of the privilege of of visual culture, maybe just because we're actually just, you know, we've got these barriers up that are limiting the sound to what we can tolerate. I'm just really curious what you think in ways about the kind of politics of sound almost or the politics of listening, how those could. Maybe I want to believe, you know, help us achieve a reconnection to something that we've lost.

Speaker3: [00:47:41] I look, I'm very conscious of this idea and I talk a lot about it. Basically, what I say in my work is about is this idea of a politics of perception. And I think it's interesting, you know, when we talk about high fidelity and low fidelity. In a kind of media, in a sense of media. It's quite complicated because I think sound is in fact, always high fidelity, yeah. You know, the kind of differentiation of high and low fidelity in some respects has to do with certain, I guess, technological conditions, certain kinds of. Cultural conditions. And I think if you. It's more about whether or not you are willing to drill into, if you like, with your ears, the capacity of the sound in any one moment. I mean, no matter where you are, whether you're listening to, you know, I think the one qualification might be ears by listening to some degree, because that's a a kind of, in some respects, synthetic sound field in that you are suddenly making your ears perform very differently to how they naturally perform because you are actively taking out certain elements. I mean, it's even with I had this experience on the plane, I have these amazing, you know, triple coated ear stopper, and they're not they're not noise cancelling. They're like just in-ear monitors that I use. And I was listening to music on the plane the other day.

Speaker3: [00:49:17] David Bowie, God bless the man. We missed you, David, and I wanted to listen to Lo because I've been having a bit of a low six months. I think, you know, always listening to that record. And I was listening to it. And, you know, the headphones are very responsive, very detailed. I can hear things in the mix. I've never heard before with these particular headphones, but I can hear this tone for like, what? What is that hype? I thought, Do I have to notice, you know, I could hear this like very high pitched, singular tone, and I was listening. I thought, I don't remember that being in this track. So I pulled my headphones out, and as I did that, I recognized that there was this air conditioning vents, something in the plane emitting this tone really strongly, and I put my earphones back in. I thought, Why is this not being blocked out by me earphones? And then I started touching the earphones to find it. Was there some point of and after some time, I realized that there was a tiny linkage point between the cord attaching onto the bottom of the earplug that had some kind of light sound leak that I could close and hear. And I thought, Wow, OK. In terms of this drilling into sound, this is what we're talking about. There is the opportunity is always there.

Speaker3: [00:50:32] Whether or not we choose to participate in that opportunity is the question, I think. And it's not just singular in that sense, it's also that we then have to have the facility to recognize the components that the question is formed by. So I think for some of us, we don't. I mean, physiologically, okay, physiologically, there can be implications. You know, that we gradually lose certain frequency responsiveness out of our ears. Most of us don't. Once we hit, our more muddled years begin to taper off that top part of the frequency. Children can hear much higher than we can. And, you know, in the old cathode ray tube days on television, you would always hear that like tone. Sometimes when you turn the television on the forty four point five kilohertz tone as you get older, that becomes no longer a problem because you lose the capacity to hear that. Not actually the fantastic conversation with my grandmother, who's growing increasingly having great hearing problems. And at one point, I knew she was starting down this road of significant hearing loss because she said to me, Isn't it strange how the mosquitoes don't make sound anymore? And I thought, Wow, that's a really I mean, the fact that you've noticed that um, and also just as a kind of poetic metaphor for this idea of the kind of elimination of the capacity to to listen.

Speaker3: [00:51:57] So yeah, I think the it's an interesting question because I'm not sure those qualifications are the hot and cold make as much sense because. The the kinds of experiential possibility that are presented by sound are not necessarily shared, I think is readily with what McLuhan was looking at and considering what he was talking about those particular situations. So I think it's it's a really interesting question because even the most lo fi recording, you know, if you think about technologically those early photographic recordings, when you go back to them and you re consider that if you like the failings of the technology, those failings actually bring about an incredible depth, which I feel is a sort of high fidelity experience. You know, the the mechanism of the medium, like the vinyl, you know, there is so much failure in vinyl in terms of a kind of audio fidelity. But those failings become part of the cultural resonance of the object and in fact becomes I would argue that it's part of the drawcard of listening to music in that format is the kinds of failings the harmonic distortion that you get from the needle on the the crackling. All of that stuff becomes part of it. And as well, I think, you know, the gestural language that goes with that. So I'm not. It's an interesting one. I'm not sure whether it

Speaker2: [00:53:22] I mean, I just think I think you're right in a way as prescient as he was, you know about thinking medium as like environment in a way, he was also very much in that sort of 1950s and 1960s cybernetics era signal to noise where you're thinking where he was really focusing on signal a lot and. And so I think that a lot of what he would have said is not because radio is a hot medium because of propaganda. Yes. So it's just the words you're hearing, essentially. But I think you are thinking much more expansively about this. Or maybe we can just now with 50 years hindsight, do a better job of of taking McLuhan's thoughts a bit further.

Speaker3: [00:53:58] Yeah. And I think we need to be fair to the circumstances that that he was working under. You know, I think that's the same for a whole lot of, you know, I'm a huge fan of Neil Postman and I think a lot of that material that he wrote in the 80s, while it was very much fixated on certain kinds of experience in media, now resonates equally as strongly. And I think in the same situation, you know, we just like to say we need to expand and we need to pull out those threads that were kind of always sitting there on the edge of the ball and we pull out one of those. We can make another ball with it. It's just kind of up to us to begin to really recognize that the loose threads actually have their own mass and weight and form. And we can, you know, take that and actually work with it.

Speaker1: [00:54:41] Yeah, yeah. I'd like to go back to Antarctica and Patagonia because you are doing these field recordings in places where climate change is being felt and experienced and taking place in really, really dramatic ways. And you're recording storms, and I imagine that you have more storms on your agenda or in your past. And of course, these storms are getting, you know, more powerful and unpredictable and come to Houston and we can show you a storm you can.

Speaker3: [00:55:11] During hearing about Oaxaca, I actually really want to go and record the wind down there.

Speaker1: [00:55:16] So, so so what do you think is what is the role of the sound artist in capturing these particular sounds that have to do with environment and climate and going back to the politics of it? Is there a kind of instrumental role that sound art can play in our comprehension and understanding of the dynamics of climate change or environmental shifts?

Speaker3: [00:55:39] Absolutely. I think, you know, the kind of acoustic ecology histories that have been going on for the last sort of 40 years coming out of the work of people like Anne-Marie Schaffer and then Bernie Krauss. I mean, there are a number of scholars and field recordings that are very much interested in that change. I mean, Bernie Krauss work around sort of revisiting environments like he's done a lot of recording around forestation and one an area is deforested and they rejuvenate it. He goes before the forest is cut down and then afterwards. And the thing that's really kind of sobering is visually it looks very similar. And you know, there are certain species that are present, but sonically it's completely transformed into sound reveals a certain invisible network ecology that is going on there. And I think there is certainly a role to be played in the same way. I think with with any sense, you know, all of our senses play a possibility, a possible role for understanding. And I think with the reproducibility of sound now, there are ways to go back. You know that I think when you when you read through, for example, his descriptions are actually very useful. And, you know, people have gone back to those and done comparative listening based on what he was kind of encountering, what he describes and the I think. One particularly that he describes is the opportunity of how far sound can be heard, how far that horizon of listening extends and how with ambient noise or the kind of nature of urban development that the horizon of listening can be reduced because of the noise floor rising.

Speaker3: [00:57:29] You know, all of that other information taking out certain things. I mean, a very great example I can give of that. One time I was recording in the Amazon in 2008 and completely pitch black. I walked a couple of kilometres into the forest and it was sunset and the sun was going down and in the forest it becomes very dark, very quickly. You can still see the sky through the canopy where it's open, but it becomes incredibly black and it is very loud. That's what you don't really realize. Tropical rainforests are incredibly loud. There's a huge noise floor, but it's a very particular kind of noise floor, which is occupied between maybe like 1000 kilohertz and 8000 10000 kilohertz, all the insects doing that. So if there is a low frequency sound that is around is incredibly present and can be heard for a huge distance. So if there was a motorboat going up the Amazon, the river and the lake, you would be able to hear that for many kilometres. Yeah, a single small motorboat, you could hear it coming and going for 40 minutes. I had this one experience of recording in the pitch black. And, you know, I guess one of these slight anxiety moments of hearing this tone that I could not describe, and I was standing a long way from the microphone.

Speaker3: [00:58:43] I'd kind of left the microphone on its own, so I didn't make any sound there, and I could hear this thing looping around like this buzzing, very low kind of frequency thing going around and around. I could I could almost track it with my eyes, but I couldn't see it. You know, you could hear it. So clearly it's very defined and it got closer and closer and was off to the side and then to the other side and then sort of felt like it was behind me and then back around and then it got louder and louder. And there was that kind of pressure that I think you feel that gradual inclination of of sound. And then literally this thing just shot out. And, you know, I could see about two metres in front of me in the dark, this gigantic beetle. It was the size of my fist and it flew directly at me and then zipped around the side of my head. It's one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had, partly for the anticipation of it of what this thing was, but also for the the way that the detail of the sound was afforded to change as it approached me, you know, as it went past my ear that I could hear those alien insect wings beating with this ferocity, that was just unbelievable. And I think, you know, when we're in the cities, in urban environments, those phenomena are going on all the time to varying degrees.

Speaker3: [01:00:05] So I had this great experience of going down to record these reeds with a group of students here and and stuff. And what was really interesting about it was, you know, I became quite captivated with the sounds of these reeds moving in the wind. But in terms of this question around the sort of ambient noise floor, the amount of sound coming from the highway, you know, two kilometres away, it was very difficult to deal with as in a kind of idea of a listenership. It was so present and so in fact so engaging that it made it difficult to focus on the the sort of brittleness of these raids. So I think there's always a challenge to be to be had there, and it's when you go to different environments where that is not an issue where you realize the real capacity for listening to take place. So, you know, I had the great fortune to go to Antarctica in 2010 and the clarity of sonic phenomena that was unbelievable. I know I have this particular recording that we can listen to. That is of literally the sound of a seal's nose opening and closing as as it sleeps in the sun. And the detail of that breathing is so hypnotic and so powerful that it really was very telling because I mean, at the same moment, you know, obviously in Antarctica, you can see these huge markers of climate change. And, you know, just a few days before this particular recording was made, I saw the most amazing image of this mummified seal that had been revealed through this the ice rapidly melting that summer, and it had melted much further than before.

Speaker3: [01:01:48] I mean, I went down with this wonderful scientist who'd been going for 42 years at that point, and Rudy, his name was and he explained that, you know, in various other years they'd been they'd been melts and they'd seen these seals revealed, but they'd never seen specimens that were this old, you know, the the ice of. On back that far that it was revealing seals that had died many, many decades before. And there was something quite powerful about seeing this desiccated shell of a of a creature there revealed from its icy tomb. And then, you know, at the same time, this wonderful living seal being able to be experienced in a way that wouldn't be afforded in other kinds of settings. So there are these, you know, you recognize that the criticality of those situations and the beauty of of, it's a shame that some people will never, ever get to experience not just Antarctic, but other areas that have this richness. You know, I always think everywhere has a richness. It's just about moving beyond that kind of preoccupation with the incidental, you know, we tend to shun the incidental when really actually we just need to relish it. And when we do this whole other sense of the world is is revealed

Speaker1: [01:03:04] In the sort of the mummified seal corpses getting revealed through this glacier melt. And then as you'll hear in this recording, this incredibly vibrant and literally vivacious sound of breath coming in and out of this one nostril is really kind of troubling and yet inspirational at the same time. So we're

Speaker3: [01:03:25] Still breathing.

Speaker1: [01:03:26] Yeah, they're still breathing for now, and we're glad that you were there to record it, and we were so glad that you were able to to come and talk to us here today, Lauren. So wonderful. This was hands down the most sort of sophisticated and long and in-depth conversation that I've ever had about listening and sound and hearing, and it's been really a fascinating trip.

Speaker3: [01:03:53] Well, hopefully everyone can wander out and just listen for a minute after this.

Speaker4: [01:03:58] Alison, thanks so much. My pleasure. What? And it. It. It, it, it, it it.

[01:09:24] It. It. Ha.

Speaker4: [01:11:16] Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Oh. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. He. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Beep, beep, beep beep. Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. Hmm, hmm, hmm. Hmm, hmm. And hmm. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

[01:16:10] I. Just. And.