A renewed interest in sound, identified by contemporary art theorist Jim Drobnick as the ‘sonic turn’ (2004), has attempted to address the absence of an aural equivalent to ‘visual studies’ across the arts and humanities. Within theatre and performance studies sound, until recently, as described by Patrice Pavis in the preface to Theatre Noise, ‘tended to serve the visual arrangement or design’ (2011: xi), thereby neglecting the full potential of the use of sound as non-semantic material, its affectfulness, atmospheric properties, and aesthetic implications. Audio theorists Sanne Krogh Groth and Holger Schulze, in their introduction to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound, point to how the Futurists and Dadaists, despite differences in their approaches and ideas, were united in their insistence on sound for this very reason (2020). In the exposition, I seek to explore and expand upon the potential of non-semantic, affectful relations occurring between bodies, objects, and phenomena.
The extent to which aural relations influence the trajectory of bodies through space has been taken up in recent years by a number of curators keen to interrogate critical listening practices. Barbara London, curator of ‘Soundings: A Contemporary Score’ (2013) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), was keen ‘not to use headphones’ and therefore developed each installation as a ‘tuned environment’ to emphasize the experience of the works and their potential to envelop the gallery-goer. By recognizing that ‘listening is about focussing’, London aimed to encourage visitors to listen, not just to hear. Similarly, curator Sam Belinfante, for ‘Listening’ (2014), commissioned by the Hayward Touring Curatorial Open, aimed to emulate a sense of aural attention by choreographing the visitors’ experience towards the works in the exhibition. Belinfante used motorized technology to stagger the aural activation of the works, thereby encouraging gallery-goers to be led by their ears. This approach sought to interrogate the act of listening rather than merely stage its aural objects. Both Belinfante and London’s curatorial approaches allude to structures of aural attention and an awareness of sound’s potential to generate aural space within a gallery environment.
The aural-as-encountered informs the work of theatre studies scholar George Home-Cook who, prompted by the work of political philosopher Don Ihde, recognizes that phenomenology needs to be ‘practiced’ (Home-Cook citing Ihde 2011: 99). In highlighting the necessity to engage in the ‘rigours and particularities of phenomenological description’ (ibid.,) Home-Cook grounds his methodology in his experience as a ‘listening spectator’. Home-Cook makes use of this to attend to the works of contemporary theatre makers e.g. Robert Lepage and Complicité to understand further and develop theoretical frameworks on perception gleaned from philosopher Alva Noë and P. Sven Arvidson’s concept of the attentional sphere. Home-Cook’s methodology is useful for recognizing the necessity for an embodied, phenomenological approach to thinking and writing about aural attention within the theatrical environment.
Building on Home-Cook’s work, I explore, via practical means, the limits of aural engagement in two distinct contexts roughly divided into plastic/sculpture (experiment I) and site/environment (experiment II). I investigate, through these two works and their associated creative processes, how aurality directs our attention towards certain objects, is organized through horizontal, vibrational relations, and how it can be discerned in an attitude shaped by attention or orientation which shifts in response to certain events, objects, and phenomena. Both works featured in my exhibition ‘Experiments in Aural Attention: Lingering Longer & Listening Away’ (2015) at Aberystwyth School of Art.
