Composing the Field of Dwelling: An Autoethnography on Listening in the Home

Iain Findlay-Walsh

06:17 030420 the pressures acting upon and within this place are intensified by lockdown the kids are driving me up the wall the inverse of social distancing is social compression home becomes hyper-relational implosion while the quiet streets outside fill with birdsong and an apocalyptic politics morphs and grows somewhere far away right here under my nose This article unfolds as a story of listening and sounding in the home I share with my partner and two primary school-aged children in Glasgow during the global COVID-19 pandemic. As a practicing sound artist, I have spent a lot of time listening to and through everyday spaces, and during the COVID-19 pandemic I have been considering the usefulness of this critical listening as a basis for dealing with the new situation of living inside. If sonic practice can attune people to the social, environmental, material, technological, and political dynamics of their world, then what can be learned, and what new capacities can be developed and shared, through an engaged practice of listening in the home under lockdown? Combining diarized notes, storied reflections, first-person field recordings (Findlay-Walsh 2019), theoretical discussion and analysis, this textual and sonic autoethnography presents and discusses my efforts to develop a critical practice of listening as the form and function of this home changes during lockdown. Connecting Pauline Oliveros, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Salomé Voegelin’s generative listening practices, Tim Ingold’s “dwelling as building;” Sara Ahmed’s embodied “orientation;” Jean-Luc Guionnet et al., George Lewis and Alexander I. Davidson’s improvisation as radical sociality; and Stacey Holman Jones, bell hooks, and Peter Gouzouasis et al.’s spaces of (self-)critical pedagogy, I trace this developing practice as a basis for regenerating and inhabiting domestic space as co-composed music.

4. Living Here With You In This Flat Right Now

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chundering boiler longs to give up

wooden bed frame creaking through fucking

brash cartoons resonating and rattling down the hall

boys’ racers tearing up the street for an audience of no-one

LJ on Zoom work call – cold gated pro voices

low rumblings of neighbors living through the walls

computer fan hum – deep, warm

repeat kettle eruptions

murmuring radio haunting kitchen

small boys rolling around – benign screaming

T H E T O P T E N R O C K S O N G S O F A L L T I M E

prone quiet caregiving phone calls to friends

foreboding silence of the snow outside

invasive doorbell – package arrival (“is this B/2”?)

bath runs full again – nurturing heat / futility portal

all together

altogether

06:17 030420

the pressures acting upon and within this place are intensified by lockdown

the kids are driving me up the wall

the inverse of social distancing is social compression

home becomes hyper-relational implosion

while the quiet streets outside fill with birdsong

and an apocalyptic politics morphs and grows somewhere far away right here under my nose

06:34 040420

this small home-office is place as ex-closure

a place for closing out

the relentlessly present social world

in favor of privacy, solitary work, desire, anxiety, action

07:10 120520

“anyooone? anyoooone?”

“I’m anyone”

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deep listening alone and with each of the boys

brief quiet time with LJ as morning coffee floods the brain

soundwalking the home to co-compose the soundscape, attending to balance, breathing, posture, noise, resistance, energy that won’t be contained any longer, needs that manifest as taut silences

improvising as caring, responsiveness, ethical action and critical intervention

performance and play

bamboozling each other with nonsense

making space for each other to be on our own

hugging and wrestling – pursuing intensity

tactics of timing, of feeling for, sensing and guiding form

dropping a sustained pitch into the scene

layering moments, events, packets of experience, endings and beginnings

feeling the music in the flat

trying to hear the flat as music

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“Alexa”