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.

6. Home As Music

Critical listening and sounding in this flat during lockdown affords relational sensitivity to the people and things that comprise it. Furthermore, as Oliveros, Westerkamp, Lewis, Davidson, Guionnet et al., and Voegelin each attest, active listening as a way of participating in space can be enhanced through an overtly musical consideration and approach. The notion of “music” and the “musical” that I invoke denotes vibration, simultaneity, aesthetic purpose, form, connection, wholeness. This home is music – when we listen and play it so. I listen now for a keynote (Schafer 1994/1977: 9), for a sounding process that produces persistent sonic texture and its transformation, for sonic events, points of relation and moments of accumulation, for a sounding nexus of social, technical, material, political relations. Encountering the soundscape of my home as music enables a conscious consideration of, participation in and appreciation of emerging relations and forms – a focus on the detail of spatial relationship. Listening into this place as music teaches me and us about what is presently admitted and what is closed out of our domain, about thresholds of agency and access.

My room has sound behind its walls, under its floorboards and on top of its ceiling […]. The walls are less stable in sound, wobbly even, permeable, letting things in and out; testing notions of intimacy, neighborliness and safety. (Voegelin 2014: 1)

If we seek to engage with and co-compose this home as music, how should I and we approach playing this music today and how can I (and we) re-learn to play and hear it tomorrow? How can I deepen the critical rigor of my musical listening and sounding practice here, participating with my family in not reproducing but regenerating the contexts, materialities, identities, agencies that perpetually make this place? How might we learn and teach and learn to teach an attention to sonic, material, relational, temporal, technological, social flows of agency, as an approach to cultivating our understanding of each other and ourselves, in relation to the world? Deep Listening, soundwalking, and free improvising as re-generative co-composition – against fixity.

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my relationship with my partner

we work to listen

with each other

1. Introduction

2. Home

3. Critical Listening Practice and Place

4. Living Here With You In This Flat Right Now

5. Smart Media Spaces and Selves

6. Home As Music

7. Pedagogical Place

References

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