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.

1. Introduction

2. Home

3. Critical Listening Practice and Place

4. Living Here With You In This Flat Right Now

References

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5. Smart Media Spaces and Selves

6. Home As Music

7. Pedagogical Place

References

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