This project assumes that listening is diverse – and as a result, what is heard is different – as listening is informed by different operations that enable a sensing agent to engage with its environment.
Classic enunciations of listening modes (see Barthes1982, Schaeffer, 2017) mostly anchor the diverse forms in which listening occurs to the changing attitudes of listening agents (e.g. how a human agent reacts to different situations: if one is to listen to sound in a life-threatening situation, if one is to listen to it as music, etc.) Moreover, auditory perception is usually distinguished between the polar opposites of listening (conceived as intentional) and hearing (as non-intentional). This distinction, while useful in a variety of circumstances, has two main flaws: On the one hand, by suggesting that there is something like a passive stance, it conceals the fact that any perceptual act implies already the active engagement of an agent in an environment. On the other hand, by establishing a polar opposition, it obstructs a thorough address of the wide variety of attention forms that auditory perception can take.
In my research an appraisal of subjective dispositions is not enough, since I am concerned with exploring the variable conditions that inform how acts of perceptual engagement take form across subjects. Rather than assuming that the listening subject is primary, these conditions are to be explored as informing the constitution of different listening subjects.
In the last decades attention to the aural as a fundamental site of engagement with a living environment has increased, relevantly challenging a long history of western ocularcentrism. It is on this context that it becomes of primary relevance to address how such engagement occurs, and to address its epistemic and affective implications (i.e.: how we know and how we partake in our environment via auditory means). At the core of the project lies a question on the diversity of that which is heard. This diversity is often predicated on differences in the identity and the capacities of listening agents. The diverse nature of the listening act itself – as a form of active engagement – tends to remain, though, unaddressed. It is widely assumed that "we all hear differently," but not much is discussed as to what these differences consist of, nor how common patterns of listening are constituted (which lie at the core of language usage and musical practices).
Staging Listening sets out to investigate specifically how infrastructures and protocols of audiovisual staging inform listening. By infrastructures and protocols I understand the material characteristics, the techniques and the social habits of practices of communal spectatorship, ranging range from theatre contexts ancient and modern to digital streaming platforms. The investigation unfolds in two dimensions:
On the one hand it creates the conditions to explore how auditory engagement is produced – i.e.: how listening changes – via experiments in the material staging of audiovisual performances. These experiments are documented in the media excerpts found across this exposition.
On the other hand, it investigates how histories, notions and protocols of the history of audiovisual staging pervade thes articulation of the aural and the visual. This can be found in the written segments deployed across the exposition.
In her book “Théâtres du monde”, Frédérique Aït-Touati elaborates on how particular technological instances of theatre have played a role in establishing a model of the world ”to be possessed as an object, as a panorama or as a scene entirely visible for an absolute spectator” (Nancy, 2004). It is in this sense that the theatrical spectacle can be addressed as nforming patterns of attention and engagement with a milieu. Theatre is herewith not understood merely as the site where a performance takes place, but as an architectural type, a collection of protocols and a set of attention practices that materialize across different medial contexts.
Utilmately, the purpose is to explore the relational circuits across which listening takes place. Rather than assuming that any sound event immediately allows an agent to engage with its environment, the question is to explore what kind of configurations and procedures are at play in informing this engagement. As Colombian ethnomusicologist and sound scholar Ana María Ochoa Gautier has argued, “in the West”, sound (or music) is usually conceived as “an eminent field of transparent affect and relationality. […] That is why in the West the expression ‘to have a voice’, to ‘listen to one another’, and more recently, to feel a ‘resonance’ or ‘vibrations’ between people are often expressions used to invoke the idea of participation, the recognition of the ‘other’.”
The problem is, she argues, not that the relational aspect of sound is to be disputed, but rather to assess how these statements entail particular forms in which relationality is constituted: forms which assume the configurations of sensorial engagement that pertain to the cultural domain of the West, its mind/body dualism and the identification between voice and subject. “The point is not to negate that the ear produces an ontology of the relation between the person and the world, but rather not to confuse that with our own notion of relationality.” The variable nature of the relational circuits enabled by sound need therefore to be reassessed.’
As I have claimed elsewhere, too often […] the relational character of sound is presumed to rely on the autonomy of the subject, its stable identity and the attribution of an independent consciousness. In this project, the exploration of the variable forms in which perceptual engagement unfolds across infrastructures and protocols of attention is aimed to open up the variable forms in which the engagement of a listening agent and its environment is produced.
"Nature as décor" Theatre as epistemic model
In her book “Théâtres du monde – Fabriques de la nature en Occident”, Historian of Science and Stage Director Frédérique Aït- Touati claims that “if painting invented nature as landscape […] theatre invented nature as décor (the scene of human action).” Aït-Touati elaborates on how practices and technologies of sixteenth–century theatre pervaded cosmological and epistemic paradigms, they informed the way in which human knoweldge was conceived as possible. She elaborates on the theatre of this time pervaded the tropes and models employed by philosophers and scientists like René Descartes and Francis Bacon. She argues that the “cartesian edificie” is “a system of interconnected machines” inspired on the technologies of stage machinery of the theatre of the 16th century: Descartes’ “theater of meteors […] evokes the ‘piéce a machines’ to introduce his physics and his thoughts on space and matter.”
The “deep mutation of theatrical décor, and of aesthetics in general” that Aït-Touati describes, the “shift from a discontinuous and heterogenous extension (the synchronic décor of medieval mysteries) to a continuous and homogenous extension (the unified décor, or with alternating changes)” enables and anchors a form of engagement with reality. The particular operations that theatrical fiction enables in this period are exposed as enabling a model for the comprehension of space and matter.
While the mechanisms of modulating attention in the context of the theatrical spectacle are usually attributed to the primacy of the visual, I address, across Staging Listening, how singular forms of sensorial engagement are also inscribed in the aural aspect of the theatrical congiguration. Rather than relying on the auditory as a seemingly "more direct" and less mediated medium, the project explores the variable forms in which listening unfolds as an act of sensorial awareness.
Sound Studies pioneers Jonathan Sterne and Emily Thopmson have described how conditions of audibility are historically and technologically constituted. In this project I address the technical and acoustic infrastructure of the theatre as a site for the production of diverse audibilities.
The epistemic dimension of these audibilities has been highlighted by the notion of "acoustemology", that American anthropologist Steven Feld he coined in 1996. Feld developed this term in the context of his study of the Bosavi people of New Guinea, to express how "acoustic sensation, knowledge, and imagination" are singularly articulated. This articulation was fundamental to express the role that sound plays in the Bosavi's engagement with their place of inhabitance, while also developing an epistemic perspective which prioritizes "knowing through relations", in which one "does not simply ‘acquire’ knowledge but, [...] knows through an ongoing cumulative and interactive process of participation and reflection." ("Acoustemology" p.13 entry keywords in sound)
The notion is significant as it helps draw attention to how the performative nature of listening can affect an agent's engagement and knowledge of its lived realm. In this project theatre and its associated practices (cinematography, music performance) are taken as sites of sedimented forms of attention.
[Documentation Excerpts from Staging Listening experiments at the Conservatoriumzaal, September-December 2024]
Staging Listening (working title) is an in-progress work elaborated across a series of sessions involving trombonist and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Fairbairn. The work comprises components of cinema screening, live-cinema, music performance, music theatre and essay forms.
In the documentation to be found across this exposition, a series of (consecutive) segments (or modules) of the work can be heard and seen. These were registered during two open studio sessions at the Conservatoriumzaal in the Royal Conservatoire Den Haag during the fall of 2024.
While a number of components remain constant across the piece, such as the presence of the performer, the sound produced both by the trombone and the multi-layered P.A. setup, the screens where visual elements produced by live cameras as well as pre-recorded are projected, each of the segments explores diverse articulations of the role and behaviour of these components.
These articulations can be said to unfold across three layers:
- The diverse forms in which the aural and the visual are coupled
- The diverse forms in which acoustic awareness is produced via audio constellation
- The diverse forms in which attention and expectation are organised within the protocols of a staged performance
These performance experiments were carried out at the Conservatoriumzaal (Royal Conservatoire The Hague) on Spetmber 27th and December 2nd, 2024.
Trombonist Kevin Fairbairn is the performer in this work, conceived for a multi-layered audiovisual setup with trombone.
The audiovisual setup comprised – in these experiments – a 16-channel audio soundtrack using 5 constellations of loudspeakers: A standard 4-channel P.A., a stereo system rendering a reflected wavefront on balconies and another one on the ceiling, two stage-located consumer loudspeakers (one of them a vintage casette recorder) and two sets of horizontal line arrays (made up of three consumer type coaxial loudspeaker drivers) asymetrically setup around the audience.
Three live video-camaras were disposed at different places of the hall and its output projected through a video mixer into a main beamer-screen and a secondary LCD screen. A pre-composed video track was also sent to the same video output configuration.
Rendering Spatialities /
On the use of non-standard loudspeaker constellations
The perception of space via sound, or rather, the perception of the spatial aspect of any sonorous circumstance or event, is made possible by a combination of several cognitive processes.
Sensing agents become aware of spatial characters through auditory means by performing a number of cognitive acts. The outcome of these cognitive acts are usually refered to as "cues" which result in the production of a sense of location, volume, scale, movement and other material qualities of an environment. These cues include: interaural time and amplitude difference (the time difference and amplitude difference between the acoustic signal perceived in each of the listener’s two ears), frequency spectrum (which provides an impression of patterns of oscillation as they occur across different material volumes and densities), direct-to-reverberant energy ratio (the perceived difference between those direct wavefronts arriving at the ear first and those that arrive later as they have been reflected on adjacent surfaces), head-related filtering outcomes (technically known as head-related-transfer-functions, that enable the brain to make sense of the spectral filtering the the head’s mass produces in the acoustic wavefront reaching one and the other ear) and motion parallax (the dynamic change produced by a moving source), among other components.
The experience of space through sound can therefore be understood as intrinsically heterogenous, since it is informed by a number of processes afforded by both the capacity of the sensing agent and the material properties of the sonorous circumstance.
Often, so-called spatialization techniques used in audio processing and electronic music production put the focus on the capacity of the listener to locate virtually-imagined (projected) sound sources. Sonorous circumstances, though, often challenge a univocal ascription to sound sources and fixed andsingular locations. Since sound takes place inherently to the coupled oscillation of multiple masses, attributing a sonorous circumstance exclusively to a single source fundamentally eludes the entangled nature that informs how the spatial aspect of sound unfolds. Fundamentally, the nature of the sonorous poses a challenge to the form in which spatial distinctions are usually understood as located and singularized. A sine-wave oscillation does not prompt the same kind of spatial awareness as a door slam, because it affords different perceptual possibilities. As sound artist and scholar Raviv Ganchrow expresses it: "To hear space is to derive a spatiality from a temporal event. [...] There are no spaces fastened to either side of the ear just as there is no absolute sonic-spatiality that needs to be defined, but rather heterogeneous and intermittent contextually constituted materialisations of sound."
Every experience of the spatial in sound entails the consolidation of a singular spatiality, that is, a particular form in which a sensing agent engages with the spatial nature of the event of sound.
In this project I address this through the use of what could be called Non-Standard Loudspeaker Constellations. The objective is in this case to bring to the fore the varying conditions that inform spatial awareness. Rather than rely on synthesizing spatial awareness as fundamentally informed by the perceptual projection of virtual sound sources, this strategy uses loudspeaker constellations to emphasize the diversity in cognitive acts that the listener performs to make this spatial awareness possible.
In my work across the past decade, and especially in the case of my sound installation Focus, I’ve explored a number of loudspeaker constellation designs which draw attention to the perceptual thresholds that come up in the act of making sense of the spatial character of sound. These design strategies rely on challenging those processes in which an awareness of distance, spatial volume and material qualities is produced. Some of these strategies have taken part in my experiments within the Staging Listening project.
Herewith I describe some of the main strategies I have employed in Focus and other works:
1) Spatial or spectral change. In this first case the acoustic summation of two very similar although slightly distinct wavefronts prompt an ambiguity with regard to how variations in a sonorous circumstance are perceived as a frequency variation or as a change in a spatial impression. The difficulty in locating the threshold where this exact change happens produces an area of undecidability that emphasizes the discrete jump between either the impression of a spatial volume – which results in concealing the presence of the loudspeaker – or of a spectral change, which results in emphasizing the tangible presence as the sound-producing mechanism.
2) Un-coupled spatial simultaneity. In this case, two spatial impressions can be heard (and distinguished) simultaneously. This special case on the fact that no significant acoustic masking is occurring. As a result, the spectral imprint of these two constellations is singularly identifiable and the listener is able to cognitively un-couple them. The sonorous circumstances produced by each of two (or more) loudspeaker constellations are not perceptually conflated into a single spatial imprint – as it would usually happen in an “immersive” endeavour – and the listener cannot perceive themselves as located in a reenacted location. The superimposition of these two spatial imprints creates a challenge that prompts each of these to be perceived as medial (i.e.: as inherent in a process of mediation).
3) Empathic resonance. This case utilizes the effects of loudspeaker distortion. The material artefacts of a loudspeaker – such as for example those of a historical radio woofer – become meshedwith the ourcome of other loudspeaker constellations. The sonorous circumstance produced is heard either as a distorted representation of a space, enabled bycultural marks which play a role in identifting the acoustic imprints of loudspeaker distortion (and emphasizing its testimonial quality), or as an empathic resonance with the physical vibration of the loudspeaker membrane.
4) Virtual acoustic field or tactile interference. This cases addresses the different ways in which the coupling of different wavefronts render a spatial-material impression. Stereo imaging techniques are usually relied upon to create spatial illusions, i.e.: the impression of a projected source or field as produced by the reenactment of the time and volume difference reaching both ears that characterize the refraction patterns of acoustic difussion of a sound event. In this case, the production of stereo phantom images is contrasted with other forms of coupling such as the production of phase cancellations and beating patterns between different components of a loudspeaker constellation. This is often carried out through the use of phasing effect across limited spectral content or sine-wave oscillations. Through this contrast, patterns of acoustic coupling among loudspeakers alternate between producing the impression of a virtual acoustic field and emphasizing the tangible presence of the loudspeaker as it prompts in the ear a seemingly tactile sensation.
Across Staging Listening, these strategies are applied through the superimposition of different loudspeaker constellations, to explore how the stabiltiy of the listener’s engagement with the acoustic reality of the concert hall/theatre is challenged. Questions pertaining to the perception of distance, immersion, scale and fictional acoustic contexts are prompted.
On Acoustic Fiction
The association of cinema and an architecture of attention has been emphasized by cinema scholar Giuliana Bruno as she addresses the marriage of cinematographic projection and architecture as the basis for consolidating the cinematic event. [1] Bruno underlines the acoustic nature of this association as she quotes avant-garde architect and cinema designer Friederick Kiesler stating in 1928 that “The ideal cinema […] is the house of silence.”
Such a statement can be seen as part of the widely acknowledged silencing process of the concert hall across romantic aesthectics, as well as the pinnacle of phantasmagorization inherent in the Wagnerian project of the late XIXth century. Nonetheless, music has been entangled with theater since a much earlier stage as this can be already asserted of ancient and ritual origins of music making practices.
Musicologist Daniel Chua argues that the theatrical configuration founded by opera lies at the root of how a particular form of listening came to be produced. Chua has elaborated on how the operatic spectacle built a relationship between sound production and listener, and argues that this listening configuration informed the core of the emergence of absolute music and the symphony. The form consolidated by opera, claims Chua, is imbued by the position of the human subject in the cosmology of that period, which he contrasts to the musical paradigm that ruled ancient practices, and in which theatre was embedded in the musical ritual.
In this new context, claims Chua, the monodic text “makes audible the disembodied bubble of the ‘invisible interior’ that is the modern subject.” Thus, it “negates the ‘scriptive space’ of resemblances” which pervaded the regimes of music making and listening of ancient times, and “replaces it with the sung speech of self-representation.”
Chua draws attention to the infrastructural technologies deployed in opera’s foundational period. These technologies are inherent in the ontology of the operatic spectacle. His emphasis on the development of stage machinery and the use of backdrops painted “in perspective” signal a change of paradigm in the position of the listening subject: “Cosmic infinity ha[d] been replaced by the infinity of the vanishing point which puts the human eye at the centre of perception.” The structure of the perspectival stage came to inform the role of the musical spectator: “with this monocular vision, music […] is looked upon as an object.”
Feedback session with guest audience
In the two sessions carried out at the Conservatoriumzaal, an audience of guests was convened which included documentary filmmakers, essay film scholars, performance artists and visual studies and performance art scholars, among others. After the performances, an open discussion took place. The following items were discussed:
a) A significant point concerned the spatial layout and the form in which devices and artefacts were disposed in the hall, and how these informed the way the audience engaged with the performance.
One of these items pertains to the dimensions of the screen, which, due to its significant size, prompted cinematographic conditions and expectations.
N.B.: In the first performance only the big screen was used – although using different projection formats (in terms of size and quality). In the second performance two screens were used, the big one and a 60-inch LCD TV screen placed diagonally on the side of the big screen.
Not all impressions expressed by the audience coincided on the effects produced by the use of the large screen. Some claimed that its imposing size anchored attention to a fundamentally frontal configuration and as a consequence prevented a more sensitive awareness to heterogenous spatialities. Others, on the other hand, claimed thgat the use of the cinematographic-type screen established a clear attention pattern – therefore becoming seemingly neutral – that enabled the audience to focus on other perceptual details.
Reflections on the type, form and use of the screen were useful to consider the role of different devices in the articulation of the visual and the aural, and how they involve matters of address (how the audience felt addressed by both the visual and aural input), scale (and its impact on an experience of presence) and directionality (how the audience’s attention was lead in a single direction or many).
The strong imprint of the lkarge screen brought relevant questions concerning the role of medial apparatuses in challenging the stabilization of perceptual patterns. Its exploration (through varying dimensions, surfaces of projection, spatial configurations) becomes a significant axis of exploration for the future development of this project.
b) Following upon questions of scale, dimension and spatial configuration, the role of screens and devices for acoustic projection was brought up in their relation to the figure of the performer: How does the ratio of screen to performer relate to “life-size” dimensions? How an object or instance on stage becomes “décor” in its relation to the performer? How are the gaze and the action of the audience in general composed as part of a specific spectatorial configuration, and what is the role of the performer in this configuration?
The relationship between performer and screens was highlighted in several ocassions. This occurred both in the cases where the performer and the screen interfered with each other in the construction of the virtual field of the stage (for example when the movement of the performer aligned with the screen/s) as well as when the screen refracted the visual image of the live performer, as a kind of mirror surface.
c) The question of how the audience is “addressed”, or how it engages with the performative context was also brought up in relation to the acoustic components. The opening segment, in which a number of field recordings originating in indoor spaces is reproduced via non-direct loudspeaker constellations (placed on the ceiling pointing upwards, balcony and side of the stage) was remarked as producing a significant starting point for the performance. While the sound emitted was perceived as fictional (not sourced in actual phenomena located in the same space), its subtle character managed to draw attention to the actual boundary between the internal and the external space of the hall. This awareness of the border prompted several members of the audience to express that it produced a “sense of familiarity” which was also, simultaneously, on the verge of constantly becoming alien. This threshold enabled the listener to “become attentive” to the act of listening as a form of spatial awareness and yielded the venue as a space of “negotiation” between inside and outside. Following upon this first segment, the work was deemed successful in prompting the listener to permanently (re-)adjust, throughout the performance, to the different contexts and processes of mediation. From the beginning, it was mentioned that the work enables a process of alternative association and dissociation between modes of sound and visual production which emphasizes the instability of the act of perceptual engagement.
d) The question of spatial awareness developed on point a) was also brought into discussion in the use of the three live cameras. Overall, the use of the cameras was deemed effective, especially in comparison with the still preliminary nature of the pre-recorded visual material. Different perspectives were brought up in relation to the use of a “zenithal” camera (located vertically over the audience seating area on the ceiling) whose image expose the audience as seen from above. While some audience members referred to the “surveillance” connotations of this perspective, others pointed out that, rather than giving an impression of surveillance, this image was rich in locating the audience in a particular position and affecting their awareness of the space. It was mentioned that it was particularly effective that the camera shot in particular was fragmentary (only a few people were seen, especially in the second performance) rather than giving an impression of the whole scope of the audience. In future variations of this strategy, it was deemed relevant to further work on this fragmentary character and keep on a strategy which does not focus on exposing the faces of the audience. Through a discussion on the role of the cameras and echoing speculations already mentioned on point a), the question of the conditions of the black box and the possibility to extend beyond these conditions were approached.
e) Both in the first and second performance an excerpt of a text from Ait-Touati’s book was projected on screen. On the first performance this text was included at a rather late stage (around minute 20). The appearance of the text in this circumstance was not effective, fundamentally as it elicited a very different kind of attention from the audience than the one that the play of perceptual adjustments had installed until then. In the second performance, the text was used in a more “essayistic” manner, at the beginning. The text was then more effective in establishing a few lines the audience is invited to speculate upon throughout the performance. In any case, it is still an aspect of the work which is to be explored, as there is a risk that the appearance of an argumentative text becomes too “self-referential”. Overall, though, the hybrid nature of the work in its “essayistic” form worked convincingly. An aspect to be explored even further is the possibility to set up the use of the visual input (both pre-recorded and live) in a more continuous manner, so as to give less emphasis to montage schemes and more to establishing clear “rules of the game” that enables the audience to traverse the multiple and permanently re-adjusting layers of the work.
Overall, the discussion with specialists, practitioners and scholars from the domain of cinema, performance and visual studies emphasized the prominence that the act of becoming aware of a space yield into the spectator/listener. Expectation and patterns of reaction to that which happens around oneself is very entwined with how one becomes aware of their environment.
Theater can be regarded as informing forms of acoustic spectatorship that set up distinct modes of spatial awareness. To address this, it is relevant to understand that the medial nature of the theatrical configuration does not lie purely in its capacity to represent, but rather in the production of a circuit which activates a type of spectatorial engagement with the sonorous. In the theater, sound enters into staging operations.
Theater scholar Samuel Weber claims that “when an event or series of events takes place without reducing the place it ‘takes’ to a purely neutral site, then that place reveals itself to be a ‘stage’, and those events become theatrical happenings.” The theatrical event produces the conditions of engagement that inform the audible, altering the nature of their spatial condition. As Weber elaborates, theatrical events “can be neither contained within the place where they unfold nor entirely separated.”
Theater scholar Pannil Camp has drawn attention to how theater provided philosopher Edmund Husserl with a useful model. This model, signals Camp, was different from the one he had previously relied upon – founded on the pictorial arts – for the elaboration of his notion of image consciousness.
Image consciousness is for Husserl a category of experience linked to the domain of fantasy and detached from ordinary perception.[2] The reason theater provides a different model for Husserl is that, in the case of visual art, a fundamental incongruity stands in the relationship between the space of the image object – the actual painting or photograph – and the evoked image subject. In this case, Camp explains, “photographic image space and actual space vie openly with each other.” Whereas, in a theater, “[t]he space of the stage, with its sets and so on, analogizes actual space.”
As Camp states, in the theater “a candle is a candle”, and the image is not produced via its incongruity with an image object – like in the pictorial arts – but rather by the performative nature of a spectatorial disposition. Also, Husserl draws attention to the fact that “the church bell rings in the theater.” The category of image transcends in this case the visual and informs the acoustic domain: “[T]he toll of a bell in a play-house produces something like the image of a sound.”
Hence, the spectatorship configuration of theatre does not merely differentiate the real and the fictional, but modulates the form in which an engagement with the sensorial occurs.
Notes towards a concludion ...To be continued...
Producing Audibilities
Often, contemporary music wavers between a resignation to the exploration of the outcomes of instrumentality – “what instruments can do” – and a nihilist perspective towards the fixed status of audible patterns originated in bygone traditions. But if means of sound production are conceived not only as isolated instruments but as nodes in infrastructures of listening that modulate attention, audibility can be appraised as a realm that an artistic practice can interfere with. It is the performative nature of all actors involved in the circuit of sensing that needs to be addressed when dealing with the production of the audible. The relationship between technology and imagination is therefore reconceived, and subject, technology and imagination are not detached from each other.
The main objective of Staging Listening is to disrupt the belief in the homogeneity of cognitive processes we perform to take part in a context.
Addressing the fundamental role of the theatre means addressing the non-reproducible event of the act of listening… the singular event of the audible in its material nature.
