Listening and Sounding at an Angle - Rachel Beckles Willson and Martina Raponi

Sound is immersive and distributed. In distinction from visual stimuli, it works on us through a range of sensorial channels. In its rich vibrational embodiment it affords the construction of unique epistemologies (acoustemologies). But what methods do we have with which to develop these ways of knowing through sound? And what happens when our strategies fail us, when we encounter only silence? What can such moments of sound’s apparent failure teach us about relationality and coexistence?

Our interactive workshop will engage participants in our complementary projects: listening with other-than-human entities, and acknowledging Deaf sound practices within sonic discourses. We each find ourselves at an angle to norms of listening, because we meet silence, or an unheard. We will share ways that the heard meets the unheard, how sonic practices can test the elasticity of perceptual and conceptual frameworks, how we can engage with movements, capacities, rhythms and temporalities that lie outside our normal listening tendencies.

Questions we are investigating include the value of vegetal silence for confounding listening assumptions. Plants do not communicate with sound that we can hear, and sound artists often resort to translating other data into sound. But what if we work instead with the interspecies silence as an active presence and allow it to be a paradoxical catalyst for more complex co-creation? Could it help us attune more deeply to an ethics of care, restraint, and multimodal responsiveness to ecological contexts? 

Deaf sonic practices challenge the presumed cochlearity of listening and sounding; they call for the widening of our analytical and sensorial tools to describe and appreciate the sonic knowledge that is produced outside (below, beyond) the thresholds of audibility. How to account for sound practices that preferentially utilize (sign) language (in its somatic and rhythmic articulation) as a basic compositional tool? How can we redirect the “negative potential” of sound as “what is known by exclusion”, without reaffirming normative and audist epistemes?

Does this challenge to our listening open a critical perspective on what we think investigative listening is, and how we might reconfigure our practices?