I am sorting out my studio. This may be the best Messy Tuesdays photo to date.

It has been unusable since November 2010 when I moved back into Mark’s house and commenced with an insane quantity of projects. I simply have had no time, energy, or inclination to sort through all the piles of stuff… until now.

I shall be assailing you with details and tidbits from the studio sortage in coming days, and there will be infrequent ebay listings here, while I rid myself of surplus possessions. There is also going to be The Mutha of all badge-listings in my Etsy shop, as I have several new ranges of found-material badges coming out in the next few weeks!

I shall begin the de-cluttering process by posting Listening Questions by Pauline Oliveros, which I have wanted to blog about forever. This piece of paper has been hanging around for a long time waiting to be discussed and after I have written this post, it can finally go into the recycling bin.

Some background: Pauline Oliveros‘s book – Deep Listening – includes some of my favourite texts on listening, art-making, and sounds. It also contains some of my least-favourite texts on the same, and I am often disappointed by the disparity I perceive between the playful, participatory nature of her writings vs. the austere tone of her recorded works. I also am uncomfortable with Oliveros’s adoption of elements of Eastern spirituality into the practice of listening.

Why does listening attentively have to be spiritual?

When I say I am interested in listening to the everyday, in paying attention to the sounds which surround us all the time and go unnoticed, people – searching for a frame of reference – will often say “oh, you mean like meditation?” and I explain over and over again that sometimes listening to the banal sounds of the everyday is just listening to the banal sounds of the everyday. Listening can be a secular activity, disassociated from aspirations towards enlightenment or self-improvement. Active listening and all the creative sonic practices which derive from it are for me part of a conceptual and imaginative practice, and not part of a search for a more wholesome existence.

Oliveros is one of the composers who has most influenced my work because I am in turns inspired and irritated by her approach. On the one hand I want to emulate and develop the ideas which I find totally exciting in her texts, and on the other hand, I want to more successfully bridge the gap between what she writes and how her recordings sound to me. Her texts – as we shall shortly see – are full of suggestions for an imaginative, inquisitive, playful relationship with the everyday world. I feel her words are enabling, presenting a toolkit or framework for differently experiencing the world. In contrast, the experience I can have from listening to my CD of Pauline Oliveros improvising on her accordion in a very resonant underground water tank, for example, is more limited. I can be impressed by her attention span, I can be transported to the resonant chambers of the underground tank, and I can have a somewhat “transcendental” experience of drifting off into the otherworldly tones sustained within the recordings. However, listening to the CD of DEEP LISTENING by Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster seems to me to be a far more escapist experience than engaging with one of her texts and putting her ideas into practice in my daily life, and this gap fascinates, irritates, puzzles and intrigues me.

How can the experience of active listening in daily life be transmitted to an audience? This is a key question for me in my practice, and Oliveros lies near the heart of it.

I led a listening group at SARU last Autumn where I presented this text to other post-graduate students exploring sonic practices, and I asked them to consider the relationship between Listening Questions and a track on Deep Listening. I re-present that same question here for you today.

What is the relationship between this recording:

…and this text?

And what would your answers be to Listening Questions? It would be amazing to read your responses to the questions if you wanted to copy and paste them…

Listening Questions, by Pauline Oliveros

1. What is your earliest memory of sound? How do you feel about it now?
2. When do you notice your breath?
3. What is attention?
4. Can you imagine composing or improvising a piece based on breath rhythms?
5. What sound reminds you of home?
6. Do you listen for sound in your dreams? What do you hear? How does it affect you?
7. The distinguished historian, William H. McNeil, has recently argued in his book Keeping Together in Time that “coordinated rhythmical activity is fundamental to life in society.”
Can you imagine tracking a rhythm pattern in your daily life and writing about it?
8. Can you imagine a rhythm pattern for the rhythm circle with your own form of notation?
9. Can you imagine composing or improvising a piece for voices using attention patterns?
10. What is sound?
11. What is listening?
12. What action(s) is usually synchronised with sound?
13. When do you feel sound in your body?
14. What sound fascinates you?
15. What is a soundscape?
16. What are you hearing right now? How is it changing?
17. How many sounds can you hear all at once?
18. How far away can you hear sounds?
19. Are you sure that you are hearing every thing that there is to hear?
20. What more could you hear if you had bigger ears? (or smaller)
21. Can you hear more sounds if you are quiet? How many more?
22. How long can you listen?
23. When are you not listening?
24. Can you not listen when something is sounding?
25. Try not listening to anything. What happens?
26. How can you not listen if your ears never close?
27. What meaning does any sound have for you?
28. What is your favourite sound? How is it made? When can you hear it? Are you hearing it now?
29. What is the soundscape of the space you are now occupying?
30. How is the soundscape shaped? or what makes a soundscape?
31. What is the soundscape of your neighbourhood?
32. What is the soundscape of your city?
33. How many different soundscapes can you imagine?
34. What would you like to have in your own soundscape?
35. What would you record to represent your soundscape?
36. What sound makes you speculative?
37. What sound gives you chhills?
38. What sound ruffles your scalp?
39. What sound changes your breathing?
40. What sound would you like whispered in your ear?