The Domestic Soundscape

The Domestic Soundscape is my area of study; I am interested in how we engage imaginatively with our immediate surroundings and in perceptions we hold about what is ‘interesting’ and what is ‘boring,’ and in what we consider worthy of our consideration and what we do not.

Domestic environments have been considered widely in the visual arts; photographers like Richard Billingham and Martin Parr have built up huge bodies of work relating to domestic life and have shown that imaginatively engaging with domesticity can provide rich and resonant cultural material.

Although artists like Peter Cusack have undertaken projects such as Your Favourite London Sounds that document our subjective and personal experiences of sounds and our attachment to familiar soundscapes, many other practitioners within sonic arts and composition practises continue to explore sound in more formal, abstract and decontextualised terms. Meanwhile for people working in relation to the domestic soundscape no satisfying archive, cross-referencing or critical framework currently exists.

I am interested as much in the context or the meaning we ascribe to sound as in its formal qualities. I hope that my research will help to draw together disparate and scattered creative activities, establish some kind of critical framework and help to bring more context-related questions to the fore in relation to The Domestic Soundscape. I also hope that I will refine my own approaches and establish some strategic ways of engaging with the sounds we encounter within the home. My explorations will deal with perception, concept, imagination, association, reference meanings and values as much as with actual sounds and my projects will frequently intersect with feminist, conceptual-art, Duchampian and philosophical dialogues as well as with areas more traditionally associated with experimental sound art.

I hope the purpose of these activities will become more self-evident as I write, read, record, make, consider and document, here.