Deep Listening: What I Learnt, From Unlearning
Through a series of chance events all failing to happen, I found myself in York Art Gallery in February, available and intrigued by the idea that the space was playing host to When All Is Quiet, an exhibition co-curated by…the Kaiser Chiefs?
A couple of lads from Leeds, one of whom has the name ‘Peanut’, is not who I would immediately jump to if I was about to curate an exhibition — but somehow, despite my own scepticism, parts of it really worked.
There were two real takeaways however — Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet and the extracts of work by Pauline Oliveros.
Cardiff’s piece was beautiful and infinitely repeatable, leaving all other audio installations struggling to replicate the intimate sense of presence — but my experience of it was heavily altered by the work of Oliveros that I had read in the room before.
Coming from the concept of recordings made by placing speakers and other sound sources in wells — Oliveros was a pioneer of Deep Listening. The term expanded from the initial experiences to reflect a deeper and more systemic way of not just listening to music — but composing, notating and feeling musical patterns.
This wont be an ode to the specifics of Deep Listening techniques however, there are people much more versed to do that, but to discuss the effect of altering the environment and the relationship with music it encourages.
Quite how much movement affects music listening is hard to quantify. It’s no secret that the secret behind EDM isn’t the music itself, but the sense of communion it can bring to the audience in it — the loss of self being almost total and the collective self becoming omnipresent when it’s performed in a live setting. But the opposite can also be true.
With reflection and meditation there is an almost unwritten normality of silence to these practices — but that doesn’t need to be the case. The physicality of a piece doesn’t have to be as extreme as a mosh pit to be felt by the body — simply breathing in a chord can alter your relationship with the music being felt. An album isn’t simply an art-piece by itself, but is entirely reflective of the setting and situation it is presented in. There’s a difference between a Picasso in a cluttered kitchen, and a Picasso on a 50ft blank wall. By allowing music to operate within a space that is special to it, you allow it the possibility to become something more.
This was the combined effect managed so perfectly by Philipsz’s I See Darkness when installed in the tanks of the Tate Modern. The darkness you enjoyed the piece in, the location of the speakers transient, allow for the piece to evolve in the atmosphere is was in. In this case the circular concrete walls and pillars provided a reflective maze for the sound to travel within — exact origins of sounds obscured like sleight of hand. There’s an overwhelming urge to try and find and quantify the sound, just like there’s a drive to quantify the music we listen to. Spotify (and the individuals) near obsession with the most played songs for example, highlights that individual experience of that song is irrelevant, the individuality of the pieces are eradicated and reduced. The deluge of information that comes out in a wave reduces all the art from it and makes a collection of potentially special experiences, vanish.
Instead of the most played song, instead think about what song is remembered. At what point can you remember the visuals, scent and emotion of a piece— because it is that what is truly unique to you. It doesn’t have to be found within the concrete walls of a gallery, the way sound moves in each space is unique and can perfectly suit a moment, but a single remembered moment is more important than any constructed figures about it. What matters is the process of being aware while hearing, making it an active experience you feel throughout your body as you do it and really, learning to listen.
