Staging Listening: Performative experiments on the heterogeneity of the audible

Staging Listening unfolds through the development of an audio-visual and performative work for ACPA Post-doc trombonist and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Fairbairn, a specially purposed multiple loudspeaker setup and various instances of video technology (both pre-recorded and live). The research process comprised the experimentation and composition of a series of modules that would later on be articulated to build up a long-duration performative work.

The project involved the development of two main semi-public performances set up at the Conservatoriumzaal and a collaboration with the Film Lectorate at the HdK, enabled through instances of discussion and feedback with artists and scholars from the realms of cinema, performance art, visual studies, photography and visual anthropology, among other contexts.

At the core of the project lies a question on the nature of aural diversity. Often, aural diversity is predicated upon differences in the identity of listening agents. The diverse nature of the listening process – as a form of active engagement – tends to remain, though, unaddressed. It is widely assumed that "we all hear differently," but not much is usually discussed as to what these differences consist of, nor on how common patterns of listening are constituted (which lie at the core of musical practices and language use).

In the last decades attention to the aural as a fundamental site of engagement with our 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 the diverse forms in which such engagement takes place in listening, and to address its epistemic implications.

Staging listening explores the conditions of spectatorship bred into practices and histories of audiovisual staging. The project interferes on the coupling of the visual, the embodied, and the aural to interrogate how forms of audiovisual spectatorship are constituted and disassemble the components on which acoustic fictions are built.

Among the main layers that the project explored, the following can be highlighted:

• Protocols of attention: This concerns, among other components, the way technologies create patterns of expectation that inform how perception occurs. The use of amplification circuits is one among several elements that play a role in the form in which attention is performed in the aural realm. Across the work, the way aural perception is formed is explored by challenging habitual patterns of audio reproduction.
• Aural perceptual stabilization: Often, the experience of listening is not accurately described by claiming that sound can be represented as a series of isolated events that take place in single and definite locations. As sound actually always occurs inherent to an oscillating medium that the listener takes part in (such as the combination of air and architectural constituents of a location), sound is better understood as intrinsic to space rather than occurring in a space. Our cognitive apparatus uses different cues and strategies to decode the spatial qualities of sound events. As a result, a space (or rather, the spatial aspect of sound) is experienced differently if the trigger that activates an environment is a chirping cricket, a sustained note of an oboe, or the slam of a door. Different types of spatial information are rendered possible by different cognitive processes. The aural is then misrepresented when the notion of an enveloping virtual ‘screen’ is enounced as a way to convey the spatial quality of sound in its entirety. In this project, I investigate and systematize the use of what could be termed as non-conventional loudspeaker setups to explore embodied aspects of sound perception.
• Auditory and visual synchronization: In this project, the juxtaposition of live cameras and pre-recorded visual material is articulated so as to explore how our perception of sound is informed by its articulation with visual cues. The use of live input rendered visible across different screens challenges how the spectator engages with the mediation of the aural and the visual and how the experience of presence is shaped within the context of the performance. In its articulation of the visual and the aural, the work unfolds in a hybrid space which includes traces of cinema screening, live-cinema, opera/theatre, music performance and essay forms.