Monday, April 21, 2008
We all just want to be listened to
This project took a long time to finally turn into something tangible. However, I think that in searching for this project I actually discovered a lot more than can necessarily be gathered from the final product. Of course, this is not actually a final product, but more a glimpse of one point along my exploration of how to frame listening. After thinking of listening as an art and something that could be learned or refined, I found myself wondering about the different ways of listening. It occurred to me that to truly listen might mean to truly understand which is quite a powerful idea. Maybe if we could learn to listen in new ways we could understand in new ways as well. So I set about thinking about the ways we traditionally frame listening--the sense of hearing, auditory sensations, talking--and I decided I would need a new frame. Traditionally, we listen to spoken words, but in my project below I attempt to listen to written words. Instead of utilizing the sense of hearing with sound, I utilize the sense of sight with images. Another key aspect of this framing is that it breaks away from the idea that we must listen to one thing at a time and in a chronological order. Here, the images work together all at the same time and come together to create one simultaneous and possibly continuous understanding. This image is only the very first attempt to explore a new way of framing listening and I believe there are endless more possibilities. For my first (and fairly amateur photoshop) attempt I decided to use images of passages from my own personal journals. I choose passages that I found particularly telling about myself so that the project was framed as a way of listening to and understanding a person, in this case, me. The overall idea then is that there is a way of listening to this image, and, by listening to it, there is a way to understand it and to understand something about the person behind it.
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2 comments:
Fantastic!
How insightful!
Some sounds require particularly close listening; their levels are such that they can easily disappear in the midst of more assertive sounds.
Any movement can have a related sound, so in reading, the movement of eyes has a rhythm, and there are embedded and implied movement in the ideas as well as in typography itself.
Some scripts suggest arabesques, swirls, corkscrews, and so forth.
Oh yes --a frequency pattern, the pictures of sound, in their most familiar forms, tend to be modulated; nonlinear, peaks and valleys, rises and falls
so a linear or chronological processing is not necessarily supported by the multi-directionality of experience.
Experience extends in all directions, events occur in all directions.
I like very much how this form of listening you've invented requires effort. It is rigorous listening, and requires that a commitment be made to hear, a willingness to understand.
Thank you.
A wonderful image to listen to --and what I hear, I will translate into language systems, some of which will likely be text forms which perhaps i will sing.
I am especially intrigued by the reaching that occurs just off-center, a frequency pattern in form of hand, another tined structure;
I am intrigued by the gesture of grasping, by direct contact as a way to feel the sonic content, as a player piano reads raised notes or cut-out patterns to produce sound, as Braille is scanned with fingers, and the sound of text is heard in the mind.
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