Entangled Listening

Workshop Overview

Time: Tuesday 2025-06-24 09:00-12:30 AEST

Place: ANU Hanna Neumann Building Area, Extra Classroom

Doings: This workshop explores the concept of 'Entangled Listening' or 'Listening-as-Baradian-Apparatus' through a combination of technological and conceptual prompts. Presented as scores, participants will first engage with listening practices through technologies that modify hearing perception (i.e. ultrasonic audification, high-sensitivity microphone playback, and tactile listening), then write their own scores to communicate their own experiences. Finally, we will conduct a discussion of the experiences in trying to understand and translate listening experiences. By asking directed questions about similarities and differences we aim to have a productive conversation about aural diversity and what that means for design. Sharing of listening experience through score is more generative than reproductive; it intends to produce modes of relation without dictating what an experience is or how an experience should be.

Preparation: No experience or materials necessary, though you are welcome to bring your own notebook and pen.

Accessibility: Contact June for any accommodation requests

Who: Anyone with interests in design, sound studies, listening practices, or somatics.

Link to Full Proposal PDF

Abstract

Listening is fundamental to music practices and provides technical and cultural context to the design of musical instruments. Through various entanglement theories of human-technology relations, we can understand listening as a Baradian apparatus that motivates, propels, and evaluates the design of new musical instruments. Further, we can use listening practices as a method to de-center the human. We propose a workshop primed by emerging theories in sound studies to critically examine how listening appears, how it functions, and how it performs. Through guided mediations, hands-on exercises, and prompted discussion, we aim to integrate a plurality of listening experiences and suggest tuning our listening toward more entangled design practices.

Key Concepts

• Listening practices, with or without technology, can actively shape and reshape imaginations, memories, and intra-actions with the world (Oliveros, 2005) (Voegelin, 2014)
• We propose that the concept of the apparatus offers useful insight into listening, suggesting that the boundary between “listener” (possibly technologically-mediated) and “listened” (soundscape or other signals) can be redrawn according to context. Listening as an apparatus presents an entangled subjectivity through an ongoing correspondence of thinking and doing with the material world (Robson, et. al., 2014). This attentional disposition demonstrates an ambiguity between making music, exploring sound, and designing musical instruments.
• A tracing of accountabilities and responsibilities in designing musical instruments and building listening machines can begin to formulate in considering both an interdependency of beings and things in how sound is produced and a plurality of aural abilities in how sound is perceived (Drever & Hugill, 2022).

Technology

• Ultasonic demodulating headphones: first created for a spatial sound installation (Robson, et. al., 2014), this device consists of closed-back headphones with a small microphone on the outside of each ear cup. The signal from the microphones is multiplied by a carrier frequency of 20.5kHz, creating a form of modulation that pushes ultrasonic signals down into the audible domain (and vice versa). Another curious property of the system is the way that the modulation exaggerates the Doppler effect so that every slight head or body movement perceptibly changes the frequency content of the sound. In the original installation, the headphones were paired with ultrasonic emitters playing precomposed material modulated up by a corresponding frequency. Here, we offer a reduced version of that with a small number of emitters playing simple tones, while also exploring curious phenomena discovered during the development of the installation in which certain sounds (e.g. footsteps on a hard surface, crinkling bags) produce interesting sonic experiences through the modulator. These tones are restricted to frequencies that can be played back through headphones.
• Ultra-high sensitivity microphones: this device consists of a pair of headphones and one or more electret microphone elements. The microphones will be deliberately set to an extremely high gain so that very soft sounds, electrical noise and interference are all boosted to audible levels. The signal will pass through a hard limiter that ensures the total amplitude never exceeds comfortable listening level, creating a situation of searching for places of quiet and solitude to be able to attune to micro-sounds amidst everyday noise. Anyone with hearing sensitivities or misophonia will be advised to proceed with caution. A byproduct of this sensitivity is that small body movements that cause the microphone or its cables to move may have audible consequences. These tones are restricted to frequencies that can be played back through headphones.
• Earplugs and Tactile Listening Many forms of listening are possible; it need not involve the ears and the auditory nerves, as d/Deaf musicians are aware. This exercise seeks to recentre the experience of listening to other parts of the body by attenuating cochlear hearing (especially high frequencies) through earplugs while increasing sensitivity in the body. A simple approach of holding an inflated balloon with the fingertips allows the perception of sound as tactile stimuli, though other membranes or surfaces could work equivalently. It is crucial to emphasise that this exercise is not presented as simulated disability; it claims no insight into d/Deaf experience. Instead, it offers a different approach to defamiliarising listening that doesn’t presuppose the ears as the main locus of perception.

Schedule

Media Links

The following two videos show sound installations by Nicole Robson using the ultrasonic listening devices used in part of this workshop. The workshop does not feature the compositional material of either installation; rather, these videos are provided to show some of the effects of moving around in space while wearing the ultrasonic demodulating headphones:

Organizers

Ethical Standards

This workshop builds in part on listening technologies developed by organisers Robson and McPherson for earlier studies which were reviewed and approved by the research ethics board at QMUL. All technologies will be tested for safety including safe listening levels, prior to arrival at the workshop. This workshop takes inspiration from the concept of Aural Diversity (Drever & Hugill, 2022) which rejects a single normative notion of human hearing in favour of a broad spectrum of human and nonhuman ways of hearing. However, none of the four human organisers of this workshop are d/Deaf or significantly hearing impaired, even as our aural experiences may differ. We do not seek to use this workshop to advance a solutionist agenda toward disability or any other way of being, but instead seek to raise more general questions about what listening might mean in different contexts.

Acknowledgements

Funding for this workshop is provided by a UKRI Frontier Research grant (EP/X023478/1, “RUDIMENTS: Reflective Understanding of Digital Instruments as Musical Entanglements”) and by the Royal Academy of Engineering under the Research Chairs and Senior Research Fellowships Scheme.

References