Listen too much you have trouble listening? Working in the audio field can often sap you of your basic ability to listen, as you constantly have to produce to deadlines, assess quality and generally conform a product to external conventions. But the most fundamental requirement of sound to a human is to inform them of a position in space, as before verbal communication the auditory system prevented you from getting eaten by bigger predators. This being said the importance of communication cannot be overlooked, as it is tied with our gradual evolutionary supremacy.

In steps Interference. A peer reviewed journal, supported by Trinity College Dublin, that is entirely free access. They describe themselves as follows:

“Interference is an open access forum on the role of sound in cultural practices, providing a trans-disciplinary platform for the presentation of research and practice in areas such as acoustic ecology, sensory anthropology, sonic arts, musicology, technology studies and philosophy. The journal seeks to balance its content between scholarly writing, accounts of creative practice, and an active engagement with current research topics in audio culture.”

Of special note is one article in the current issue Leandra Lambert called “Experienced Sonic Fictions“, which I shall very superficially contextualise for this article. Throughout the introduction of the piece Lambert mentions the founders in the field that established the ‘deep listening’ and ‘sonic awareness’ disciplines, which can be approximated to a form of listening meditation. Proceeding this she describes the process of free-form sound walks, and the associated imagery that is stimulated. As by letting her imagination guide her through these walks the stimulation is less and less guided by any conscious purpose, and in reaction the ideas and concepts imagined become more lucid and fantastic. Though rather random and quite time consuming it does reaffirm the idea that we need to listen to our environments and not try to block them out or classify them to swiftly. Though this capacity for ordering reality is essential in modern life, for a sound designer the ability to stop and actually listen to a scene for all its richness is worth remembering. In many respects it is reminiscent of the John Cage works on silence and of how evocative the absence of direct stimulus is, paradox or contradiction I’m not sure?

Coming back to the opening gambit, though sound walks may not be for you, the idea that to truly assess and recreate a sound scape one must remember how to listen is a very important skill. How you choose to do this can come in many forms, as with all creative processes, but it is a important principle as audio technology reproduction methods approach the means to reproduce true soundscapes to a mass market.

Another journal of note is that of SoundEffects, also open access and very stimulating.