Mind Wandering
The Reflection on Reduced Listening
Humans tend to think base on stories, with visual and experiential precedence. When our ears receive sounds, we instinctively link them with their sound sources and consider the cause. People who are not long-term trained tend to always do association, even when we try to eliminate visual influences (Chion, 2012, p. 28). This is not benefiting the practice of reduced listening.
This leads me to an idea, that we can try reduced listening on the foundation of causal listening. By confirming the sound source to the brain at first and guiding it not to question the cause, and instead focus on the sound’s characteristics, maybe we can better achieve reduced listening.
However, this approach has huge uncertainties when it seems only workable on individual level (aside from collective memories). The accumulation of listening experiences is highly personal, with big differences between every entity, even when we exist in the same time and space (Pasoulas, 2020, p. 224). I decided I should first focus on personal experiences and conduct an auditory experiment on myself. This might be challenging for listeners because sounds that are familiar to me could be completely unacquainted to others.
Theme Based on My Reflection
Based on the discussions above and my personal experiences, I came up with the theme of this project.
When I work in my most familiar yet also the most boring environment, my thoughts often wander away from what I should be focusing on. Different sounds in the environment that I had never thought existed or noticed before start to be extracted by my brain, amplified, and tracked at this time. I want to recreate this mind wandering by recording environmental sounds that exists in the environment, then gradually amplifying the ignored sounds within them, and even distorting and rearranging them into a more surreal soundscape.
Unlike my previous work of forgetting the sound source, which achieved reduced listening by not recording (labelling) sound sources at all, I detailedly documented all the sounds I searched and recorded. When recording specific sounds in the environment, I spent a lot of time accurately finding their sources, trying to make sure that I understood the causality before listening to them. I think this process echoes my method of building reduced listening on the foundation of causal listening.
In terms of location selection, I started with myself and chose my bedroom; but to bring closer shared memories and experiences, I included Creative Media Center, a place that is most familiar and intersected by everyone, hoping to bring my practice to more people to try as well while showcasing my daily routine in this building.
The structure of the work includes two locations as I mention before, and each soundscape of the location includes normal environmental ambience and then developed into a more abstract form. The abstract sounds have all appeared in the normal environmental sounds.
Production
In order to achieve more flexibility and accuracy of the project, I recorded every fragments of the sound environments individually and recreated the soundscape in the DAW. I chose Second-Order-Ambisonic to arrange more detailed positions.
Workflow
Reflections
After multiple times of listening to my project, I did find myself focusing on the characteristics of sounds, but I am not sure whether it was caused by my familiar environment or by many times of listening. Maybe this project should be treated as a demonstration of how my mind is wandering first, and the reflection of modes of listening is a additional aspect that should be discussed more in further practice.
References
Chion, M. (2012). The Three Listening Modes. The Sound Studies Reader, 58-63. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9780203723647-10
Pasoulas, A. (2020). Timescales and the factors influencing time perception. Organised Sound, 25(2), 221-231. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355771820000138