In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • On Missing the Live of the Everyday Ambient
  • Natalie Bell (bio)

Sound examples related to this article are available at <www.nataliebell.org/sounds>.

When John Cage introduced ambient sounds as musical material, music was no longer a creation of the performer but one of the listener. Following his precedent, I understand performance as prescribing a way of listening—and of listening to ambient sounds in particular. My performance is minimal and mute. With a tap on the shoulder, I silently interrupt the subway passengers who are listening to their ear buds and pass them a small flier that encourages them to download and listen to my podcast, Sounds Like, while riding the subway. My compositions for the pod-cast consist of my own field recordings of the subway, layered with old ethnographic field recordings and various 20th-century avant-garde works as well as contemporary popular music. The predominance of subway recordings, however, is primary to my goal: that listeners learn to open their perception to the aesthetic qualities of these ambient sounds and appreciate the experience of collective listening practices in public spaces.

In contemporary culture, not only the concert hall is obsolete. Still more impertinent are the casual performances of the urban everyday—namely, [End Page 43] subway musicians and the ambient soundscapes that subsume them. The use of a podcast as media—though somewhat elementary—is a precise element of my endeavor. In reincorporating the ambient sounds that would otherwise be live into a listener-controlled private performance in the collective public space of the sounds' origin, I invite the listener to investigate her capacity to aestheticize the familiar and locally present sounds and to reconsider how listening practices with respect to one's everyday surroundings are cultivated or neglected. As a prelude to other works involving sound environments and technology, my pod-cast is a simple exercise in engaging the contemporary listening practices that are privately motivated and often focused on excluding ambient sounds. [End Page 44]

Natalie Bell
E-mail: <natalie.a.bell@gmail.com>. Web site: <www.nataliebell.org>.
Natalie Bell

Natalie Bell's recent pieces can be heard at <www.nataliebell.org/sounds>.

...

pdf

Share