Sonic Commentary: All Ears

WHAT CAN a compilation of recordings tell us about listening, aside from what we hear when we listen to it? As the eight selections included here demonstrate, music and sound art can have a more sophisticated relationship to listening than simply that of a sonic object to be encountered by the listener.

Many of these recordings call attention to the limits of human hearing. Two in particular highlight the ear as a finite and material actor in the process of processing sound. In Christopher Haworth’s Vertizontal Hearing (Up & Down, I then II), the listener confronts a series of sounds that seem to deceive the ear, whether through manipulation of the listener’s ability to distinguish two spatially separate sounds or the cognitive dissonance of simultaneously ascending and descending movement.

Also foregrounding the ear in the act of listening, Jacob Kirkegaard’s Stereocilia for 7 Ears presents the otoacoustic emissions of ears, captured through microphones placed in the ear canal, then played back in a sound installation resembling a pile of speakers clustered on the floor. These otoacoustic emissions, unlike those that Maryanne Amacher explored in the 1990s, emerge independently of external sonic stimuli. The ear is not just an organ of perception; it emanates sound too.

Echoing earlier works such as Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room, some of these pieces draw attention to the ways in which physical surroundings can affect the reception of musical sounds. Jen Reimer and Max Stein’s composition Wellington Tunnel, for example, features instruments and live electronics reverberating through a shuttered tunnel beneath Montreal, while Gather, by Sarah Hennies, mixes the unnatural tones of the vibraphone with field recordings she captured in the gorges of upstate New York.

Two other works here focus on soundscapes as witnessed phenomena that leave a trace in the mind of the listener. Both Gerard Gormley’s Mochorel and Calendar, doors, and corridors, by Maile Colbert and Rui Costa, present a sonic reflection on the memory of spaces: rooms, cities, universes.

The last two pieces noted here, Masz, by Yvon Bonenfant and Cox Ring, and Telepathic Concert, by Tomomi Adachi and Jennifer Walshe, highlight the intersensorial dimensions of listening. Bonenfant and the ephemeral Ring worked closely with the artist Sebastiane Hegarty to create a series of works that respond visually, tactilely and aurally to a recording by composer Diamanda Galás. Masz is about being touched by a song, in all the connotations of the term, and is itself intended to be felt with the body as much as with the ears.

The contact between Adachi and Walshe, on the other hand, is not haptic but telepathic. In a series of related performances, the artists agreed to improvise simultaneously, communicating only through extrasensory perception. The results, including this recording, push back on our preconceived notions of the limits of human hearing.

Presented together, these eight recordings speak to each other as much as they speak to the listener. They push, often gently, on the barriers between seemingly disparate realms: the sonic, the subjective, the material. As a group they demonstrate the vast territory where listening operates, from the intracranial to the supergalactic.