Thinking about Native by Pauline Oliveros;

“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”

Thinking about how impressionable I might be as this is one of the first things I remember from the course in 2020. I’ve referenced this piece in my dissertation because it’s very much so concerned with listening with the body, perhaps even multi-sensory. This appeals to me as someone with a complicated relationship with listening exploring aural diversities and the multi-sensory. Thinking about ways in which we can open up listening exercises more to others with complicated relationships to sound.

In a lecture at the beginning of the year, David was taking to us about creativity within writing talking about intentionally swapping sentences around as a idea generator I think this subconsciously influenced me to think about Native as an idea generator.

I clipped my microphones to my shoes and went for a walk. The issue with this kind of “assisted listening” (I’m not sure if this term works and will try to change it at some point) is that it’s not very discreet, if it isn’t very discreet, walking around at night you draw attention to yourself with expensive equipment in tow. Whilst I was recording, I wasn’t able to enter any kind of listening state. I was too aware of the expensive microphones on my feet, how far I could feasibly go, was I drawing attention to myself.

More thoughts about the logistics of the exercise and less thoughts about the states of hearing. This ruins any listening experience you are likely to have. So in order for this concept to work it might need to be stealth at times. The recording equipment probably should be cheaper and easy to source. E.g maybe just on a phone? Or portable recording device. This is about breaking down barriers of what it means to collect a good recording. So it should be affordable and accessible.

However I’m happy with this recording, it was an interesting experiment.