Just Listening

Songs of a Wooden House

drifting through sound

Just Listening is a search for noise, for silence, for unspoken words... Just Listening is an opportunity to explore the sounds of the past which came back to us like an echo, transformed by our present. It is an attempt to capture our individual struggles and shared joys through acoustic imagery. Just Listening sought, unintentionally, to focus on the questions rather than the answers. All of these questions, we think, remain open.

Is noise a universal fact?

Is noise in the tropics [louder, more diverse], a consequence or a driver of wealth?

Is the acoustic diversity of a particular city unique?

Does the act of listening mean that one should remain silent?

Do cows snore, do they dream?

Is that rain?

Do bats sound like whales?

Can we map sounds to a branching tree?

In which language should I transcribe what I listen to?

In the end, what is listening? Absence, emptiness, noise, electricity, death, life, memories, my mother, a bird, perhaps a trogon, the crushing of the waves?

Can I listen whilst I write? Can I write whilst I listen?

Are all refrigerators noisy?

Can roosters lose their voice?

Do you like the song of birds?

Do bats sing?

Did we create concrete music, concrete poetry?

Can you hear the train train bus?

What should we do with unpleasant sounds?

Is silence power, is silence scary?

Is what I write what you hear?

Do I want to transcribe things I don't "understand" but listen to?

How long does a thought last?

Is it possible to transcribe unintelligible sounds?

How well do we remember voices?

Songs of a Wooden House, drifting through sound, provides an overview of the material and the exploration process of our research project – an attempt to just listening -and to, using Pauline Oliveros’s words – listen[ing] in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. We chose sound as a medium because we were curious to find out whether it would help us connect among each other and with the environment that surrounds us. Perhaps what we have tried to do is explore through the sonorous language, questioning what a diversity of sounds could potentially transmit to us. We experimented with sounds that we were exposed to in different moments of our lives (historic recordings) and in a variety of our current life contexts whilst being part of SoC. Looking back, this shared process, among our collective, SoC peers, and friends, led us to reflect, not to condition our mind towards the sounds that we were exposed to.

During our exploration, we developed a series of exercises, some of which we used within our collective and others that we shared with SoC peers and projects. 

We compiled recordings of sounds around us.

We listened to these recordings freely, individually, as well with a group during our distance-based digital encounters.

Sometimes we shared these impressions in writing or through spoken language. We tried to learn how not to impose a homogeneous way of sharing.

Some of the exercises we designed aimed at exploring different approaches like moving information and translating these recordings into the written form as an approach to transcription. Some kind of sound translation or sound transcription.

Our approach to this collected material was not theoretical; we were not interested in giving any interpretation from what we were listening to, although voices and dialogues were quite significant in our recordings.

We might have, unintentionally, generated a cartographic sound archive.

To a close friend of Just Listening, our project led us to create a collective sound memory...

Songs of a Wooden House

As part of the research, and probably very much influenced by prior experimentation and the motifs that came from the collected materials, Just Listening lab experimented with Songs of a Wooden House as a contribution to the end of the year event of School of Commons, If it is a Garden that has Become a Wilderness. We produced a satellite live evening event in San José, Costa Rica and, a week later, the piece was also part of the collective exhibition in Zürich in the form of an audio and video installation. 

Songs of a Wooden House was a live sound event with minimal predetermined guidelines and timing structure. Each of us selected a set of recordings a-priori for the event without letting others know so as to enable a collective listening experiment. Sound, raw and modified, was reproduced by means of speakers and amplifiers located close to the walls of the room, with sound being projected towards the center. As such, there was no stage. The event hosted a collection of distant field recordings of cows, birds and bat calls, human voices, a variety of languages, daily life, industrial and organic sounds, live music by acoustic instruments and electronic devices, a poem read out loud … Songs of a Wooden House became a space to share sound and to collectively listen to it, on a rainy night among friends.

Con pintura.

Con plomería.

Con electricidad.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con yoga.

Con sexo.

Con voluntad.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con silencio.

Con remos.

Con juanilama.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con terapia.

Con pastillas.

Con silencio.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con bicicleta.

Con jardinería.

Con lectura.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con teatro.

Con paciencia.

Con natación.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con distancia.

Con amuletos.

Con humildad.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con una brújula.

Con un rosario.

Con un par de dados.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con una bola de disco.

Con un ovni.

Con un sintetizador.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con un poema de Vallejo.

Con dos pedacitos de lotería.

Con nostalgia.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con malas decisiones.

Con audios de wp

Con una canción de amor.

Así fui saliendo de ese pozo.

Con este mantra.

With paint.

With plumbing.

With electricity.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With yoga.

With sex.

With will.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With silence.

With oars.

With juanilama.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With therapy.

With pills.

With silence.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With cycling.

With gardening.

With reading.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With theater.

With patience.

With swimming.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With distance.

With amulettes.

With humility.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With a compass.

With a rosary.

With a pair of dice.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With a disco ball.

With a UFO.

With a synthesizer.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With a poem by Vallejo.

With two lottery tickets.

With nostalgia.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With bad decisions.

With wp audios.

With a love song.

This is how I started getting out of that well.

With this mantra.

One of the aims of our project was to research the positive capacity of the act of listening -or more precisely, of just listening- to interact or relate with the world.

We continue to explore a question that led us to the creation of Just Listening: Through the process of just listening to the vast diversity of sound around us, can we increase our awareness of the complex web of acoustic elements of our environments and enhance our connection with the world we live in?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Tamar Qurkhuli, Adrián Cruz, Jeymer Gamboa, Juli Schmid, Anthony Arias, Sarah S. Calderón, Daniel Ortuño, and to the SoC peers who shared with us their listening notes, voices, recordings and reflections. Many thanks to Marea Hildebrand, Josephine Baan, Jelena Mair and all School of Commons fellows for their deep inspiration and for introducing us to an alternative and meaningful peer-to-peer learning experience.

IMAGE’S LEGENDS

Figure 1: Listening notes by Juli S, with the collaboration of Baboo

Figure 2: Fragments of the listening notes exercise – Two minutes per day

Footnote to this image:

This exercise with variations was also used by other SoC Labs explorations:

-“Hidden in plain sight. Sonata for many voices” by Elisa Lemma, as an introduction to some of the project’s experiments.

https://www.schoolofcommons.org/labs/hidden-in-plain-sight-sonata-for-many-voices

- An invitation from Lili Huston-Herterich, “Ongoing Manifesto of Radical Dependency”, in joining a digital conversation with Linus Bonduelle regarding his sound and sculptural installation Moving in, out, around sound, at Available & The Rat

https://www.availableandtherat.com/2022-linusbonduelle.php

Figure 3: Excerpt of an exercise in which the acoustic content of a sly campfire was transcribed into written language. Here the listener selected a time window between minute 0 and minute 2 of the 7-minute recording 

Figure 4: Timeline of Songs of a Wooden House

Text box 6 (Poem): Poem read by the poet Jeymer Gamboa as part of the happening Songs of a Wooden House, San José, Costa Rica

LINKS

Link 1 (from A collective polyphony of voices):

https://willipink.eu/cloud/s/

Legend to the video: A collective polyphony of voices- Credits Kitchen Session 11.05.2022. Voices: Amy, Eirini, Elisa, G Will, Jo, Kari, Lea, Leo, Mark, Vivi. Listeners: Amy, Eirini, Elisa, G Will, Jo, Juli, Kari, Lea, Leo, Mark, Vivi. Forest: Juli. In collaboration with: Tamar

Links 2 (from soundcloud):

https://soundcloud.com/just-listening-990130151/atable-in-reserve-at-gledi?si=d52c6976b84d4e709a31008257850af1&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Legend to the audio: A Table In Reserve At Gledi

&

https://soundcloud.com/just-listening-990130151/calls-from-gledeberg-to-georgia-to-hermosa-beach-cr?si=d52c6976b84d4e709a31008257850af1&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

Legend to the audio: Calls From Gledeberg to Georgia to Hermosa Beach CR

Link 3 (Songs of a Wooden House’s piece): https://willipink.eu/cloud/s/FRHKc3ZE5FPLoAHLegend to the video: Songs of the Wooden House. Just Listening in collaboration with Adrián Cruz (guitar pedals, audio & video creation), Jeymer Gamboa (poem & voice), Anthony Arias (drums)