Note: I wasn’t in for this lesson, so I am ‘teaching myself’ from the slideshow and making notes in my own time

In this lesson, I got to explore the idea of psychoacoustics (your brain perceiving a sound, and acting upon it once it is received through your ear) and auraldiversity (which draws parallels to neurodiversity, it is the explanation that everyones hearing is different, and that hearing is a unique combination of differing experiences case by case, person by person.)

I really enjoyed reading up about the different ways of listening. Casual listening is the act of listening with the intent of gaining information on a sound’s purpose. I really enjoyed Ingrid’s piece about the glass marbles breaking the glass. It really made me focus on the sound of the glass breaking and all the audible qualities and artefacts that come with that. I always read up about semantic listening and reduced listening; both of which I found very interesting, although a bit difficult to get my head around.

After this, I read about Maria Chavez. I found her piece ‘I just know it’ to be really interesting whilst also quite abstract. The part I enjoyed reading about the most about this piece is how she cut up a variety of different recordings to form the sentence ‘I just know it’. For me, the idea of stripping the original context of these sentences is really personal and almost dark. Then, a new pattern of sounds and syllables are formed when the words are matched together to form the sentence which adds a whole new context to these specific performances of these words.

After I finished the slideshow, I made effort to perform Pauline Oliveros’ ‘Re Cognition’. I recorded myself playing a chord on acoustic guitar and had it loop in Ableton. I sat in a dark room (which is interesting to note since there are no guidelines on how to perform this piece) and listened to the chord until I didn’t recognise it anymore. It took a while, but my definition of ‘not recognising it anymore’ was a change in context; the chord no longer evoked the same emotions and feelings for me, its context had changed the longer I listened to it. I would like to perform these piece again in the future, changing specific variable such as other noise in the room, distractions, whether the room should be light or dark, time of day, etc, etc.