Listening to Noise (Pollution): Performer and Audience Environments

The research project is focused on composition using sound recordings that allow listener-participants to reflect on noise pollution and develop new insight into its causes and ramifications, as well as demonstrating the subjective nature of noise. A portfolio of compositions will be produced focusing in the first two years on solo and small ensemble works, allowing the exploration of different approaches using noise, with the intention of writing a larger scale work in the final year. This study will include site-specific pieces using recordings from publicly accessible areas including local National Trust sites, creating installations using local noise polluting sounds. The accompanying commentary will document and critically reflect on the process - including the rehearsing and performing of works - and provide an overview of the theoretical concepts that stimulate the work and place it in context.

We all have the ability to hear noise, but rather than just hearing noise, many composers have been interested in how we listen. Pieces such as, Hildegard Westerkamp's Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989), Peter Ablinger's Sitting and Hearing (1995), and Matthew Shlomowitz's Lecture About Listening To Music (2017) all deal with our perception of noise and challenge our listening methods. With depleting natural wildlife, now struggling against our sounding environment, we are mostly subjected to the monotonous din of traffic noise (Parris and Schneider 2009). Since the release of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring (1962), which resulted in the development of the Environmental Protection Agency, the environmental crisis caused by human involvement has been at the forefront of debate
(Paull 2013). Increasingly, composers are looking to environmental studies to evaluate the implications of human noise towards natural soundscapes. Of particular note is composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer's study of Acoustic Ecology, which seeks to find relationships between humans and a balanced soundscape or acoustic environment (Schafer 1977). Often, transportation is the most prominent cause of noise pollution (EEA 2009), with low-fidelity sounds removing variety and nuance from our soundscapes (Schafer 1977). Moreover, Guattari's 'The Three Ecologies' (1989) suggests that 'we have challenged the Earth enough and are now on the brink of ecocide (Pindar and Sutton 2000, pp. 3). Environmentalists are looking to sound art in demonstration of the resulting sound/silence of mass extinction. Landscape ecologist Bernie Krause uses field recordings, in The Great Animal Orchestra (2012), to show the quietening effect aeroplanes have when cruising over forests. We have also seen an emergence of composers who work with animal sounds, such as David Rothenberg (2005), who co-creates pieces with animals, exploring the importance of their communication.

Theories on listening, such as Michel Chion's three listening modes (1990), causal listening (identifying sound sources), semantic listening (sociocultural reading of signs and messages) and reduced listening (sound as a purely sonorous phenomenon) and Eric Clarke's book Ways of Listening (2012), challenge our initial perceptions of noise. According to Attali (2014, pp. 26), 'noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of emission'. This might suggest, in relation to Chion's semantic listening, that noise interferes with our ability to apprehend a given sound, creating a blockage in our ability to apprehend meaning.