Plan of the Project

Attesting to the acoustic environment’s essential role in the constitution of physical, social, and existential space, the art of phonography (“sound writing”) captures sound’s unique capacity to document the complex network of encounters that define our experience of the world. This experiential research project explores the ways that the mediation of sound fundamentally alters our relationship to the acoustic environment, and how acts of “sound writing”—considered here as both as audio field recordings and as experimental writing practices—may be used to develop an ethics of imaginative listening that reconsiders the sonic experience of everyday life.

This research is still in a very early stage of development. In this first stage of the project, I am attempting to literarily mediate the acoustic environment via short, plainly descriptive experimental writing practices inspired by Georges Perec’s series of practical writing exercises in the essay collection Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Encompassing various approaches to chronicling the intimate and public spaces of his Parisian neighborhood, Perec utilized a combination of exhaustive, objective description and more personal reminiscences of the minutiae that compose everyday life, foregrounding the "infra-ordinary" as the material contexts through which existential life reveals itself. As Perec’s work emphasizes visual aspects of everyday environments and the complex network of relationships therein, he leaves the acoustic environment relatively unexplored. Thus, I am adapting his experimental writing models to the sonic experience by documenting a series of soundwalks in order to attempt to develop a literary equivalent to audio field recording that may be capable of tuning the reader’s ear to a form of clairaudience ("heightened listening") activated in the imagination.