Sonic Embodiment:Trembling with the Multitude
by Liza Rinkema Rapuš
What is the potential of ~ listening ~ as a somatic practice of attuning to the world,
as a practice that supports the transformations we are going through?
Listening, as a practice of giving sensuous attention, has the capacity to totally reorganize my world. Tuning with other human and nonhuman beings makes me aware of the monstrous potentialities of what a body can be, experiencing its untimeliness, and its limbs breathing in many dimensions. I start to understand the body I am right now, the technology of my body system, and the many ghosts and aliens that co-habit this ‘I’. I start to get a sense of the histories that live on my tongue, the molecular ancestries we exchange through our breath.
On Öland, we tried out techniques of focal and global listening, as suggested by composer Pauline Oliveros: standing in the grassy field next to the barn, we closed our eyes and played with focusing and expanding our sonic fields of attention. Attuning to our bodies and the environment, we explored the technicality of our human hearing; the ways it can zoom in, expand, and tremble at its boundaries of capacity.
Pauline Oliveros distinguishes focal and global listening in her essay ‘ Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (to practice practice)’. Focal listening is zooming into a tiny spot, for instance, your heart, and listening into the specifics of its sounding. It is zooming in to the granular details of the sonic picture. In this practice, I get intimate with the voices sounding close to my skin.
Global listening, on the other hand, happens in an expanded field of attention. I practice it like this: step by step, I try to hear broader and broader. Then, when I cannot go any further, I hold my attention to all the sounds in the field I’ve delineated. It requires a lot of attention, hearing this multiple surround-sound composition. Its complexity can only be perceived when attention relaxes its usual focus and becomes soft, broad, and expanding in its strength.
~ The first thing that happens when I start to listen is that space gains dimension. Sound sources surround me and texture the surroundings. I start to tap into this texture, its relations, its specific embodiment(s). It is a dimension ruled by the logic of simultaneity, a sense that comes from everywhere all at once. To move in this space is to impact all the points, simultaneously. To be accountable, although not stable, and to be plural, always already. ~
Practicing listening in this way is not only about the ears. It is an attempt to get playful and precise with the whole sonic embodiment we inhabit and are inhabited by. By playing with embodied sonic skills, a kinesthetic matrix is opened up: understandings of plurality, spatiality, paradox, friction, and resonance become available to the body. It asks for tapping into many perceptual and sensual systems at once.
It is important to practice, to repetitively exercise this muscle and so slowly gain capacity and strength. After practicing listening together in the workshop, it was pointed out how stretching the listening field could become overwhelming. Going too far too quickly creates a kind of sonic dizziness; losing clarity of hearing through overwhelm. I understood that a learning process would be necessary to grow comfortable and skillful in expanding the capacity of broad, full-bodied listening. Like with all skills, it takes time and repetition to consciously feel into the different aspects of the practice, and then exercise them. Through this process, they can integrate into the unconscious and become graceful movement.
~ Through listening, ‘I’ respond to the call of becoming undone, of shattering a subjectivity that has been sitting on top of the food chain, to shiver inside the vicious porosity of being (in) a web of connection.
~ Through listening, ‘I’ set myself up for failure, or rather, a free fall without
an end.
~ Through listening, ‘I’ train my brain-body to move with awareness and respond creatively in the face of fear.
I would associate my experiences with what Salome Voegelin calls ‘sonic physical optics’. She elaborates on Karen Barad’s terminology of a physical optics, which points to a diffractive consciousness. 1
“In sound we are not reflected but practice diffraction, the bending of light through our simultaneous difference. Thus, we perform the physical optics of Karen Barad: producing vibrational patterns from our overlaps and tracing invisibly all the ways we intra-act. In those intra-actions, we are constituted together as a being with and in proximity however far apart.”2
Voegelin speaks of a sonic sensibility that notices proximities and patterns, a sensibility that understands accountability through inextricable entanglement rather than through reflexive distance. ~ to move in this space is to impact all its points, simultaneously
The sonic, as an area of meaning-making, assumes relationality first and foremost. In the intra-actions of listening and sounding, relations are made and unmade simultaneously; threads are woven~pulled from the sonic web. Listening opens one up to these relational ecologies, while listening techniques sophisticate the specific ways of being-part.
It is this sense of moving in connection and complicity that the practice of listening brings into being. Like a forgotten and unused muscle, it fumbles in the dark, uncertain of how to exercise itself. ~ to be accountable, although not stable, and to be plural, always already.
But somewhere, it/I knows. It is just waiting to be re-membered again. 3
~
The workshop on Öland was inspired by Pauline Oliveros’ “Quantum Listening”4, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals”5 and “How to Land: Finding Ground in an Unstable World”6 by Ann Cooper Albright. The notion of sonic physical optics is derived from Salomé Voegelin, “Uncurating Sound: knowledge with voice and hands. 7
Read Sonic Embodiment Poem