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In late 2012 I developed a work entitled The Inaudible Archive of Incredible Promise (2012d). I felt it was a more satisfactory manifestation of my ambitions for Open Studio. In the piece participants were provided with the contents of a sound archive on library cards, which they then made audible by vocalising and then recording them onto one-minute long cassette tapes. These sounds then became the audible content of the collection. At the time I felt the work was a more open piece, one that allowed for a deeper engagement with listening and sound, as per my initial ambition for Open Studio:

Allowing for multiple possible hearings and understandings as well as maintaining the possibility of an extended listening time-space, and delineating the sound-space enough to allow this attentive listening to arise. (Scott, 2012e)

Figure 10: Scott, D. (2012) The Inaudible Archive of Incredible Promise (setup view) This was because it still allowed for an acousmatic and imaginative listening to occur, but

they emerged more from participants own listening and experience, rather than from a collection of objects that I selected and controlled. It was still framed by a conceit I had devised, but this acted more akin to the jigsaw pieces I outlined in my report. The pieces of the jigsaw were present but all kinds of combinations were possible.

The work featured a large two-metre by one-metre wooden panel displaying two hundred, one-minute long cassettes (see figure 12). Some of these were blank; others had already been recorded onto and featured doodles and drawings written by participants directly onto the transparent plastic of the cassette (around 600 tapes were made by the end of the project). Next to the display was a long bench on which six tabletop tape players play recordings previously made for the archive. On the floor in the room there were three one metre square panels (modelled on Foley sounding boards) on each of which sit three top loading cassette recorders and a box of noise-making materials (see figure 10). Finally, there were multiple library cards on each panel describing the contents of the archive (see figure 11).

Figure 11: Scott, D. (2012) The Inaudible Archive Catalogue Cards

Throughout the devising of the project I was again exploring the modes and strategies of listening derived from the canon I had collected. In this case these modes and strategies were (again) acousmatic listening; causal listening, derived from Michel Chion;

‘imaginative’ listening, taken from Don Ihde’s writing in Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (1976); ‘innovative’ listening, from Salomé Voegelin’s writing in Listening to Silence and Noise: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art (2011) and her essay ‘A Speech for Noise’ (2008);

and Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening (2005).

Figure 12: Scott, D. (2012) The Inaudible Archive Tape Collage 2.6.1 Imaginative Listening

The auditory imagination is vibrant, sometimes disturbingly so, breaching the boundaries between self and other via hallucination or uncontrollable internal voices. Popular science

books such as Oliver Sachs Musicophilia (2007) or Daniel B. Smith’s Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Hearing Voices and the Borders of Sanity (2007) offer many examples of voice hearing, auditory hallucinations and neurological anomalies involving imagined sound. In Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (1976) Don Ihde describes an experiment in imaginative listening in which he listens to Mozart whilst also imagining the music playing at the same moment, augmenting the real sound with his own extended notes. He describes this a

‘copresent polyphony of auditory experience of the perceptual and imaginative modalities’

(p.134), suggesting an ability to inaudibly conjure up both sound in the mind’s ear and to listen to this sound in counterpoint to external ‘real world’ sounds.

Kendall Walton, in In Other Shoes: Music, Metaphor, Empathy, Existence (2015) writes of a more dreamlike listening, different to the intellectual hard work suggested in Ihde’s experiment.

He asks, ‘in what ways does music engage our imaginations? … Imagining as I understand it can be spontaneous, nondeliberate, a passive experience rather than something one does’ (pp. 154/155).

Figure 13: Meehan, S. (2003) Field Recordings Volume 3 This imaginative listening is present in a number of silently sounding artworks. It’s a modality explored explicitly in Sean Meehan’s Field Recordings Volume 3 (2003, see figure 13), which prompts the auditory imagination with words. This text work is ‘a collection of letterpress printed matter…meant to be consumed in the same manner a recording is listened to…when used in concert with the viewer’s ideas the piece can suggest and shape a silent listening experience’ (Meehan, 2003). It was also a mode I had explored in my

own work Field Recordings of South London Windmills (see figure 14), created during my MA at the London College of Communication and the subject of a journal article in Organised Sound, published at the beginning of my PhD (see Scott, 2011). The work consisted of field recordings made at the sites of former windmills and played with an imaginary listening to history and absent buildings.

Figure 14: Scott, D. (2010) Field Recordings of Former South London Windmills Such works are explicit in demanding what R Murray Schafer calls in his essay ‘Open Ears’ (2003) the ‘ear of the imagination’. In the same essay Schafer also goes on to note how haiku poetry developed a subtle and powerful play with the auditory imagination, citing the following verse by Basho as an example:

The voice of the cuckoo Dropped to the lake Where it lay floating

On the surface (cited in Murray Schafer 2003, p.36)

This listening imagination is also encouraged in contemporary forms such as the Onkyō performance discussed earlier, where quiet performances make it, in the words of one reviewer, ‘absolutely impossible to judge whether the individual listener’s perception of the seemingly imperceptible shifts is based on the listener’s own consciousness or an actual physical occurrence’ (cited in Lourde, 2008, p274).

2.6.2 Imaginative Listening In The Inaudible Archive

In the case of The Inaudible Archive of Incredible Promise I was asking audiences to actively engage with imaginative listening by asking them to imagine a sound, and then to make it with their voices and with objects. I developed the idea after spending time on the British Library National Sound Archive website and reflecting on the evocative nature of the catalogue’s descriptive texts.

The catalogue descriptions required an imaginative listening on the part of the casual browser. The actual sound on the recording becomes ‘a common starling’ or ‘Away In A Manger (preceded by a conversation)’ (two examples from the archive) through the suggestion of the catalogue description. This ‘program’ creates a particular narrative for the sound offered: the browser listens in a different way, ready to match the sound heard with memories of carol singers, for example. The program also focuses the browser’s ears onto specific signifiers within the sound heard: they listen to the starling rather than the wind or running water in the background.

In relation to location and nature recordings this notion may seem rather trivial to point out - we listen to the starling because we want to hear the starling, so that is what we hear - but it highlights how the conditions of its presentation encourage a particular mode of listening that leads to a particular understanding of that sound⁵. The reading of the sound archive ‘program’ involves an imagined listening to the forthcoming sound before actually hearing it: one ‘pictures’ the sound of a starling (or an approximation of a starling, or a guess of what a starling might sound like) before one listens to the sound. Our ability to do this might predetermine whether or not we proceed with the listening. This is certainly the case in my own experience of trawling the incredible array of sounds on the British

5This presentation is further nuanced by the listeners existing knowledge of the recording. They may be aware of the recordist’s (Lawrence Shove) work, of his intentions and techniques, for example.

Library National Sound Archive website. If I feel I know what something sounds like (i.e.

I can imagine it) I may not click my mouse, if it’s something new (and my imaginative listening draws a blank silence) then I may click, so I can make it audible and understandable. This comparison of remembered and actual sound continues during the hearing of the recording itself, enacting Don Ihde’s ‘copresent polyphony’. I am satisfied when the starling I imagine matches the starling I hear, or I may be surprised and delighted when it deviates from that imagined hearing, a deviation that then informs and alters my imagined hearing on future occasions.

Figure 15: Scott, D. (2012) The Inaudible Archive of Incredible Promise (Detail)

I wanted to creatively exploit this dialectic between the imagined and the actual in The Inaudible Archive. By reading the library cards and then beginning to imagine the sounds on them audiences would employ this imaginative listening. The tape recordings taken from The Inaudible Archive often contained initial conversations about what the sounds would sound like:

“High-pitched … loud … quiet … beeping … buzzing”

“What noise does the bird make?”

“How do they sound when they’re dancing? They go ‘boom boom boom!’”

Each comment or question above refers to the sounds ‘heard’ after an internal and

imaginative listening to the archive contents, offering some indication of the internal listening process at play. After some dialogue the participants then began voicing the recording. Visitors made audible the written descriptions by vocalising and making sounds with Foley objects and then recording the sounds onto the tape recorders.

2.7 Listening Out Loud: Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening Within The