Listening practice, experiments from the audial imagination

As the 2023 Randell Cottage Writing Fellow I have developed a personal ‘listening practice’.

Sometimes I collect found instruments and sounds and explore their auditory possibilities. I then ‘play’, record and edit these into sound works, which in turn enable me (metaphorically speaking) to go ‘inside the sound’, sparking a sort of ‘audial image’ that seeds various forms of poetry. 

At other times, my ‘listening practice’ simply means being attentive to the audial and imaginative nuances of place and moment, augmented by research focused on the intersection of poetry and music, past and present.

A driving question and curiosity for me has become, What is the music of the moment?

I speak more about this in the video here made by Godwit Films.

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Sound design experiments

Experiment #1: Eighteen petal note

I recorded the sound of eighteen rose petals falling and made a short grungy base track on loop:

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Experiment #2: Dressing in a leaf

When I was ‘playing’ a leaf, the following raw recording inspired the poem below:

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Experiment #3: Enough bones for a game

During my walks around the city I sometimes collect ‘found instruments’ such as seeds, fallen leaf matter etc. to ‘play/record’ and make sound design works with. On one walk I collected a gum nut and ‘played’ it together with a small piece of kauri gum that a friend gave me. The track reminded me of a ‘knuckle bones’ game and inspired a new poem called ‘Enough bones for a game’.

In the following sample I use a vocal layering of the first line of the poem alongside digital augmentation of the two ‘instruments’ and a sample of a town bell I recorded in Kassel, Germany.

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Experiment #4: The Dorian mode

For research and enjoyment I have been listening to compositions by Tōru Takemitsu and reading about his life and work. For my eighteenth birthday my friend Chloe gave me a Takemitsu recording and I have been a super fan ever since.

Takemitsu was arguably obsessed with the Dorian mode and I became obsessed with learning about scales and modes. In the spirit of getting in there, I experimented with notes in the Dorian mode and made a playful work that inevitably is a failure in mode, but a success in pleasing mess?

This track includes augmented digital piano and a recording of birds roosting at dusk on Featherston Street.

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Experiment #5: Sausage sizzle…as phantasmagoria

As you’ll know if you’ve read a few of my prose poems, I often channel lived experience into surreal and imaginative territory. By blurring the boundaries between the actual and imagined I aim to prompt the reader to form new habits of thinking, feeling and being in the world.

To give an example, a recent prose poem playfully reimagines a sausage sizzle I observed near the Wellington Cable Car as phantasmagoria, a form of horror theatre popular in the 19th Century.

I overheard the boy on the grill ask a punter ‘What would you like on it? in a way that suggested even world peace or 24 carat gold sprinkles might be possible. From there, the poem unfolded.

As a reward for reading this far, please enjoy an audio recording of

The Lantern of Fear sausage sizzle

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While in residence at Randell Cottage I have collected a wide range of ‘found sounds’ and audio samples from around the city that I will continue to work with to shape sound design works, poems, and a collaborate live performance in the near future.

On a related note, a prose poem called ‘The new lives of my children’ was published on NZ Poetry Shelf in August 2023. The poem emerged from my ‘listening practice’ as well.