Amy K. Pix // Sound Arts and Design

Listening connects us to our acoustic environment. “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning and deciding on action”, “we listen in order to interpret our world and experience meaning.” (Oliveros, Quantum Listening). The fields of soundscape composition and acoustic ecology focus on “the interrelationship between sound, nature and society” (Westerkamp, H. 2002), “its particular aim is to draw attention to imbalances which may have unhealthy or inimical effects.” (Schafer, 1994)

There is constantly sound happening around us, and an omnipresence of music which Cage emphasised through silence. Listening connects us to a heightened sense of awareness of our sonic environment. It can tell us about culture, wildlife and biodiversity, and the everyday sounds of our environment. Throughout our lives, through a deep listening practice we can learn to listen better and more deeply – finding ways to connect with all sounds which we may possibly be able to hear, thought included. This expands into Quantum theory and “listening to more than one reality simultaneously.”

I disagree with R. Murray-Schafer’s “aesthetic moralism” as Marie Thompson put it, and Pauline Oliveros was another key figure who was more resistant to the negative judgement of sounds that Schafer became known for. I think that Schafer’s desire to control the noise of our environment is tied to white environmentalist viewpoints of “white men wanting to preserve nature for their enjoyment” (Loach, M. 2023. pg. 90) which focus on maintaining the status quo, rather than calling for any real change.

References:

Oliveros, P. (2010) Quantum Listening.

Westerkamp, H. (2002) ‘Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology’, Organised Sound, 7(1), pp. 51–56. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771802001085.

Loach, M. (2023) ‘It’s Not that Radical’. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited.

I have been really interested recently in the politics of noise and silence. I have been particularly inspired by Marie Thompson’s writing ‘Gossips, Sirens, Hi-Fi Wives: Feminizing the Threat of Noise’ (Resonances, 2013) and Thompson’s proposal of “an alternative politics of noise, which distinguishes itself from the legacies of both Futurist noise and Cagean Silence.”

“On the one hand, notions of frivolity, triviality and pettiness mark the sounds characterized as feminine. Women’s talk is degraded as extraneous and meaningless, likened to the non-verbal braying and clucking of animals. However, despite their apparent triviality and meaninglessness, feminine noises are also dangerous, wicked and damaging, serving to rupture moral and social orders. In turn, women’s noises are to be abated; they are to remain veiled in silence, their sonic presence regulated by the masculinized structures of morality.” (Thompson 2013, p301)

In response to Thompson essay and to expand upon their theory, I was inspired to look further into how trans-feminine noises might be seen as unwanted, dangerous or “to be abated”. In particular, I looked into the trans-feminine voice and how it might be read as noise. Trans-feminine voices are heard as “noises within the system; they are disruptive, transitional bodies that cannot be constituted in relation to normative dualisms”.

My particular agenda that I want to emphasise here is that cis-normative ways of reading voices in certain ways: that ‘women’s voices are typically high and men’s are typically low’ is reductive and we should move beyond gendering sound in this way. A woman’s voice can be deep, and this sound is still feminine. Sound shouldn’t have any relation to the identification of a voice. The identity of the voice simply belongs to the identity of the person. In fact, our cultural associations with a voice that is deep, being ‘commanding’ or ‘powerful’, and tied to being a man – are from patriarchal and hegemonic conventions. Moving away from this is a liberation of feminine noises, from feminine noises being characterised as “frivolity, triviality and pettiness” (Thompson) – to being able to be deep and bassy empowers us to stretch our capacity of listening beyond binaries.

Wrapped up in this are considerations of transphobic discriminations of silencing of this transfeminine noise. Again, noise and silence always have a politics to them. The voice of a transphobic person is another kind of noise which may push out a trans voice from the space – as an attempt to silence the threat of feminine noise and the rupture of a transfeminine body in a system.

References:

Thompson, M (2013) “Gossips, Sirens, Hi-Fi Wives: Feminizing the Threat of Noise”Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music. New York: Bloomsbury.

John Cage’s body of work has often been used to “define what constitutes “experimental” music in the broadest sense. This has worked to deny the influence of comparably innovative music practices by women and people of colour” (Rodgers, T. 2010, pg 10; Oliveros, P. 1984)

Cage places an “emphasis in experimental music on operational processes, which ensure a music that appears to happen of its own accord, unassisted by a master hand, as if thrown up by natural forces.” (see: Nyman, 2010, pg 26).

“Thus, despite Cage’s own efforts to disrupt hegemonic silences, the centrality of his work in subsequent electronic and experimental music histories has often had the effect of silencing others. Moreover, the process-oriented compositional strategies advanced by Cage that seek to erase or reduce the influence of a composer’s intent on the resulting music can be interpreted as a negation of identity; this may not be a universally desirable aesthetic for artists of historically marginalized groups who have suffered the effects of imposed forms of silencing and erasure. Indeed, feminists have often located empowerment within acts of breaking silences, by foregrounding aspects of identity.” – Rodgers, T. (2010) Pink Noises. pg 10).

Pauline Oliveros, while admired as a key figure in the development and innovation of experimental – is often isolated and thus tokenised, featured often as the “only woman in textbooks that otherwise cover a variety of men’s work in detail.” (Rodgers, T, 2010, pg 11).

Oliveros’ work ‘Sound Patterns’ fulfills criteria of experimental music partly in its use of extended vocal techniques. Extended vocal techniques followed on from Dada, post-war surrealism and the avant-garde and involve using the voice in unexpected and unusual ways. Another parallel between Cage and Oliveros: heavily influenced by surrealism and the philosophies of of Dada, “Cage utilized the voice in his later compositions as a vehicle of sound, not necessarily beauty” (Crump, M.A. 2008. pg 38).

Oliveros’ use of extended vocal techniques in this piece for a cappella mixed chorus is understood to reflect her interest in electronic music at the time, reflected in works such as ‘Time Perspectives’ (Oliveros, 1961) for tape. The parallels between these two works in composition are numerous. They both involve a broad range of sounds, and use the full range of the voice. They both use moments of silence, as well as using interruptions of sound to fill silences. There is a broad dynamic range and they are composed of often non-tonal sounds rather than being musical.

Both pieces demonstrate experimental composers’ interest in “the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur”, rather than “prescribing a defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance” and in the ways in which “relations […] exist between sounds as they would exist between people [these relationships] are more complex than [one] would be able to prescribe.” The performance of ‘Sound Patterns’ or ‘Time Perspectives’ would be difficult to reproduce exactly, and would involve improvised decisions in the moment of performance (another of Nyman’s conditions of experimental music).


References:
Rodgers, T. (2010) Pink Noises: Women on Sound and Electronic Music. Durham: Duke University Press.

Oliveros, P. (1984, 2015) SOFTWARE FOR PEOPLE – COLLECTED WRITINGS 1963 – 1980. Second Edition.

Nyman, M. [1974] (1999) “Towards a definition of Experimental Music”. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond.

Crump, M.A., 2008. When words are not enough: tracing the development of extended vocal techniques in twentieth-century America (Doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Greensboro).

Oliveros, P. (1961) Time Perspectives [online]. Massachusetts: Imprec. Available at: https://imprec.bandcamp.com/album/pauline-oliveros-reverberations-tape-electronic-music-1960-1970-12cd

Oliveros, P. (2015). The Difference between Hearing and Listening | Pauline Oliveros | TEDxIndianapolis. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QHfOuRrJB8.

I found LINKED, a piece of sound art by Graeme Miller, really interesting as the dimensions to it felt layered. In the first layer there were simply the physical yet invisible radio waves, communicating between transmitters and our headsets across the fabric of the urban environment. In the second there was the metaphysical dimension of time and memory: a matrix overlay of the past with our present. And finally there was the spatial dimension of existing as a body in an urban space.

I found it interesting how I would pick up little fragments of the past when walking around. Walking under an overpass, and catching a little snippet of someone from the past talking about her life, how the area had changed; and feeling like I was between dimensions – it felt like I was walking around a kind of thin place in the veils between realms.

The spatial dimension of existing as a listening walker is also valuable to think about, and how it relates to our perception of urban spaces, particularly London. We stuck out a bit with our vintage headphones and radio boxes, and although I drew some glances when I was standing by a lamppost for a while or trying to listen to a tree, I also just felt like I blended into the life of a city.

I think also it wouldn’t be the same if it was a digital listening walk. The radios created the fragments of signal and interference noises that you were able to sort of compose yourself based on your location. They create a “secret, ghostlike layer of the city”, activated by the listener with their attention and deep listening.

Graeme mentioned the idea that it exists whether the listener is there or not. It is a kind of unseen fabric of the city ~ which feels mysterious and through the artist can be tuned into as a way to access this hidden realm. I felt privileged to have been invited into this universe by Graeme, which he has overseen for over 20 years.

I like the idea that the radio boxes were time travel devices, and that those of us on the walk used them to time travel. It felt like that. Like although what we were seeing was East London in 2025, we had time travelled with our ears back to 2003.

Our time travelling bodies existed in a dream state in the city walking through a space between the veils wondering where else we might exist and does where we are really exist tuning into a single frequency signal hello lo lo out there can anyone hear me reaching through the veils through time reaching and trying to pull back into our reality listening to ghosts and spirits speak we are spirit bodies in spirit days this doesn’t matter as much as you think it does but at the same time it matters so much your life depends on it we are here on this physical plane but also existing in so many more at the same time please don’t think that this is all there is there is still time to read our poetry on picket lines as our voices crack from exhaustion to love each other so much we can’t say the words anymore to have sex with each other to stand exactly where we are and believe that we have every right to be there because we do

References:
Miller, G. LINKED | Graeme Miller. [online] Available at: https://graememiller.org/project/linked/. (Accessed: 15 November 2025)

Visiting Longplayer, at Trinity Buoy Lighthouse in East London, evoked, for me, a sense of ‘solastalgia’ – “the grief of witnessing environmental change in a place you still inhabit”. The feeling that over our lifetimes – just a tiny part of the thousand years’ duration – so much has and will change in our environment. The piece prompts those who visit it or anyone who listens to think about just how long a thousand years is compared to our short human lifetimes – and then, further, how short a thousand years actually is in comparison to the lifespan of the universe, or to eternity. Furthermore, the fact that Longplayer has existed since before my lifetime – it prompted me to think about how much has changed in our environment in my lifetime already. How much it has changed since the beginning of Longplayer, 25 years ago (2000), and how much will change in the next 25 until the half-century.

Here is a fragment from an extended field recording I took in the lighthouse.

Longplayer as an installation is a piece of music which never repeats for a thousand years, which seems impossible given how intentional the composition of the sound in the recording feels.

In Steve Connor’s ‘Ears Have Walls’ (2003), he talks about sound’s unique ability to permeate borders, listening as constructing ‘walls’ between certain sounds like in the Sonic Boom exhibition which he references, and sound in the gallery as removing the gallery walls and bringing “the outside in”. I think this is relevant to Longplayer as a temporal sound installation, as its use of the “unsighted” rather than the “sighted”, to use Connor’s language, speaks to sound as an event rather than an object – existing in both time and physical dimensions rather than being static in space. Also, its ability to mix with other sounds in the environment such as the sounds of the weather outside of Trinity Buoy Lighthouse which shift and change along with Longplayer. “For the presence of architecture, found sounds, environmental noise, and the details of given locations loom as continual input into forms of listening. That is to say, the sonorous world always presses in, adding extra ingredients by which we locate ourselves”  (Labelle, B. 2015).

In the same way that Steve Connor says that ‘Ears Have Walls’, the walls of the lighthouse where Longplayer is currently held are also imaginary. If the existence of the piece in our minds is prompting us to think about its duration of 1000 years and what that entails, then it doesn’t really matter whether it is a sounding object or not. The sound is almost irrelevant – and the walls containing the sound, preventing it from mixing with the sounds outside could just as well not exist. The physical site isn’t the point. However, the fact that it is sound and not a physical object is just what makes the dissolution of these walls, and the feeding of our temporal imagination, possible. A physical object in a gallery that were, say, designed to weather and last 1000 years wouldn’t have quite the same effect as sound. “Sound is intrinsically and unignorabley relational: it eminates, propagates, communicates, vibrates and agitates: it leaves a body and enters others: it binds and unhinges, harmonizes and traumatizes; it sends the body moving, the mind dreaming, the air oscillating. It seemingly eludes definition, while having profound effect.” (Labelle, B. 2015).

References:
Connor, S. (2003) Ears Have Walls. [online] Available at: https://www.stevenconnor.com/earshavewalls/ [Accessed 22 Apr. 2024].

Labelle, B. (2015) “Introduction” Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. Second Edition. New York: Bloomsbury.

Andrea Lockwood’s piece ‘Piano Burning’ (1968) was an attempt to “record fire” (Rodgers, 2010). She put a microphone inside the piano and recorded for as long as possible, as long as the microphone lasted. She then wrote a fluxus score for it in which the instructions were to “put a little lighter fluid down in one corner of the piano, and set it alight, and let it go.”

When Lockwood was living in Essex in the English countryside, the cottage she was living in had an old-fashioned Victorian garden that was “running a little wild.” She was curious “to see the moment at which young saplings would start to force their way up between different parts of the structure of the instrument. That paradox, that beautiful thing, that young plants look so fragile and are in fact so strong.”

Dig a sloping trench and slip an upright piano in sideways so that it is half interred.
A small grand piano may be set down amongst bushes etc.

Plant fast growing trees and creepers around the pianos. Do not protect against weather and leave the pianos there forever.

Piano Garden (1969-70 – Ingatestone, Essex)

References:
Rodgers, T. (2010) Pink Noises: Women on Sound and Electronic Music. Durham: Duke University Press.

Lockwood, A. Piano Burning (1968). [online] YouTube (2020). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EMu15_9SF8 [Accessed 13 Oct. 2025]