Headphone listening in live performance: a phenomenology of sound design

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat is it to wear headphones as Audience? In recent years the availability of relatively low-cost wireless headphone technology has meant an increase in performances that use the phenomenological potential of intimate, ‘secret’ listening as a theatrical element. However, the very mode of headphone listening – personal, private, ‘interior’ – is at odds with the plural sharedness of Audience. In this article, I attempt to navigate an intersubjective model of headphone listening, one that allows the turned-outwardness to performance of theatrical Audience and the turned-inwardness of the private listener, using my sound design for the MKA/Darebin Arts Speakeasy/Melbourne Festival production of Lachlan Philpott's The Trouble with Harry (dir. Alyson Campbell, 2014) as a case study. Through phenomenologies of listening by Don Ihde, Salomé Voegelin and Jean-Luc Nancy, I propose that headphones fundamentally disrupt the act of listening as Audience, by enclosing individual audience members in their own acoustic space. However, I argue that headphones can also fundamentally change the way that private, personal and public spaces can bleed into each other, and that different technical modes of listening (amplified, unamplified, public address, personal stereo, monophonic, spatialized … ) produce differing phenomenologies of performance.