Relational Listening: A Politics of Perception

Abstract

Over the past half century, the practice of field recording has shifted from an ethnographic to sonic arts pursuit. This transition reflects a variety of factors including changes in access to technologies, developments in the social sciences, acoustic ecology, and understandings of how sonic phenomena can be manifest and applied beyond research applications. As an artistic practice though, field recording, and its creative root in listening, remains largely under theorized. In this article, I outline a critical approach to listening as it pertains to the practice of field recording. Placing itself within several historical and social movements, it explores the role of field recording in relation to sound phenomena, place, and listening in order to address the experiential elements of the practice. I engage with three theoretical domains: sound, place, and listening. I propose a new theoretical approach titled ‘relational listening’.