@jd_prior

LxD: Thank you for very much for agreeing to take part in this interview. Before we start, could you please introduce yourself briefly to the reader with a short listening focused outline of you and your work.

I am a human geographer based at Cardiff University. In my research I study environmental policy – things like nature conservation and ecological restoration – in a way that tries to disentangle the role that aesthetics plays in policy creation and implementation. Much of the work in this area has tended to focus only on visual aesthetic qualities – things like picturesque or scenic landscapes – which led me to consider multi-sensory qualities during my PhD research a few years back, and sound and listening became a focus of this as I went about undertaking interviews with policy makers. This drew me into the world of field recording as a means of trying to document various sonic landscape interventions made by landscape designers; things like the re-design of river systems so that they sounded more ‘natural’.

At this point, field recording became a hobby of mine, and has since led me to undertake various sound and listening projects with one foot outside of academia, such as creating museum audio tours and leading listening walks (these are group listening exercises undertaken while walking through a given space). With a couple of colleagues – Michael Gallagher at Manchester Metropolitan University and Anja Kanngieser at the University of Wollongong – I’ve become involved in trying to develop audio methods for social science researchers, through workshops, conferences, and various bits of writing. We’re in the early stages of planning a book on this topic, which is very exciting.

LxD: What does listening mean for you?

Michael Gallagher, Anja Kanngieser and myself have been thinking about this for quite a while. In an academic article that we have recently completed we have attempted to expand the notion of listening to mean “the varied ways in which bodies of all kinds – human and more-than-human – respond to sound”. Importantly here is that listening doesn’t just happen through the auditory system, but through the whole body.

Away from this definition, for me listening is a sensitive disposition towards the world; ‘listening’ may bring to mind something that is rather passive – we become silent to be able to listen – but I think listening is very active. As such, we can be variously attuned to listening through different modes of listening (say, more or less focused), and acknowledge that listening can be really hard. For the first 20 minutes or so of a listening walk, I find it challenging to listen with any real focus.

To answer your question a slightly different way, listening also makes the world more meaningful to me, in ways that I find hard to articulate. The joy of field recording for me is not really any resulting recording, but rather the in-the-moment conscious act of listening to the world around me.

LxD: In what way does your work, research or practice involve listening?

In my research I am primarily interested in what other people experience through listening to landscapes, how they make sense of their listening, what it is that they value or disvalue in a given environment, and how they express this – say within policy documents or through making material changes to a landscape – so in a way I am listening to other people’s listening.

More theoretically, with colleagues, I am trying to embed listening within social science scholarship in a way that broadens it out from the dominant focus on human verbal interactions. Of course, an ability to listen to one another sensitively is vitally important, but listening should I think go much further to encompass non-human and non-communicative sounds.

Within my role as a geography lecturer, I am trying to help normalise things like field recording and listening walks as valid methods for data collection and dissemination. I don’t want sound and listening to remain as a fringe interest within cultural geography. I am lucky enough to be able to integrate sound and listening within my own department on a second year research methods course, and have contributed to the curricula at other institutions in collaboration with geographers also interested in the role of the senses, such as Nina Morris at Edinburgh and Bradley Garrett at Southampton. I’ve also run workshops for post-graduates and other academics on the basics of audio recording, which can be far more daunting than, say, picking up a camera to take photographs.

Very recently, I got the opportunity to speak to a group of secondary school geography teachers from across Wales about the importance of sound, and how they could integrate listening within their own teaching, which was a fantastic opportunity. A focus on listening has to be at the basis of teaching. In many respects, sensitive, patient listening is more important than the technology that enables good quality audio recordings.

In my more practice-based work, there are plenty of opportunities to speak with people about listening outside of academia, such as when I’ve led public listening walks. I have also been able to experiment with the production of sound when I’ve created audio pieces for galleries and radio. A few years back I created an audio tour for the Slovak National Gallery to interpret the life and work of the painter László Mednyánszky (1852-1919). I got to tell stories about his life based upon his diaries, and to create sonic representations of his work through field recordings, which invited people to listen to the environments of his paintings.

At the moment, I’m working with the academic and poet Samantha Walton on an

ecopoetry/sound project interpreting the Bristol to Bath railway path, which invites a listening to place across disciplinary boundaries.

LxD: Do you listen out for something particular, do you work with a pre-given set of auditory expectations and aims, or do you start defining aims from what you hear?

If I’m taking people on a listening walk, then it’s likely that I will have designed a route, and so will have certain expectations about what will be heard, or how sounds will be experienced – say, in relation to how open or enclosed a particular space is. Of course, what is most interesting are the actual sounds encountered on a route. One of the most powerful components of a listening walk is how it can open you up to sounds you might not have noticed before, even if you habitually walk through that space. In my experience, listening also brings about a change in bodily experience – when people focus on listening while walking, they’ll often remark on how they felt sound across their body, or how it activated another sense in a significant way.

If I’m field recording, it’s a mixture of expectation and serendipity. I’ll often go to a location for a particular reason, but again be open to things I can't pre-determine. An example: I’m currently documenting woodlands in Cardiff through field recording, which may eventually form the basis of a sound map of Cardiff’s green spaces. As part of this, I recently went to Plymouth Great Wood to the west of the city, with all the sonic expectations one might have of a British woodland in Spring. The sound that dominated during an afternoon of walking, listening, and recording was of motorbike scramblers zipping through the woodland. I knew that there was a history of people riding these bikes on public lands in south Wales, after having spoken to policy makers a few years back – they raised this as a problem for the management of lots of old coal tips that are being turned into local parks in the Welsh valleys – but this was the first time I was able to listen to and document this cultural practice!