Trajectories of field recording: Sonic fluxes, fuzzy lines and relational space in practice

This practice-led thesis is centred on using sound as a resource for thinking relational encounters and processes of spatial constitution. Starting with Doreen's Massey's conception of space, which posits that space is constituted via interaction, I examine my own field recording practice, and the recorded documents I produce, for ways of thinking the diversity and dynamism of interaction. In doing so, I develop six sonic figures: Volume, Propagation, Reverberation, Masking, Interference and Not-Sounding, and explore the aural flows and fluxes these figures entail for suggestive ways of conceptualising dynamic interaction. Thus, the central question this thesis examines is: if space is the product of interrelations (Massey 2005:9) how might sonic dynamics be used to conceptualise the diversity, complexity and hybridity of interaction itself? Relations are, of course, varied, they might comprise contradictory dynamics or take hybrid forms involving, for example, both conflict and collaboration. The sonic figures I have developed for thinking relationality involve highly variable interactions comprising processes of transformation, amplification, silencing and returns. In using them to conceptualise the dynamics of relations, I explore their fluxes for ways of thinking relational complexity. This approach generates a version of relations as hybrid and mutable, with effects which might too be contradictory or in flux. By expanding the ways in which relations themselves might be conceptualised this thesis offers new approaches to thinking the 'how' of relational constitution, locating in sonic dynamics new ways of thinking the constitutive relational flux which produces space.

I draw on three specific artistic commissions, which took place from 2018 to 2021, to develop and put forward the arguments presented in this thesis. Under Construction (2019) and Ascending Composition 1 (For Planes) (2019) were both installations which were exhibited in London, with Ascending Composition also involving documentation of a sonic intervention, while the third Hawkes End —> River Sowe junction – a sonic transect of the (sometimes absent) River Sherbourne (2021) was a composition for the Coventry Biennial. All of these projects invited me to work within and through a wide range of complex, overlapping, complimentary and conflictual sets of relations. Throughout the thesis I turn to the sonic figures I have developed for ways of conceptualising the dynamics at play in the locations in which I was working, and those entangled with my own practice of field recording in public space.