The anxiety of the lonely listener

Text on listening originally featured in /seconds. peer reviewed online journal. The radio is not one thing it is multitudes. Radio is not innately anything, but is everything it is, dependent on who is listening. In this sense any radio transmission is truly contingent on the temporal, spatial and psychological (understood as an inner dimension) circumstance of the listener. The radio broadcast, emitting from its unsighted box, gives the room it enters different colours; working with the tones that are already there, stretching them in every direction. Sure, this idea of contingency could be applied to other media too, but nowhere is the multiplicity of production and perception more profuse than in the darkness of radio, where no image preserves our hold an on authentic sense of reality, and thus no sense of non-reality limits the imagination of the listener. The temporal flow of radio is a blind stream, emanating from a faceless, boundary-less place. The association of this transitory stream with a visual actuality is produced in a fleeting action of listening. Radio does not produce a certain object, but incites figments of individual imagination. It does not affirm the surety of a location or object but produces its own reality as a perceptual and individual uncertainty.

Salome Voegelin

Research Fields

Sound Art
Philosophy and Aesthetics of Sound
Listening
Sonic Memory
Ethics
Audio-Visual Relationship
Digital
Current Research

Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer who is concerned with the practice and philosophy of sound. Her work has been shown in the UK and Mainland Europe. Most recently her voice work 'Barry Echo' has been included in 'Playing with Words, the Spoken Word in Artistic Practice', Cathy Lane ed., UK, CRiSAP and RGAP, Cornerhouse Publication, 2008. In 2007 she was commissioned to produce a site-specific sound piece for RADAR in Loughborough, UK, and produced a collaborative sound work for the Bregenz Kunstverein, Magazin 4, Austria. She is the curator of Clickanywhere, an online sound exhibition featuring sound work that focuses on the voice.
Salomé is regularly invited to speak at conferences and most recently presented Digital Listening some ideas on digital knowledge and sound at an ARLIS workshop on born-digital archives at UCL in London. She also chaired an international workshop on 'Audio Art on the Radio' at The Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, Switzerland, in November 2009. In July 2008 she gave a talk on Noise at Architectones in Besançon, France and was involved in NOW II a research project into durational work on the radio staged by the University of the Arts Zürich which culminated in a publication entitled Nachtschichten, edition Fink 2008, for which she wrote a chapter.
Voegelin took part in a panel discussion on States of Flux, chaired by Cecilia Wee at Tate Modern. Her published writing includes 'Sonic Memory Material as "Pathetic Trigger"' in 'Organised Sound international peer-reviewed journal, Cambridge University Press April 2006, 'the Anxiety of the Lonely Listener' in '/Seconds', an international peer reviewed on-line journal, issue 05: March 2007, available at 'A Speech for Noise' in 'Earshot' 5, 2007, and most recently 'Völlig Losgelöst', a chapter in 'Autumn Leaves: Sound and the Environment', Angus Carlyle ed., published by Double Entendre in 2007. Her book 'Listening to Noise and Silence: towards a Philosophy of Sound Art' will be published by Continuum Press in May 2010.

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