Sound Words and Sonic Fictions

Keynote for conference convened by the School of Art, Aberystwyth University in collaboration with The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

abstract - Sound Words and Sonic Fictions

This presentation will discuss listening and its connection to language as the description and initiation into the work, bringing with it conventions, expectations, taste and ideologies; the discipline of music and of sound art, aesthetic criticism and history - and to language as reinvented by listening, articulated from within the unreliability of the work, its uncontrollable nature and invisible materiality; losing its grammatical form, its name as well as the shape of its words.

The suggestion is that listening must meet language not before a perceptual engagement but must conjure it from the possibilities of the heard. This is language not as a structured given but as the formless practice of my listening; as process rather than as the infrastructure of words and grammar. It is language shaped by the unseen mobility of sound, articulated from an inhabiting listening, and driven by the tendency to speak, to be social, that assumes other listeners as things thinging in the world of the work, with whom I seek an exchange not about what the work is from what I know about it beforehand, nor what it becomes in pure reflection, but what it could be and might go on to be as sonic fictions.

Sonic fictions are a generative rather than a referential: they do not pretend nor propose a textual universe; they do not suspend our disbelief and guide us into a parallel truth and reality, but invite us to suspend our habits of perception, taste and expectations, and create the work and the world as a plurality of truths and realities from what it appears to be as actuality into what it could be as possibility.

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