Since the Renaissance, we have had a dominant visual perspective and language to accurately speak about images, something we still lack in the world of sound where words fail us to even describe the complex waveforms of an urban environment much less what those sounds do to us and how they make us feel. This talk will explore five projects developed by O+A (Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger) which aim to make sense of the sound environment we live in by listening with attention, hearing, exploring and attempting to understand the cultural waveform as a language. Over twenty five years, O+A have developed a set of compositional tools to sculpt and transform our sonic environment. These tools allow us to extract the harmonic material from city noise, filter it, shape it and play it back in the moment to transform the feelings, atmosphere, and sound design of that environment. We are able to extract the melodies and make the hidden voices hearable. In a visually dominated culture, thinking with your ears tells a very different story.
Towards a Hearing Perspective
© Sam Auinger