The aural and the quotidian : everyday experience in listening and practice

• Main Author: Keenan, Jeremy
• Published: Goldsmiths College (University of London) 2011
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.547149

The research herein comprises an examination of the following question: in what ways do our experiences of the everyday inhere in our experiences of the aural as aesthetic and meaningful? It is not concerned with forging a definition of everyday sound as a category of sonic effects, but instead an analysis of the ways that the everyday, aural and otherwise, is interpenetrating with our perceptual capacities and the cultural practices encompassing aural aesthetic production and experience. This thesis extends extant discourses surrounding the notion that the experience of sound as meaningful and aesthetic is connected to our general experience as embodied beings in the material world. The following analysis encompasses aspects of auditory perception, music aesthetics, and sound art production from the perspective of the body, as it is the locus of the listening subject situated within the domain of everyday experience. This includes an investigation of sound transduction technologies, as the devices that enable aural aesthetic practice are central to its analysis in the context of the everyday. Listening attitudes are transformed through cultural practice, structuring the relationship between the domain of the everyday, the embodied listening subject, sound recordings as cultural artefacts, and the attendant process of transduction. Discourses that attribute non-material, disembodied understandings to aesthetic experience are examined and challenged. From this, a fundamentally material, embodied approach to auditory experience is proposed, and with it a consideration of the ways that sound art and acousmatic music engage with the process of human understanding and the constitution of meaning in sound. Self-reflexive methodologies in aural aesthetic practice are exemplified, with the aim of promoting an expanded conception of aural context that includes the technological, cultural, and phenomenal aspects of its production.