Deep Listening Prompt

This was an assignment for a course I recently took on sound studies.

Each week someone was assigned the role of performing a ‘deep listening prompt,’ selecting one of Pauline Oliveros’ prompts from her book Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, and modifying it to suggest a new prompt.

I selected the prompt “Extreme Slow Walk” and changed it to “Extreme Slow,” using erasure as my method of modification. What resulted was a practice that questioned the relationship between the words:

tend / attend / attention

Before beginning the prompt, participants were offered rocks from a old, well-loved basket (gathered by my mum and I from the beach in my home town), as a method of grounding their attention on the rhythms of one of their senses. This was inspired by Johanna Hedva’s “rock ritual” in “My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want it to Matter Politically,” a reading of what would become the seminal essay “Sick Woman Theory.” Homemade cookies were offered for anyone who wanted to focus on taste. Scraps of paper were also handed out for participants to write on.

I then opened the prompt with my modification, which asked participants to communicate through Audio Description:

  • Audio description (AD) is the process of ‘translating’ visual media into verbal description for audiences who have vision impairments, but can be used by any creator/audience as a mode of universal access. AD is often conceived of as a binary; descriptions are created either according to ‘compliance’ (an ‘objective’ or neutral, ‘checkbox’ approach) or creativity (a subjective attempt to match the verbal affect of AD to the artwork’s ‘vibe’ or ‘feeling’). 
  • Use the weight of the rock as a reminder to attend to the weight of the body; let what is automatic become what is given attention (in the way that disability disrupts bodily rhythms), eg. tasting/eating, breathing, heart beating, walking, hearing, smelling, touching, etc. Then, creatively describe the process you’ve slowed down/tended to as AD. We’ll each write down our descriptions, collect them, then read them aloud at random. Then we’ll attempt to identify which processes are being described as a group.
  • Potential questions: Does this creative approach to AD work? How can AD inform our creative writing practices? How does describing the ‘invisible’ potentially alter the implications of AD?

This process of reading the descriptions aloud and guessing what they described led to generative results. We had a discussion about vulnerability and care that felt influenced by how we’d engaged in ‘crip time,’ slowing our attention and tending to our bodies collectively.

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