A sonic research program in four investigations. A cumulative archive.Ā A self-organized space for listening, learning, and building something that lasts.
Pea roots navigate toward water by sound. Stressed plants emit ultrasonic clicks that neighboring roots detect. A forestās dawn chorus is organized by frequency with such precision that the loss of a single species leaves an audible gapĀ āæ» a silence that ripples through the community. The platforms that govern daily attention produce the opposite: undifferentiated noise, content stripped of context, speech without a body behind it. The gap between these two sonic realities is where this program sits.
š¢šø The whole practiceālistening cycle, archive, play is research infrastructure: self-organized, sonically grounded, resistant to extraction š¢šø Ā
Gathering as in collecting. Gathering as in coming together āæ»Ā
Bandcamp, ButtonDown
The Cycle šØ
The Ear Full Listening Cycle.Ā
Placement ā deliberate exposure. No research question. Be inside the material before there is language for it.
Duration ā return across time. Three sessions minimum. Different body-states. Track what repeats, what resists summary, where the body becomes implicated.
Interference ā introduce a second material that destabilizes the first. Forest understory over city traffic. Plant root-clicks over notification sounds. Do not reconcile. Observe where concepts collapse.
Residue ā document what remains unresolved. A tension, a bodily response, a phrase that keeps returning. Not conclusion. Not argument. What remains.
Articulation ā state what is at stake. Identify what is being flattened. Name the tension without pretending it is solved. Then stop.
Search the Archive š
The archive is searchable across four dimensions. Each emerged from a different investigation.
Political category ā what power does this phenomenon encode, resist, or make audible?
Tempo ā what rhythmic system operates below the threshold of attention?
Transmission depth ā how many bodies has this passed through, and what entered in transit?
Spatial authority ā what agential cut did the architecture or ecology perform on the sound?
Counter-Archive
What sounds are excluded from official memory, and what does the exclusion produce?
What gets filed materializes as knowledge. What gets excluded becomes the constitutive outside. No museum has a collection of: the rhythm of someoneās movement through a kitchen at 2am. The dawn chorus of a specific valley before the data center was built. The frequency a stressed plant emitsĀ š¼š¤£š„§š¼ an ultrasonic click that science spent decades refusing to acknowledge. The acoustic dialect of a bird population that exists nowhere else, learned and transmitted generation to generation, irreplaceable when the last speakers are gone.
Make
Three field recordings, two to four minutes each. No editing beyond trimming. Ten-minute sit before each session.
- A sound that encodes invisible laborāthe specific tempo of a specific body in a specific domestic space.
- A sound below the threshold of official attentionācontact mic against a tree trunk during drought. A hydrophone in an urban storm drain.
- A sound being actively erasedāthe dawn chorus at a site slated for development. A bird dialect of a shrinking habitat.
Each card in the grid is one phenomenon. These accumulate as the work is made. The grid starts empty. The first card appears when the first recording is done.