Dr Patrick Farmer

A response to Respondents, a new work by sonic sculptor, Rita Evans 

Listening and its not brings together nineteen text realisations of a score by Patrick Farmer. The score invites performers to travel exactly 10 miles north of their home and write about the experience of listening”without pointing directly to it, or at it”.

With contributions from some of the most original voices to emerge in the field of writing in sound art practice over the last 10 years, including Daniela Cascella, Lawrence English, Sarah Hughes, Amelia Ishmael, Richard Pinnell, Salomé Voegelin and Mark Peter Wright. Listening and its not invites readers to rethink the act of listening as an internal, imaginative, discursive, dialogic and political terrain. The resultant texts range from the personal, scientific, informative and polemical. They provoke questions around the nature of location and our experience of place and, by refusing description, the act of listening is presented as a form of correspondence that reaches far further than the nineteen encounters that form the basis of this book.

In this essay I attempt to reexperience as much as rethink and rework approaches to sound, walking, and soundwalking. One way I have tried to do this is by developing an account of what I call ‘vertego’, a portmanteau of vertigo and ego, denoting the implicit and densely entangled relations of self and environment, and of listening and walking (held together, and pushed apart, by balance and gravity). Such intimate proximity is accompanied by various theories of the human ego (as if such theories were akin to different environments, topographical maturations and imaginations), which I here consider as a vessel that breaks even as it is being formed. Underlying this process, and in concert with my ongoing reading of the works of microbiologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, I try to move away from such polarised terms as cooperation and competition, working instead with a spectral vocabulary of ejection, emergence, and by-product, trying to get closer to a practise of listening that is akin to unlistening (or not locating), in which, in a manner similar to vertego, listening-selves fall apart.

For me, writing an essay in a book concerned with ‘Aural Diversity’ requires writing about my hearing. In this regard I’d like to begin with an apology, particularly to those who live with tinnitus, as I’ll be mentioning it throughout. This last year I’ve been undergoing research as part of a funded AHRC project, with Dr. Marie Thompson, concerned with ‘Tinnitus, Auditory Knowledge and the Arts’, and as such, when I need to write the word tinnitus, I have started to replace it with the symbol of a wave (〰), representing what I tentatively call ‘wave signification’. This is concerned with phenomena, such as tinnitus, that once you hear and/or think about them, seem to shift in perception, whether in terms of signification, location, volume, intensity, or otherwise...

A condensed account of the mechanisms and energies of the human ear, tying together many publications.