Entangled Listening

Entangled Listening Workshop -- NIME 2025

In 2025, I led a workshop called Entangled Listening: Exploring Relational and Diverse Listening Practices for DMI Design, and built a website for it. This workshop was held in Canberra, Austrailia at the Austrailian National University.

This workshop explores the concept of 'Entangled Listening' or 'Listening-as-Baradian-Apparatus' through a combination of technological and conceptual prompts. Presented as scores, participants will first engage with listening practices through technologies that modify hearing perception (i.e. ultrasonic audification, high-sensitivity microphone playback, and tactile listening), then write their own scores to communicate their own experiences. Finally, we will conduct a discussion of the experiences in trying to understand and translate listening experiences. By asking directed questions about similarities and differences we aim to have a productive conversation about aural diversity and what that means for design. Sharing of listening experience through score is more generative than reproductive; it intends to produce modes of relation without dictating what an experience is or how an experience should be.

Technology

Ultasonic demodulating headphones: first created for a spatial sound installation (Robson, et. al., 2014), this device consists of closed-back headphones with a small microphone on the outside of each ear cup. The signal from the microphones is multiplied by a carrier frequency of 20.5kHz, creating a form of modulation that pushes ultrasonic signals down into the audible domain (and vice versa). Another curious property of the system is the way that the modulation exaggerates the Doppler effect so that every slight head or body movement perceptibly changes the frequency content of the sound. In the original installation, the headphones were paired with ultrasonic emitters playing precomposed material modulated up by a corresponding frequency. Here, we offer a reduced version of that with a small number of emitters playing simple tones, while also exploring curious phenomena discovered during the development of the installation in which certain sounds (e.g. footsteps on a hard surface, crinkling bags) produce interesting sonic experiences through the modulator. These tones are restricted to frequencies that can be played back through headphones.

Ultra-high sensitivity microphones: this device consists of a pair of headphones and one or more electret microphone elements. The microphones will be deliberately set to an extremely high gain so that very soft sounds, electrical noise and interference are all boosted to audible levels. The signal will pass through a hard limiter that ensures the total amplitude never exceeds comfortable listening level, creating a situation of searching for places of quiet and solitude to be able to attune to micro-sounds amidst everyday noise. Anyone with hearing sensitivities or misophonia will be advised to proceed with caution. A byproduct of this sensitivity is that small body movements that cause the microphone or its cables to move may have audible consequences. These tones are restricted to frequencies that can be played back through headphones.

Earplugs and Tactile Listening Many forms of listening are possible; it need not involve the ears and the auditory nerves, as d/Deaf musicians are aware. This exercise seeks to recentre the experience of listening to other parts of the body by attenuating cochlear hearing (especially high frequencies) through earplugs while increasing sensitivity in the body. A simple approach of holding an inflated balloon with the fingertips allows the perception of sound as tactile stimuli, though other membranes or surfaces could work equivalently. It is crucial to emphasise that this exercise is not presented as simulated disability; it claims no insight into d/Deaf experience. Instead, it offers a different approach to defamiliarising listening that doesn’t presuppose the ears as the main locus of perception.