Audio-textual listening platform

Created with support from Sheffield Hallam University; developed as part of Future Architecture Platform 2021

Collaboration with Julia Udall and Jon Orlek

Following Brandon LaBelle’s identification of the potential of the sonic ‘as a means for enabling new conceptualisations of the public sphere and expressions of emancipatory practices’, this project proposes careful listening as an approach to (re)thinking and (re)making the spaces of the high street in ways that draw attention to forms of collectivity and support productive and agonistic relations, intensities, and concerns. Through an interactive audio-textual environment, this website invites you to remake spaces of Sheffield high streets in listening. Sound compositions comprised of field recordings from three ‘patches’—barbers shops, busy pavements and a pay-as-you-feel cafe—are the basis for sonic exploration. With each composition, textual artefacts emerge on the page: provocations, quotations, and critical and journalistic writing, augment, subvert, amplify and dissonate listening, in relation to your navigation of the site. This environment is not intended to represent the spaces of the high street, but rather, through the associations, interruptions and collisions between text and listening awareness, transform them and make them anew. This process is conceived as a basis for developing constructive modes of listening that can be taken with you on your travels.

Access the site here.