Paper short abstract:

This paper considers notions of hyperreality, liminality and dwelling in relation to everyday auditory experience, with specific reference to the stereo/headphone piece 'Born On', produced by the author.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers notions of hyperreality and liminality in relation to auditory experience, with specific reference to the autoethnographic stereo/headphone piece 'Born On', produced by the author. Dwelling is considered in relation to recent theories of listening, and explored as something sought after, but evasive - an attempt at self-situation within the saturated spaces of the everyday. A short presentation and discussion will follow the piece, which has a running time of 11:20.

About the piece:

Born On (Walking Version) is a stereo composition which documents and reflects on the practice of everyday commuter (headphone) listening, re-presenting it as a search for situatedness while travelling. The piece can be understood as a layered document of my own auditory experiences during a repeated daily urban commute. A range of recording technologies and strategies are used to document my listening experiences, including recordings made by placing in-ear binaural microphones underneath a pair of IPod headphones, thereby capturing the sounds of IPod listening, environmental sound, and bodily movement simultaneously. By presenting these recordings as a stereo composition for subsequent listeners, the listener's experience of Born On (Walking Version) is designed to overlay that of their immediate auditory environment, providing a kind of 'second order' experience of headphone listening, through which my own auditory experiences are reframed. In this way, the piece draws on autoethnographic methods to explore and present headphone listening as a search for situatedness within the hyperreal spaces of the urban everyday.

Link to audio: http://bit.ly/2faUHgx