Conkers (listening out for organised experience)
Katharine Norman · Organised Sound · 2010
By comparison to contemporary artists in other disciplines, such as the visual and literary arts, composers of sound-based art and electroacoustic music sometimes appear strangely diffident in articulating their motivations in other than material-based terms, or at least seem so within scholarly debate. Reception-based investigations (such as Weale 2005) seem either at a relatively early stage or understandably inconclusive, with an emphasis on how the listener accesses, or might access, the work. While this might appear a semantic nicety, I suggest that it could be fruitful to proceed instead from considerations of how the work might ‘access’ the listener, via considering diverse experience, rather than direct associative responses to sound, as material that is organised in both creating and listening to sound-based work – and by whom left open to negotiation.