Abstract
Phenomenologies of sound are, in general, phenomenologies of listening or performing—that is, they privilege the moment of sound’s making or the moment of its hearing. This chapter broadens this to include the process of the sound designer, integrating the experience of the audience in an account of the complex temporalities and intentionalities of the full experience of sound in performance, rooted in our intersubjective understanding of other beings in our world. It argues that sound design and other design disciplines within performance are an integral part of the performance, not an afterthought. Further, the work of design is figured as a work of phenomenology itself, as an intersubjective transcendence of designer, actor, director, audience as individual hearers—a coming-into-being of ‘listener’ and ‘listened-to’ in the time of a work’s creation as well as its presence on stage. In the work of sound design for performance, the designer must be open and turned towards an audience that does not yet exist—the designer must render the thinkable imaginary of design as the knowable of performance. The philosophies of Badiou, Heidegger and Nancy are brought together with leading theorists of sound to address notions of truth and the temporality of performance in the role of the designer in theatre, exploring the movement of meaning between listener and listened-to, and positing that the rules and conventions that are shaped in the rehearsal and performance process are unique systems of meaning which imagine an intersubjective audience for an other.
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Friedner and Helmrich apply the term ‘audist’ (with something of the sense of ‘eliminationist’) to those approaches and narratives that privilege the physical mechanism of hearing over senses. In their view, sound studies often equates deafness to critical inattention and ‘a condition to be “overcome”’ (Friedner and Helmrich 2015, 88–89).
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Kane accounts for this in a discussion (via musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer) of French verbs for which we use the English equivalents ‘listening’ and ‘hearing’. These denote a variety of different types of listening: oüir (inattentive audition) in which we are surrounded by sound without attending to it as such; comprendre (listening to language, comprehension); écouter, “where sounds are heard immediately as indices of objects and events in the world” and is a “selective, positional and indexical” listening; and entendre, which has a sense of intentionality and a shifting of the whole of attention to the sounding object and sounding world (Kane 2012, 440–441). These differentials of listening engagement permit us to think of listenings that are perhaps embodied, rather than ‘heard’ as such.
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References
Theatre and Performance
Art of Difference Festival Variety Night. 2009. Northcote Town Hall Studio 1, Northcote, VIC, Australia.
Filmography
Danger Mouse. 1981–1992.
That Mitchell and Webb Look. 2006–2010. Directed by David Kerr and Ben Gosling Fuller.
Discography
Bowie, David. 1977. Low. Compact Disc. RCA.
Bowie, David. 1977. Heroes. Compact Disc. RCA.
Bowie, David. 1979. Lodger. Compact Disc. RCA.
Williams, Charles. 1943. Devil’s Galop, or The Theme to Dick Barton. Chappell.
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Wenn, C. (2019). Sound Design: A Phenomenology. In: Grant, S., McNeilly-Renaudie, J., Wagner, M. (eds) Performance Phenomenology. Performance Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98059-1_13
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