Department of
Sonic Affairs
Department of Sonic Affairs
Division of Creative Research Practice
Bureau of Public Listening
Current Inquiries
The Division of Creative Research Practice explores listening as both embodied attention and reciprocal relationship—with sound, place, memory, and the more-than-human world.
This work emerges from a practice of listening across time: attending to what persists and what changes, imagining soundscapes that have shifted or disappeared, and listening for the presence of what is here now before it becomes memory.
Research Modalities:
- Field recording as creative practice and method for deeper listening
- Embodied and attentive listening across seasonal and geological time
- Place-based (physical and temporal)
- Participatory and community-engaged inquiry
Guiding Questions:
On attention and presence:
- How do listening practices restore our capacity for depth and connection in an overstimulating world?
- What would it mean to offer attention rather than pay attention?
On reciprocity and relationship:
- How can field recording become a practice of reciprocal relationship rather than extractive documentation?
- What does it mean to listen-with rather than listen-to? How does this shift create reciprocal relationship with the animate world?
On memory, time, and change:
- How does sound carry memory? Can places help us to re-member through their soundscapes, present and past?
- How do we listen for what was once here?
- How do we attend to what persists when we are separated from the places that have held us?