Ways of Hearing in Cyborgian Geographies

Ways of Hearing was a national programme of research and knowledge exchange focused on listening. Practitioners from a broad range of disciplines are engaging in a programme designed to create an interdisciplinary exploration of how sound impacts on our understanding and shaping of the city.

Established by Sound and Music with national and local partners, the programme has 36 participants from a range of disciplines within the arts, engineering, technology, architecture, planning and music; all of these participants agreeing to contribute their research to a wider understanding of the act of listening within urban environments.

The cities of London, Bristol and Leeds have been selected to play host to this highly skilled group of practitioners. The research developed will become part of a new archive of current practice in this field. Regional partners for the Ways of Hearing include Opera North and Lumen (Leeds), Musarc (London) and Arnolfini and The Architecture Centre (Bristol).

This research engages with fiction as a strategy for listening to the 'inaudible' frequencies and noise of cybernetic geographies.

From the project intranet:

Derek’s research interest sits between the digital and philosophical virtual, the actual, the informational, the biological, the cyborgian, augmented and mixed realities, and his work has been disseminated nationally and internationally. His published project outcomes, and his ongoing concerns, include reflective work on play as process, surrealist notions of space and the object, and Deleuze’s writing on the objectile as in-between and on the simulacra as difference.

For Sound and Music’s ‘Ways of Hearing’ project Derek is interested in listening to the hauntological sounds and spaces of the city of Leeds: seeking to tune-in to its acoustically split sites of frequency and noise. His research process will use notions of doubling, echoing, reverberation, refraction and reflection to develop a sense of warped time in the sonic fictions of contemporary Leeds.