Feedback: A Practice Research Project on Moving(-)Listening with Sonic Feedback

FeedbackA Practice Research Project on Moving(-)Listening with Sonic Feedback Scott McLaughlin (bio) and Maria Kapsali (bio) Context Our collaboration started in 2018 and centers on the relationships between a feedback system that responds indeterminately to movement and a performer moving in response to sound. We are interested in the sounds, movement, imagery, and patterns of behavior that emerge from this “intra-action” (in the par-lance of Karen Barad), and we wonder whether a practice of feedback could offer a tangible exploration of a form of auditory subjectivity as discussed in writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, Don Ihde, Steven Connor, and David Levin.1 We ask if a system of audio feedback can allow one to practice a relationship with the world that is shaped by a prioritization of sound and follows its characteristics. Our joint effort provides an aesthetic and artistic interrogation of Nancy’s question: “What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all his [sic] being?”2 Our provisional answer to Nancy’s provocation is that immersion through/in listening is by default an embodied process and can be greatly enhanced by inhabiting acts of movement/perceiving. The feedback system is simply a wireless microphone attached to the mover, some EQ and compression, and a loudspeaker. The sound of feedback changes in pitch and gestural-behavior as the spatial configurations (position/angle/surface reflectivity/etc.) between the microphone and loudspeaker are altered. This is a nonlinear and fairly unpredictable relation, where a flying leap in one position might elicit the same level of change as a micro-movement of the wrist in another, or produce no change at all. The varying sound levels shape the exploration. Low volume can foster small movements, and the exploration is focused on the threshold at which feedback begins, while higher volumes produce continuous intense feedback, which in turn affects movement quality and relationship to space. This sometimes leads us to endow the system with animist properties and to regard it as a semi-autonomous entity with a behavior of its own: sometimes wild and unyielding, sometimes gentle and malleable. [End Page 73] The following text comes from a transcribed conversation that took place in June 2022 after a two-hour session in a seated auditorium (see figure 1) at the University of Leeds. The dialogic form aims to capture the intersubjective process through which knowledge and understanding emerge (between us, between us and the space, in the pauses and the ellipses) as well as to replicate the main premise of the practice. The back and forth that takes place between moving body and audio system is mirrored by the movement through which ideas are being thrown back and forth between us, and, in this process, augmenting, changing, becoming defined. A key theme that emerged in the discussion is the relationship between sonic and physical space and how it becomes morphed, experienced, and modulated through the intra-action of movement and sound. ________ Scott McLaughlin: That was fun. Maria Kapsali: That was great fun! SM: If I closed my eyes, I could almost tell what kind of movements you were making. I could tell when you were making movements like “that” [demonstrates flowing circular movement of the whole body]. Any movement that was twisting the microphone around you could be heard in the feedback. It was as if the sound was going through that same process. MK: I think now there are three elements to this. There is the body (whether that’s an instrument or a human body), there is this feedback system, and there is the space. And I think what we’re finding out is that I use the space as an instrument both for structuring the movement and the sound, so you can’t really tell those things apart. SM: When you say “the space”, you also mean the things in the space? I mean, you were doing a lot of moving around seats and . . . MK: . . . yeah, yeah, yeah, but what is particularly interesting in this space [see fig. 1] is that it has those levels, the vertical levels, which are not often...