In producing this audio paper, I set out to answer two questions:

1 – What is the purpose of academic reading and writing within the context of UK art studies and does it benefit us as artists in terms of improving our practice?

2 – From the perspective of a student with undiagnosed ADHD, does this reading and writing create barriers to achievement?

To be completely honest, I think this was a subject matter born more out of instinctive frustration than anything else, and if I had the opportunity again (which I will) I would write about something else. I chose the subject matter when I was going through a bit of a frustrating time in life (money problems, too busy with outside work to focus properly on university work etc.), and because I was struggling to come up with ideas based around my fields of interest, I wrote about a subject that was based on my lack of ideas at the time and an area that I personally struggle with in my studies – that is, writing. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad idea, and it’s a topic that genuinely interests me that I don’t feel has really been talked much, however the latter point also became an issue for me. Because it’s not been talked about much I couldn’t find much material to reference and critique – this is why I decided to go out and conduct interviews as a way of obtaining some primary research. I also don’t feel that it was the most helpful topic in terms of improving my practice, as it doesn’t really go hand-in-hand with any of the practical work I’ve made so far. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing but in future I’d like to write more around my fields of interest.

That being said, I do still feel as if I’ve learnt some points to take away, and I think I’ve learnt more about my process and how I study. I’ve learnt more about the value of academic reading and writing within art studies, even though in some ways I have critiqued it from the perspective of someone with an undiagnosed learning disability. The process of making an audio paper is also something that’s been new to me, and I find it a far more expressive and practical way of getting my thoughts down, even if it is a little more work and a little more technically demanding. I have found the process difficult, however it feels much more rewarding to have produced an audio paper over a black and white slab of writing. I’d like to make an audio paper for next year’s dissertation, however it could be beneficial to add more abstract elements which I didn’t include this time.

So, did I answer those two questions successfully? I’m not sure – if I were to do this again I would write less about the history of universities and technical colleges as I don’t feel it’s too relevant to the point I’m trying to get across (or at least I didn’t explore it deeply enough within the time I had). I would have liked to explore more writing around the subject, and I still find it frustrating that the best answer I had from my student interviews kept deleting itself when I tried to place it in the paper. I really feel as though this would’ve added something. However, I still made an effort to gather opinions of students and academics which is a good thing to have done. If I had more time I would’ve maybe interviewed more students with specific learning disabilities to ask their opinions, as I feel this paper was written too much from my own perspective. A lot of the problems with time come from my own time management, which I will hopefully be getting support with by the end of the academic year.

The mixing of the paper was adequate, and I didn’t feel like much needed to be done to the tracks. However, I didn’t get the chance to hear it in one of the studios at LCC, which I will make the time to do next time.

Having said all this, I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom and I’m still happy with myself for finishing this audio paper which initially felt very daunting. There are aspects that I’m proud of, like the sound effect of the continuous scribbling on the page that helped create a soundscape that was supposed to add a background level of noise that hopefully can give the listener an idea of all the sounds that occurred and often distracted me whilst I was writing the script for the paper. This also added a slight performative (albeit non-vocal) aspect as I recorded it in one 10 minute take, which I think was successful.

Overall, I think the paper could have been better. Next time I make an audio paper I will take more time to carefully consider what topic I choose instead of just getting carried away with one subject before I carefully evaluate what else I could cover. I learnt a lot about my own processes and that is a positive, however in future I would like to research more perspectives and choose a topic I can do more reading around. I’m considering doing my dissertation on the humour within art and how it can sometimes be perceived to have lower validity, as there is a lot of writing around this and it’s more relevant to my practice as an artist who likes to make pieces with a sense of humour. However, for now I am somewhat happy with my paper, and looking forward to carrying on with future projects.

In order to continue building the soundscape of my surroundings, I tried to make a mental list of all the sounds that I would usually hear on a day-to-day basis. These include:

Fire from a woodburner:

Traffic on the main road:

Ambulance going past:

The large fountain that seems to run all day in the nearby luxury apartments:

The DLR running past:

And the planes from London City Airport that I previously posted a clip of on the BBC Sound Effects Review. Likewise, all of these clips are from the BBC Sound Effects website, which I have found very useful in helping me build the soundscape of all the noise I will usually hear in the space of 10 minutes of my day.

When putting the clips together I mostly left them as they were as I didn’t feel as though they needed effects or much EQ on them, they seemed to slot pretty easily together. However, I did add a convolution reverb to the fountain to make it sound further away, as it does in reality:

I ran into some challenges when trying to insert the the voice clips from the interviews I had conducted. One of the clips worked completely fine – it was sent over Whatsapp and I just downloaded it onto my computer. and dropped into the recording However, the interview that I felt was most beneficial to the point my paper is trying to make was sent over Instagram and I had some real challenges with it. The interviewee (a student from my course) was talking about how the writing in courses benefits some students whereas others find it difficult, and that students that find it difficult shouldn’t take it as a reflection on themselves if they don’t feel like they succeed in it. They also said that they felt it would be better if students could have more of a choice between written work and practical work, and I thought this was a really insightful comment that would benefit the paper. Unfortunately because this was over Instagram I couldn’t download the voice note, so I had to take a screen recording to get the audio. However, when I tried to take this recording the voice note wouldn’t play back, and even when I wasn’t recording it wouldn’t play back either. It was as if it had deleted itself, which I’ve never know to happen before on the app. I asked the interviewee and they said they had the same problem as well, so a few days later they sent me another voice note with a similar response to my question. Unfortunately I encountered the same problem again. I would’ve asked the interviewee to send the second voice note over Whatsapp so there would be no problems, however they actually sent the second one before I’d asked them to – which was very nice of them! However when it turned out I couldn’t play it back to record it a day later, I didn’t want to ask them to record another response again as I felt like it would be asking too much of interviewees to get them to send the same answer to a question three times over because of my technical problems. I’ve realised that in the future it would be better to conduct these interviews in person. This situation is a shame, as I do think the content paper is going to suffer from the lack of this clip. This also meant I had to re-record a few lines and change the script due to my response to the interviews having to change.

However, a positive note is that Dr Vasseur finally got back to me! Had the paper been handed in on time, I wouldn’t have been able to include his response as he only got back to me a day after the deadline. Although I’d rather have handed the paper in on time, I’m still happy to have this response as I feel as though what he has said is very balanced and contributes as good primary research towards my paper.

I haven’t added too much processing to the vocal track I previously recorded, only a noise gate to drown out the building works that were happening nearby when recording the track:

There’s also a few seconds in the paper where I ‘play’ the part of an English teacher I used to have being a bit snobbish about ex-polytechnics. I thought it’d make the paper a bit more interesting if I gave this character a different tone of voice, so I put my speech through Logic’s Vocal Transformer plugin, changing the pitch by +1 and formant by -3:

This is the result:

It’s a bit strange but I think it’s quite a playful aspect to add to the paper.

I’ve put most of the BBC Sound Effects tracks as a constantly running background throughout the piece, with the exception of the ambulance, plane and DLR effects. I’ve faded them all out at the end, in time with the end of my writing clip where I drop the pencil on the page I’ve been writing on.

I don’t really feel as though there’s much mixing to be done on this. I adjusted a lot of the levels and a couple of EQs as I was recording the paper, and even then I felt as though some of the work I did with the EQ sounded worse than when I left it alone. I’ve panned a few of the soundscape tracks a little bit to create a sense of space, although I’ve tried to keep it as natural as possible. I’d say the paper is pretty much finished now, and in my next blog I will be reviewing the final outcome.

When finishing the first draft of my audio paper, I’ve tried to link my thoughts and research into academia within art studies to my own experiences with ADHD and reading/writing. I’ve also made an attempt at coming up with a proposal for what I think could be a way forward for art studies within higher education, although I’m not sure how realistic it is. The basic conclusion I’ve come to so far is that whilst a contextual understanding of the debates and conversations surrounding contemporary sound art is definitely useful to a degree, it would perhaps be beneficial for students to be able to choose the ratio of practical to written work in their course – to an extent.

Obviously, I’m not saying to scrap written work and reading entirely for students that this doesn’t appeal to – it’s very important to be able to describe one’s process to justify and explain work that has been produced, and reading also plays a large part in the development of contextual awareness that is important to developing one’s own practice. I also don’t want it to seem as though I am whining or complaining about having to do written work – my thoughts and opinions on this subject have definitely evolved as I have worked my way through the script. I’ve found that producing an audio paper has been a useful way of combining practical and written elements to create a body of work that questions the state of contemporary arts education. However, I also see, and have felt personally, that the world of academic writing and reading can often be intimidating to students who join art courses primarily to create practical work and learn practical skills. Maybe lectures could be given to make this world of academic writing seem less impenetrable? I understand the argument that academic writing surrounding sound art is often only made by academics for other academics to read, which would be the same as, for example, papers written by scientists studying for their PHDs which are only ever meant to be read by other scientists. However, a demystification process of sorts, a few lessons to help students who struggle with the language used in these papers, could be useful. It’s difficult to imagine a reality in which this exists, though, as funding is constantly being squeezed out of arts courses by the government. It is a difficult topic to find a conclusion for.

Before I began to record this paper, I had the idea of the pencil scribbles running underneath my voice. Having recorded both of these elements now, I think they work well together – the writing noise adds to a soundscape which I am hoping to fully develop of the surroundings in which I have written the script. I want to create a soundscape that can at times slightly distract the listener from what I am saying, maybe make their brain wander. My brain was constantly wandering off whilst writing the script, not on purpose, but just because I can’t concentrate for longer periods of time very well and it takes me quite a while to write usually. I want to create a mood of constantly being slightly distracted by one’s surroundings, especially in a busy cityscape.

Unfortunately when I first attempted to record my dialogue for the paper, my interface stopped working (it’s an old one and I think the phantom power stopped working). This was a bit frustrating as I was recording pretty close to the deadline (completely my fault and I should’ve done this earlier!) and I had to give back the microphone I was using to record my voice to LCC the next day, and it was not available for me to book out afterwards as we are approaching the winter break. I would make use of the studios at uni, however they’re not available at any of the times I’m free in the coming week. I did manage to borrow a microphone and interface from a friend for a few days, so that’s how I’ve started recording dialogue. This is annoying as because of my poor time management the project will unfortunately have to be handed in a bit late as I don’t have extra support in place at the moment (I’m on the waiting list for a screening), however hopefully it will give me more time to make the paper better quality.

To make the sounds of my voice and the writing congeal together, I’ve sent both tracks to a bus with a very small room reverb. It’s not meant to be heard necessarily, but just to create a sense that both are happening in the same space, simultaneously. Here’s the settings I’ve used:

I’ve also added 11.9db of gain onto the writing track using Logic’s gain plugin, as the recording I have is too quiet. I could’ve re-recorded it, but adding the gain sounds perfectly adequate and if I don’t need to record my scribbling for 10 minutes again, then why should I?!

The final vocal track is also a comp of a few different takes – when recording I’d usually get to around a minute or two of perfect speech until I’d fluff up a line, so in instances like this I have just started recording from the nearest possible break in my speech that I can.

To start building the soundscape I’ve found a couple of good recordings from the BBC Sound Effects website of a narrowboat engine and some lakeside nature sounds:

This is a good start, although when I come to finishing this piece off I would like to add more cityscape sounds to truly recreate what I experience. Just for context, here is the view from where I’ve been writing:

What’s left to do now is to further build the soundscape and insert the recordings of the interviews I carried out with my coursemates. Unfortunately, Dr Vasseur hasn’t replied to me just yet, which is a shame as I think his words would count as a very valuable piece of primary research, however I still have some time so fingers crossed that he gets back to me!

Below is a short description that could be used to promote my audio paper to websites such as NOS magazine (http://nosmag.org/) which highlight and comment on issues that affect people with neurodiversities:

20 year old student and sound artist Henry Brewer has just released a new pilot podcast titled “Well, Why Am I Doing This Anyway?”. This first episode highlights Brewer’s struggles with ADHD in academic settings, calling into question the very nature in which arts universities function and become inaccessible to neurodivergent students, whilst also stepping back and looking at the history of how this came to be. Brewer’s aim is to call for change in a system which he sees as being “frustrating…, especially from the perspective of someone who with an undiagnosed learning disability who doesn’t necessarily have access to many treatments”. He hopes to continue this series into the future, further probing into inaccessible aspects of our westernised society whose traditions can often stem from the archaic. We are here, and we deserve to be heard.

In the past couple of days I have started developing my script and I’m now at the point where I feel I’ve nearly finished writing. This has been a bit of a difficult process for me so far – I have written the entire script on the notes app on my phone whilst pacing up and down my living room. This probably sounds strange but it just helps me concentrate if I can remain in motion – sitting down and writing is much more difficult for me.

I’ve decided to focus in on the question of if academic writing and reading is necessary to develop a successful practice as a sound artist. I am also then planning to link this to my experiences with undiagnosed ADHD, and I will hopefully be able to come to a conclusion where I can make a suggestion as to where arts education could possibly change in the future, although I’m not quite there yet.

I’ve looked a little into the history of arts education within universities and polytechnics, as I’ve previously heard it mentioned that art courses within the framework of higher education used to be more practical than today, where one could argue a course like this is around 40% practical work and 60% written/academic work (taking blogs like this one into account too). I’m hoping this may give a little bit of historical context to what I’m talking about, although I’m concerned that this section of the paper so far is a little under-researched. I will try and rectify this.

I’ve asked a few of my fellow students to send me voice recordings responding to the question “What is your opinion of academia within art studies and do you believe it’s necessary for developing a successful practice?”. I’ve received around 4 replies and there are a couple I think that would be good to slot in. I’ve also emailed the same question to Dr Roman Vasseur, my family friend who lectures at Kingston School of Art. I don’t have a reply yet but hopefully one will come in time!

I now need to think of how I want to conclude my paper. I’m not quite sure what to suggest at the moment so I will take a break and come back to it soon when my brain has had time to ponder…

Sometimes it can be difficult to record foley and get exactly what you want. Or sometimes you may want to access a previously existing piece of media to place within your work. This is where a sound library or sound archive may prove useful. A sound library consists of any amount (it can be large or small) of pre-recorded sounds that can be accessed by members of the public – this can either be free (in the case of freesound.org) or paid (for example, Splice).

This may prove useful to me. I’d like to build a soundscape of the setting I’m writing the script in (my narrowboat in East London), and I want to be able to access sounds that might be difficult for me to capture by myself – such as a plane flying overhead. In order to do some research and see what’s available to me, I decided to simply search ‘free sound library’ into Google. One of the first results that cropped up was the BBC Sound Effects website, first introduced in 2018. This is a collection of over 33,000 sounds recorded by the BBC over its 100 year existence, which are free for anyone to use provided the content is non-commercial. I tested it out by searching for a sound that resembles the planes that fly above my boat as they take off from the nearby London City Airport. This recording of a Boeing 747 seemed to do the trick:

Another sound effect that would be difficult to record as foley is the noise of sirens passing by on the nearby main road. This is impractical to record for the simple fact that you never know when an ambulance or police car is going to pass by, and if you get a bad recording you have to wait for a vehicle for a siren to go by again. I searched for a siren sound effect and after some scrolling found this one, aptly named ‘Dial 999 – Ambulance, pass left to right with two-tone horn siren, urban background’:

It’s very helpful that resources like this are free to access – even if I wasn’t using this sound library to produce my own work, some of the sounds on the website are quite interesting. There are various examples of indigenous music that I wouldn’t have listened to otherwise, for example. Obviously, this does raise the question of colonialism playing a big part in the creation of the sound library. This website consists of tens of thousands of recordings from the past 100 years, so it does take us back to the days of the British Empire. I would like to see some more acknowledgement of this by the BBC as when I try to find discussion about this online I can’t find anything – not even a reassurance by the corporation that these recordings were captured in ethical, consensual ways, which I find troubling.

The library is also not very affordable at all if one wants to use it for commercial purposes. Yes, it’s useful for me in my current situation where I am making this paper for University, however if I wanted to use the BBC’s recordings in a professional scenario I might have to shell out up to £1,650 for use of the full library. This might be standard practice and I can understand why the BBC does this, however it is certainly a barrier to me using it for professional work in the future. Maybe I’ll have to revert back to freesound.org in the future…

On top of my own research into sound archives, I also recently went on a visit with University to the British Library Sound Archives, where we had a talk about the history of not only the archives, but of the means of sound production and reproduction dating back to the Phonautograph, invented by Edouard-Leon Scott in 1857. We were shown various forms of music distribution, and were played a recording off a wax cylinder – this is a medium that dates from the 19th century! This was an interesting talk as we got to learn more about the processes and time constraints that go into digitising all of these recordings and putting them into the archives. For instance, the degradation of physical material sometimes means that archivists only have one shot at making the recordings digital before the original physical copies become unusable. This can happen in the case of reel-to-reel tape that has degraded. We also got shown around the equipment they use, such as the record flatteners they have that unwarp vinyl records.

Something interesting that was mentioned was the efforts made by the library to repatriate recordings that were made tens of decades ago to the countries they were recorded in, especially if the recordings were obtained via what would now be considered non-ethical methods. Although the people who work at the the archives are obviously not the same people who made these recordings, it’s pleasing to see this step being made from a British institution to give these recordings back to the countries they belong to. I was going to say how this seems to be a better method of approaching the de-colonialisation of sound archives than the BBC, however when I looked this up online I also couldn’t find much about it, so maybe the BBC are making efforts to repatriate recordings to their home countries but just aren’t publicising it, although this would be a little odd.

Anyway, this was an enjoyable visit to the archives and maybe I will have more of a sift through them in the future.

This is, after all, an audio paper. It’s impossible for it to exist without some form of performance.

But does performance have to be carried out soley through my voice?

No.

I may also use other aspects of myself and being to perform.

Could I use an instrument to perform?

Yes.

Does it have to be a musical instrument?

No.

I will use a pencil and paper to perform.

For my first test of foley recording, I wanted to record myself writing the first draft of my essay with a pencil on paper, to run constantly underneath my voice. I think it’s my aim to make a distracting soundscape that reflects the difficulties I have with concentration and distraction.

I want to start the essay with just the sound of me writing. I then drop the pencil and begin to speak – “Well, why am I doing this anyway?“. The writing resumes, as does the pencil performance. In the first test recording, I started writing the sentences as I have written them in my draft script. Here I encountered my first problem – as I move the pencil along the page, the sound gets fainter and quieter due to its further proximity from the microphone.

Now, I could move the microphone along the paper with my pencil. However, that would be very impractical and probably produce unwanted noise. I soon realised that you can get the same sound by scribbling in the same spot. It’s not quite as conceptually interesting for me as handwriting the essay in full, however it’s much easier to get the sonic result I am looking for. Below is the paper I was writing on; you can observe the experiments that were occurring as you move down the page –

And here’s a snippet of the audio result:

This is me writing the first sentence and then dropping the pencil, with a short sigh in the distance. Eventually through the 10 minutes I recorded this pencil scribble for, I started to feel a performance aspect to it. I could change the intensity and the speed at which I wrote, and add pauses – all for performative effect. I will keep this idea of scribbling on paper, although as I say, I would’ve liked to have written out the paper in real time. Still, I don’t think this will really detract from the listening experience and is simply part of a wider soundscape that I want to build.

Developing on my previous post, I want to discuss my ideas for the audio paper and the research I could do to make it as engaging as possible.

I want my paper to explore a topic that is related to how I want to amplify the voices of the neurodiverse, and speak about how my relationship with my likely undiagnosed ADHD affects how I study and create.

During a recent lecture, each student was asked to draw on paper a representation of what they thought they might want to cover in their audio paper. Every other student seemed to come up with an interesting topic, however my mind was just blank. I’ve sadly lost my drawing (I think I might’ve thrown it away in embarrassment), however I will give an explanation. I tried to draw completely from impulse to see if it would give me any ideas, but it didn’t go well. I ended drawing a scene of three people shouting gibberish at each other whilst a train rolls through the ceiling(?) and rats run rampant everywhere. Needless to say, it didn’t produce many ideas. However, when I discussed this with my lecturer we came to an idea that I could perhaps write about the nature of academic thinking and writing within art studies, and how it can potentially be off-putting or intimidating to students who may have joined a course to develop practical skills and have little to no experience with academia. This is somewhat similar to my position, although I do have an interest in reading around arts.

This could also be an interesting topic to link up with my goal of talking about neurodiversity within art studies. Speaking from my own perspective, I can often find it very difficult to read through pages of writing such as the Manifesto for Audio Papers that I mentioned in the first blog post for this unit. Usually I find it challenging to read as my brain skips past words and I get to the end of the page wondering “how did I get here?“. This is exacerbated when words and phrases I have not been introduced to before crop up, such as in the manifesto. I might have to read one sentence five or six times to actually have any clue as to what it means, and this makes for a very long reading process, especially when I forget half of what has been said at the end (Note to self – make more notes when reading!). The same can be said for writing – my brain constantly wanders mid-sentence when I write which means it takes me quite a while to get my thoughts down (I just timed myself, it took me 3 minutes to write that last sentence and it’s taken me almost 1 and a half hours to write the previous 450 words of this post – this isn’t even serious academic writing! I’ve just been writing down my thoughts so far in a conversational tone). It would be useful to explore all of this further, and develop ideas on whether arts universities need to better adapt to neurodiversity.

Primary research would be very useful for this paper, as I can gather students’ and academics’ opinions on the matter. A family friend of mine works as a senior lecturer at Kingston School of Art, so I may ask for his opinion whilst also getting vox pops from students on my course. I think this will help me keep my essay balanced and prevent me from going off on tangents. Secondary research is also useful, and I will do some work to find writers and studies I can reference.

In order to produce a convincing body of work that contributes effectively to a wider discourse within Sound Arts, I need to reflect and ask myself – where am I coming from? Who am I? What do I represent? Why does what I have to say matter?

My background coming into the world of Sound Arts is that of a multi-instrumentalist who plays in 6 bands and gigs across London regularly. I’m very much originally a musician who has dipped their toes into this world to develop my practice.

I like to inject humour into my work wherever possible (this is a practice I’ve tried to develop over the past year). I suppose this may come from some of the trauma I experienced when I was younger – nothing crazy, but a long and messy divorce of my parents, a bit of neglect on their part, getting bullied at school, etc. I feel as though a lot of the time I enjoy to make art for people to laugh along with and not take too seriously, whilst still getting a message across that art with humour is just as valid and real as art that covers more serious issues.

I also believe I struggle with undiagnosed ADHD – I have been in contact with the disability services at UAL recently to access support, and I have been on a waiting list on the NHS to be diagnosed for around a year. My GP said I most likely have it, but it’s incredibly difficult to get diagnosed through the system once you turn 18 years old – he actually apologised to me that he couldn’t really do anything to help.

Something that interests me is the role that neurodiversity (specifically ADHD) plays in arts education, and whether universities are doing enough to assist the learning processes of students with dyslexia, dyscalculia, Asperger’s, ADHD etc.

I recently found an interesting written by Luca M. Damiani, a lecturer at LCC, that discusses the relationship between art and neurodiversity:

https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/88/146

He specifically talks about his experiences with Asperger’s syndrome and is interested in “investigating how art and design expand perceptions of and give voice to neurological diversity”. I might like to cover something like this but from the perspective of a student with undiagnosed ADHD. I think it’s important to give voice to people with neurodiverse conditions and this is probably where I want to situate myself for this project.

For my first foray into the world of audio papers and content, I will be writing about an episode of the ‘Art + Music + Technology’ podcast, hosted by the late Darwin Grosse, and reviewing it in terms of the ‘Manifesto for Audio Papers’ as written by Sanne Krogh Groth and Kristine Samson for Seismograf.

The episode I chose to listen to was an interview with Greg LoPiccolo, a games developer who was previously involved in the production of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video game series. LoPiccolo’s new project is a platform called ToneStone, which expands on the concept he was trying to develop with his previous efforts – that is, “to use technology to make music accessible to a mass audience”. He says that whilst his previous projects were more “like karaoke”, ToneStone allows the user to be more creative in the way that it lets them create their own music out of loops, encouraging creativity similar to that seen in games of other genres, such as Roblox or Minecraft. LoPiccolo sees ToneStone as a games design approach to learning music; in a video game, the player won’t know how to play the game at all first. They will start off with easy challenges and as they learn, the game becomes more complex. The same is true with ToneStone – more possibilities are added as the user progresses. I think this quite a good approach of helping people to begin to produce and write their own work. I never had anything like this when I was beginning to make music, and softwares such as GarageBand or Logic Pro were a little daunting to me as a 10 year old. The primary audience of this product is children and teenagers, and it’s commendable that LoPiccolo is attempting to demystify music making to a younger audience.

Being quite a typical podcast format, it can be somewhat difficult to relate it to the manifesto for audio papers. However, it does adhere to a few of the principles mentioned – for instance, it certainly follows statement 5 (“The audio paper is multifocal, it assembles diverse and often heterogeneous voices”). It is narrated from two perspectives, the interviewer and the interviewee, unlike the singular narrative of a traditional written paper. It also “evokes affects and sensations” as written in statement 4 of the manifesto. Whilst only consisting of the sound of two people having a conversation, the listener can pick up a lot from listening as opposed to reading a transcript. You get the small pauses, the tone of the voices, even the breaths – it’s a more unique, human experience than reading. Other than that, I feel as though I am straining to find more statements to compare the podcast to. One could say it’s slightly idiosyncratic in the way that you’re listening to this discussion as a non-rehearsed conversation as opposed to a carefully thought out and pre-planned written paper, however I feel this is a bit of a stretch (maybe I’m wrong, I do find the language used in the manifesto slightly impenetrable at times).

Whilst I feel it’s difficult to compare this podcast to the manifesto for audio papers, it’s a good starting point to begin to analyse audio content that dissects the world of sound art. I’ve learnt how to critically listen to a spoken audio production, which I hadn’t done before, and I think this will help me when making my audio paper.

Bibliograhy

1. “Podcast 379: Greg LoPiccolo” (2022) Art + Music + Technology. Available at: https://artmusictech.libsyn.com/podcast-379-greg-lopiccolo (Accessed: 2022).
2. Groth, S.K. and Samson, K. (2016) Audio papers – A Manifesto, SEISMOGRAF.ORG. Available at: https://seismograf.org/fokus/fluid-sounds/audio_paper_manifesto (Accessed: December 6, 2022).