credit: unknown

Hearing as Science-Fiction

Artist talk

Hearsay Audio Arts Festival, Kilfinane, Co. Limerick. 21-23 November 2014.

Description

I was an invited guest to this festival of radio and audio art, held in a small market town in the middle of the Ballyhoura Mountains.

My talk explored the mysterious and wonderful complexity of our acoustic sense. Topics included timbre and the limits on measuring frequency, the condition of “the digital”, analogue audiophile myths, and why we might consider the ear itself as a digital apparatus. An examination of phenomenological paradoxes lead to a startling conclusion: hearing is acoustic time-travel, an impossible activity that we nonetheless take for granted. Hearing creates the world for us as a science fiction.

Thanks

Thanks to the organisers for a fantastic time.