S2, Episode 3: Home Sounds

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Transcript

We live in a quite a modern apartment block, but very like in a very traditional town, so we have like the church really nearby. So the church Bell goes off every hour, there’s a train station so you hear the trains go by. You’ve got like little twittering birds and dogs, and things like that which are like Happy, Lovely neighbourhood sounds. And then you have a lot of like people screaming in various languages in the different apartments around, which is also interesting.

Welcome to That Feels Like Home, a podcast by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA), reaching you from Middlesex University in London. I’m Ana Baeza, and I’ll be hosting this second season to explore the multiple stories around home in the current Covid crisis. This time, we’re recording from less favourable conditions, from our homes, so please bear with us if the sound isn’t always of studio quality. And in this season I’ll be talking with historians, anthropologists, activists and practitioners to reflect on the many changes brought about by this pandemic on our homes. As usual we draw inspiration from the museum’s collections to reflect on the present through the lens of the past.

In this episode we’re thinking about how sound influences our experience of home, and it’s interesting to reflect that when we recorded this a few weeks ago, the country as a whole had experienced a period of unusual quiet; we were all required to stay at home and the customary sounds of traffic reduced perhaps we became all more aware of the sounds of neighbours, housemates, and even ourselves., so alongside discussing this, you’ll also be listening to various home sounds.

What do our homes sound like? Is the radio turned on, can you hear the next door neighbour, perhaps a flushing toilet, some drilling from the next DIY project or children playing, or perhaps complete silence? And what does that silence feel like? Is it relaxing or difficult to listen to and live with? In this episode we’ll be exploring the domestic soundscape, an aspect of home that is often overlooked because it’s so ordinary that it becomes part of the invisible landscape of the everyday, in the words of the cultural historian Jo Moran. And we’re joined by two fantastic guests, anthropologist Jo Tacchi, and sound artist and knitter, Felicity Ford. Welcome Jo and Felicity.

Jo Tacchi:  Hi.

FelicityFord:  Hello.

Ana: Jo Tacchi is a professor in the Institute for Media and Creative Industries at Loughborough University in London. She is a media anthropologist researching media, communication, development and social change with an interest in the senses and emotions and everyday life. Her research is underpinned by ethnographic principles and sensibilities. Felicity Ford is a self-employed artist working principally under the Knitsonik moniker. She mostly works with hand-knitting, knit and spoken word and field recordings Sonik. Her practice lies with the intersection of craft and art and she is especially interested in using sounds to amplify and celebrate women’s history and to explore the politics and textures of daily life and also back in 2012 Felicity was artist in residence at MODA for her project Sonic Wallpapers which explored a new auditory approach to MODA’s wallpaper collection asking what would it be like if we decorated our homes with sounds? So it’s brilliant to have you here Jo and also brilliant to have you back Felicity.

Listening

Ana: In this episode we’re going to be talking about the sounds of home, silences, radio listening, but also about the sounds that might intrude into our very intimate domestic spaces, the sounds that come from the outside. But before we do that I’d like to ask you about the practice of listening, what that means to you Jo and Felicity. In the past Jo you’ve written this is something that’s quite hard to describe in words so I’m sure this is not an easy question. But then also Felicity you’re a sound artist and much of your work, I’m assuming, is about listening. So I just wanted to ask you both how do you engage with the act of listening and why is it important.

Felicity: For me listening is about being really present to what is happening and there’s a kind of bearing witness to and being present to the immediate moment that I find extremely, extremely grounding but also for me it’s a slower pace of comprehending everyday reality than photos which are kind of like, you know a very tiny fraction of time. Whereas if I stand and listen to how long it takes for the beginning of the sound of an aeroplane in the sky to the end of when I can’t hear that sound anymore then I’ve been present in place to what is happening right around me for several minutes.  And I find that a very, yeah for me it’s about being present to what’s right in front of me in a very kind of immediate and very sensual kind of way.

Jo: As you have mentioned like in the past I’ve done research on sound, I haven’t done much research on sound in recent years although I’ve worked with other people studying sounds, supervised PhD students or read the work of other people and I do remember when writing about sound and soundscapes that it was difficult to find a way of putting it into words and describing it in words. But it’s not so much the listening that’s hard to describe because the listening is a process or a practice, it’s a practical thing that we do and it’s quite hard to stop listening. So I think listening for me now because I’m not doing research on sound at the moment, listening is just something that I do as a person in society. So occasionally I think you become aware of listening but mostly it is just something that one does that is not really easy to stop doing. So I think it’s easy to describe and write about listening when you think about it but what you’re listening to is often quite hard to describe.

Felicity: Yeah I often resort to words that are more like touch words or tactile words when I’m trying to describe sounds because we don’t have a very big vocabulary for describing different kinds of sounds and often when I’m listening if I was to try and describe what I heard I will resort to kind of like it was a scratchy sound, or it was a tickly sound or it was a rough sound. And yeah I think sometimes that it’s difficult to pinpoint what the process of listening is but for me I can only say it is very physical and it’s about being very present in my whole body as to what is happening around me.

Ana:  Yeah and I think what you’re both pointing at in some way I think which is about this very experiential, aspect of it that cannot really be translated to spoken language in easy ways is something I can definitely relate to and I guess is one of the reasons also why I asked you to bring some sounds So could you tell us a bit about the sounds that you brought and why you chose them and how they fit within that repertoire of everyday activities and domestic soundscapes? Let’s start with your sounds Jo

Jo: Yeah so the sound that I recorded is the sound that I quite often wake up to which is a soundscape that is I think unique to the lockdown period. So what it is, is it’s got birdsong so that has been something that I’ve been very conscious of since the lockdown happened. And then there’s this sound of my grandson building Lego and searching for Lego pieces. So this is a sound that I’ve never really been terribly conscious of before but now it’s quite often a sound that I wake up to as he’s sat on the landing outside my bedroom door playing with his Lego. And then in the background there’s also the radio. So this is the soundscape that I often wake up to and I think that’s when I’m most conscious of listening and the soundscape throughout the whole day.

Ana: And now let’s listen to Felicity’s recording

Felicity: So the sound that I’ve brought is very much a sound from the lockdown period and it’s the sound recorded from the stairs because I always hear the sound upstairs. I’m upstairs and my husband is downstairs, Mark, doing PE with Joe Wicks and I kind of wake up to this sound, or even if I’ve already woken up and I’m getting up and I’m just starting my day I can hear this loud exercising on the wooden floor and there’s this particular kind of beep, beep, beep and I don’t know what it is it’s some sort of sound that’s part of the PE with Joe Wicks that’s to keep you doing an exercise or to tell you that you have to do it a bit more. And that’s just become such a part of my experience of lockdown it’s like every day during the week, 9 to 9:30, this is the sound that’s going on in our house. And in the background you can hear the shower and that’s me in the shower. And that’s always how it is at the moment in the mornings, me getting ready upstairs and exercise with Joe Wicks going on downstairs.

Ana: And I find it really interesting that you’ve both chosen sounds that are new to this period of lockdown but also sounds that are of that moment of waking up in the morning. So I guess I just wanted to follow up with a question around why did you choose these sounds? Like is there something about a sort of changing soundscape that especially made you more aware of the sonic surroundings? And I guess secondly why that time of day, what do you think is it about the morning?

Jo: I think it’s because it’s, you know you’re waking up and I think your senses perhaps are, well they’re waking up as well so you become aware of the sounds around you in a way that’s different to throughout the day when you’re sort of moving around in soundscapes. And I think it’s noticeable because it is different. It’s like it’s not the normal sounds that you’re used to, you know I mean if you have lived in the same place for, I don’t know, ten years or something and then the soundscape changes it’s a really fundamental change. So I think it’s that waking up and noticing the difference and sounds that are usually a little bit muffled by, I don’t know, traffic noise or aeroplanes overhead suddenly sort of become foregrounded and you become much more aware of them. So, you know I keep saying to people, ‘Gosh there’s so many more birds around at the moment,’ and of course it’s probably not that there’s more birds around it’s just that I can hear them, I can hear them more.

Felicity: Yeah it’s been quite strange for me with that like because just as much as I’ve been paying very close attention to everyday sounds for as long as I can remember and we live on a very quiet street anyway and I guess when I got really intensely interested in everyday sounds I kind of was paying very close attention to like what birds there are in the neighbourhood and what the sounds, everybody’s got these different iron gates in our street, and over time I’ve got used to knowing well that’s No. 11’s iron gates, it has a slightly different timbre from No. 15 and so in a way it’s quite strange for me because it was something that I felt like was a very particular pursuit noticing these everyday sounds and what’s been strange for me about lockdown is suddenly a lot more people taking an interest in that and becoming kind of aware of that. And I suppose things like the birds and I was thinking because you were doing this podcast during lockdown I wanted to find a sound that would speak to that particular context and I was thinking well most of these sounds that I’m noticing during lockdown don’t feel specific to this time because I’ve been thinking about them for over a decade but then the Joe Wicks PE sound is so, for me in a way this period I associate more with this compression of sounds of people talking across the internet, of things being broadcast from YouTube, from Zoom, the texture and compression of mobile phone recordings like in a way that has become much more in the foreground for me.

Jo:  I find it interesting Felicity the way you describe the beep, beep in the Joe Wicks and the way that you said I’m not sure what that’s for and then wondered a couple of things that it might be and there’s something isn’t there about unfamiliar sounds and trying to figure out what they are and putting your interpretation onto it I suppose. So you’re now really used to that sound and it’s part of your everyday sort of routines. But you know I was just thinking it sounded like you haven’t done the Joe Wicks workout because my feeling when you described the beep, beep, beep I immediately felt this sense of relief, oh it’s almost coming to an end because that’s to me what the beep, beep, beep means. So even in your description of it I felt this physical sense of oh it’s almost over, kind of thing. So it’s interesting what sounds can do to you, or even the descriptions of sound.

Felicity: Yes and you’re right there is something about that unfamiliar and I think the thing that I’ve found most striking is I had an errand where someone gave me a cheque and I had to physically go into town to lodge it and I’ve been putting it off and putting it off and then I realised oh it’s nearly six months I have to go now and it was right at the height of lockdown and the quietness of town was really strange, like all the shops shut, all the restaurants shut, no people, and I think there was one bird in the canal and it was making a little, I think it was like a coot and it was doing its call but that sound was reverberating off all of the surfaces and I realised I’ve never heard that because that space would be buffered by people.

Ana: Yeah.

Felicity: But I didn’t record that sound I can just tell you about it. I recorded it in my memory but not on my recorder, so that’s my other lockdown sound.

Jo: The thing is you can’t really separate sound and soundscapes from all the other…I mean this idea that you experience sound or you need to draw on other ways of describing sounds like other sort of senses like touch or feel or vision or whatever. I think during lockdown and the way that people’s movements and the presence of, I don’t know, vehicles and so forth changing so much sound has actually changed because of what you described, you know the different surfaces that sound is bouncing off because there’s nothing in the way to stop it, so sound is different during lockdown, it’s not just that we’re hearing things that we couldn’t hear before but those sounds themselves are transformed because the environment is so different.

Ana: I’d like to maybe return to the question of the domestic space because you’ve been talking about how because the sounds have changed themselves because the environment around us has how has that felt to the domestic environment for you, how has the sonic atmosphere in the home felt different during this period?

Felicity: I’ve actually felt very nostalgic for, and very comforted by a project that I worked on in 2008 called the Fantastical Reality Radio Show which was like a really cheesy kind of like a 1950s gameshow, radio show but everything was about really mundane everyday sounds and I collaborated with these artists Kayla Bell and Claudia Figueiredo and they were doing a project at the time called Mundane Appreciation and I remember working on that radio show and I was recovering from some fairly major surgery on my feet and so I was kind of in the house a lot because of illness and disability and I had this great project on where we were doing things like, there was a whole thing, ‘Which snack is that?’ and so the idea was that we recorded eating different snacks, so I think I had Jacobs crackers, crisps and then there was some sort of other biscuit and I was recording the sound of me eating these different snacks and then with the idea I was going to play this to somebody later and they had to identify which one was crisps and I just remember if you’ve never done it, if you’ve never listened to headphones and had a microphone and eaten crisps, like after that crisps are transformed, you can never just go back to just eating crisps without thinking about it. And I remember weeping with laughter for some reason the sound was so funny.

And then similarly we kind of decided well we’re going to make these little profiles about ourselves for this radio show that are going to be based on the domestic soundscape and I thought, well which sounds do I want to incorporate? And I thought about the sound of tipping sprinkles, like sugar strands into a glass bowl if you’re going to make cookies or something, and it is such a beautiful sound these little tinging sounds of tiny pieces of hard sugar going into a bowl and like every time I opened the kitchen cupboard to make a cup of tea or something there’s sprinkles there and I think about that sound, even, what is it, 12 years later. And I think about like there’s something so joyful and life-affirming in that project and in a way I haven’t thought about that project and I’m not thinking about the final output that we made but much more the process of being in place, sort of stuck at home, recovering from this major surgery and just filling up that time with mischief and celebration and recording every sort of…

Like making popcorn, that’s another one if you’ve never made popcorn in a saucepan and listened to it and thought about how it sounds like fireworks you should definitely, I recommend it highly as a sonic entertainment. And I just think yeah I’ve been thinking a lot about that. So I don’t know if that answers your question of the domestic soundscape but for me the domestic soundscape has been transformed by those earlier kinds of projects. And lockdown has really made me think about them again and the process of being at home and remembering it as a vital site of creativity and play and a cultural site of meaning and a kind of really rich resource when we can’t go out.

Ana: Yeah it also seems to suggest like a new attentiveness to those small, everyday gestures that we start to perceive in a different way and to give more importance perhaps. I don’t know how that’s been for Jo, whether this resonates with you Jo or how have the domestic routines and atmosphere felt different as regards to their sound?

Jo: I think I’ve been trying quite a lot to create soundscapes, so to fill the sort of empty spaces because the domestic space has become more, I don’t know, it’s sort of become larger in our lives because of the lack of our ability, or we’re not allowed to travel around and go into other spaces so much, those of us who aren’t frontline workers. So I’ve been working at home. I’ve been just as busy as if I’d been physically able to go to work, or perhaps busier I’m not sure, but it’s all in the same space. So I think when I’m working I try and reduce or exclude any sounds, I occasionally become aware of sounds outside, the birdsong etc. etc. or other people in my household moving around. But when I’m not working that’s when I need to fill the soundscape because it’s then my domestic space. So somehow I’m trying to switch between a working soundscape and a domestic soundscape even though it’s all happening in this same physical space.

Ana: That’s so interesting. I’m just thinking of some conversations that we’ve had in other podcasts in which we speak more about spatial demarcations between the domestic space and the workspace where the fact that sound has been one of the channels, I guess, for you to make that division. I think it’s really interesting and I guess it speaks to that physical quality of sound as something that’s spatial and how it takes up space,

Jo: Yeah and I think it’s probably something that everyone tends to do but not in a particularly conscious way. So I’ve finished working now, I’ll switch the radio on. Or I’m starting to work now I’ll switch the radio off. So you are manipulating and adjusting the domestic soundscape as you move through different tasks. So yeah it’s really interesting.

Silence

Ana: You’re listening to That Feels Like Home. I’m Ana Baeza and in this episode I’m talking to Jo Tacchi and Felicity Ford about the experience of sound shapes our domestic spaces, and now we’re going to move onto discussing silence and quietude in lockdown.

Ana:  We’ve been talking about different domestic sounds but I wanted to also touch on the subject of silence which has come up in a more tangential way and especially in cities and I live myself in London, silence has been quite significant as part of the experience of lockdown and probably one of the things that I will remember, I wonder if that’s the same for you or have you been engaging with silence and the texture of silence in any way during this period and what your thoughts are on that?

Felicity: I think at home there’s very rarely any genuine silence, like there’s always a sound, like there’s always the sound of our tap just constantly drips in the kitchen and that sound is there all the time. There’s loads of blackbirds, we have loads of blackbirds in this street and they’re always on the roofs singing. And for me those are quite kind of comforting sounds and I definitely have noticed the drop in air traffic and I think that’s one of the major reasons that I’m noticing more birdsongs definitely is that that background drone of planes going over and over and over has lessened somewhat. But I’ve definitely found that quietness and particularly the of like cafes and restaurants and pubs really strange and I didn’t appreciate how much of a comfort it was to me to walk through town and hear people laughing and getting drunk and being silly and eating and those little sounds of cutlery even and the sounds of the bustle of life. And I think it was really strange seeing the centre of town being really silent and I think that for me was the slightly darker side of silence, of quietness.

Jo: I think it’s interesting as well, we talked earlier about how you talk about or write about or put into words things that are to do with listening and sound and the sonic I guess and so I’ve been thinking about people saying it’s quiet, it’s so quiet and quite often for me it’s like when I’m thinking, oh it’s really quiet, I’m saying that because I can hear a sound really loudly, like birdsong. So it’s interesting and it reminds me of the difference between sound and noise and noise is quite often considered to be quite a negative thing, it’s like an invasive thing, so people talk about noise pollution and so forth. But actually sometimes with the lack of noise which indicates something else, you know that there are people around, that you’re not on your own etc. etc. is a comforting thing.

So the way we talk about these things and the role that they play in our domestic lives or everyday lives it’s quite hard to articulate and in the past when I’ve written about silence and stillness as a state of contemplation silence doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of sound or a lack of noise, so I’ve written in the past about how some people fill their domestic space with quite loud sounds in order to achieve a sense of, what I used to call, social silence and then I started to use this term stillness instead. So it’s like blocking out unwanted thoughts and I just wonder this sense of being in a space where suddenly it feels really silent and you feel quite alone and you long for the presence of others and the indicators of that partly being the sounds of other people, I just wonder if that’s connected to this sort of emotional state of feeling either part of something or alone or connected or disconnected. Yeah it’s really fascinating.

Ana: Yeah absolutely. I hadn’t thought of framing it that way but it absolutely rings true and it makes me think of an experience I’ve been having recently, I just became much more aware of some of the sounds of the neighbours around me. one of the parents works nightshifts so there’s quite a lot of sounds during the night that I was a bit frustrated by at the beginning but then actually that made me aware of some of the social lives around me. So there’s something there about the social dimensions of other sounds that we suddenly become aware of, of people that live around us and that we might not have interacted with before because they were dampened by other noises.

Felicity: I feel like when I was thinking about that and thinking about this podcast the phrase that I put down around this question was collective vulnerability because for me the social sonic state of lockdown has been one of an intense feeling of vulnerability but a shared, collective vulnerability. For example, reading like what you were saying about your neighbours and becoming more aware of your neighbours sonically during this period of lockdown but then also coming more into contact with their lives. Like I have a neighbour on one side who they’ve had a baby last year and so she would be one and I hear them in the garden all the time kind of showing her things and talking to her and talking her through her first steps and I feel a little bit like almost like I’m trespassing on these very vulnerable, fragile moments of like this her first summer of being kind of one and being able to walk and crawl and she’s got some words and then at the same time I’ve got chickens, we’ve got four chickens, I adore the chickens and I’m always talking to the chickens when I go outside and suddenly I became really conscious, I suddenly became just really self-conscious there was one morning when I could hear they were talking to their daughter, their little baby girl, I was talking to the chickens and then suddenly I just felt really self-conscious and then I thought no we’re all just trying to live and in our ways.

We’ve got like our families and our family life which for me is the chicken babies and you know I dote on the chickens and I’m always bringing them treats and when I talk to them they kind of response they kind of go ((clucking noise)) and I suddenly just felt very tender towards all of us. And then I have another neighbour on the other side and she’s very recently bereaved and she lost her mother and she was her mother’s full-time carer and I’m very conscious of her being alone and our cat goes round and she says that the cat knows that she needs company. And I hear her talking to the cat and I just think how tender are those things of like her talking to the cat, me talking to the chickens, the neighbours talking to their baby, it just feels really very…this is something to me to hold in intense tenderness and I feel like this is happening everywhere. And we’re all seeing and hearing parts of our lives, or parts of other people’s lives that maybe in normal circumstances we wouldn’t hear and we’re sharing parts of our lives that we, in normal circumstances, wouldn’t want to share.

Jo: It sounds like the soundscapes that you’re describing are like incredibly comforting in a sense and it just makes me think about the way people use mediated sounds, so radio, you might think of in particular but it is about connections isn’t it and trying to be connected. So when you’re .listening to a neighbour talking to a child or a partner or whatever that’s not the sort of thing that you normally think of the sorts of sounds that would bring you comfort like the sound of a radio programme that you regularly listen to or music channel that you listen to but it’s sort of transformed into that somehow. So I think this need for connection because we can’t physically connect, as you said because we might transmit COVID if we don’t socially distance but sound isn’t prevented in the say way. So sound is a really important connector for us in this particular time and I guess you know I often wonder about people who are completely on their own in lockdown and what role does sound play for them in their lives and listening to neighbours is that a comforting thing or a reminder of their isolation? I don’t know the answer but yeah it would be interesting to know.

Radio, broadcasting and connectedness

Ana: You’ve introduced this subject of isolation, Jo, and how we need to think how sounds but also quietude and absence of sound can be affecting people very differently. So I wanted to move onto the subject of connectedness, and how radio and other forms of broadcasting, like podcasts, might offer a way of generating connections. What’s your personal experience of listening to the radio?

Jo: Yeah so this is interesting because I mean thinking about my own use of radio I’ve always listened to the radio first thing in the morning and often when I’m driving and not so much late at night or anything like that but…so I still do that, I probably do it more because I’m more in my domestic environment more, although I’m not driving long distances any more. So I feel like radio is important not just to create a soundscape but also to find out what’s happening because there’s this…the other thing about the current pandemic situation is about getting information and understanding what’s happening and trying to sort of connect with other people’s experiences. So for me that comes in the form of speech radio, so I listen to a lot of news radio and news programmes and discussion programmes and also podcasts.

So podcasts have, I mean I’ve always, well for some time I’ve listened to podcasts on occasions but they’ve become really important to me now. So if I’m cooking I need to be listening to a podcast as well. So I don’t know yeah it’s some kind of connection to something else or a filling of space that you’re in like on your own and feeling some kind of connectedness to some other place or person or story or whatever. And thinking about doing this podcast I was interested that Ana you shared with us a link to a site that gives you a sense of what different places sound like during lockdown and it reminded me of the radio garden which is an app and a website where you can tune in live to radio stations from all over the world. And I mean I don’t know why I’d forgotten about it because for ages now I’ve been trying to find ways to connect to what people are talking about and saying in the States because of the Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd events and just really, really wanting to be connected to it and I’ve finally, because of preparing for this podcast, found a way to be connected to that listening to a radio station in Washington that is exploring the topic from various different perspectives. So yeah I think for me the radio, and even podcasts which aren’t a live broadcast are about connecting.

Felicity: That’s so interesting what you’re saying there about podcasts because I’m going to say a slight heresy which is I don’t really listen to the radio, as in terrestrial radio, I love the idea of the radio but I mostly hear it in the morning when it comes on, it’s our alarm and we go straight into like the seven o’clock news and I find, like you Jo, I’m very…I’ve been following the Black Lives Matter movement and everything that’s going on with anti-racism in America and I find mainstream news coverage like CNN or Fox News or Sky News and even to an extent the BBC news I feel like I’m not getting the depth of coverage of what is going on. And so I listen to, there’s one podcast that I religiously listen to which is called The Black Guy who Tips, podcast and they’re really long conversations, it’s a husband and wife and they’re about between two and three hours long, each episode and they speak on such depth about race in America.

And in a way that’s kind of a…I get something very important socially from listening to that which connects me to a whole series of things that are going on in the world at the same time as the pandemic and it’s interesting that I think podcasts and the fact people can now take broadcasting into our own hands and we can all produce content and put it up online has removed that sense of collective, like there’s a programme that’s on at nine o’clock in the morning, it’s broadcast on terrestrial radio, we’re all listening to that at the same time. That’s not the case anymore with podcasts our experiences are much more individually curated and geographically dispersed and yet there is that empowerment that you can go, this is the…these are the voices that I want to listen to in trying to understand these huge, complicated issues.

Jo: It’s interesting isn’t it. It’s like the kinds of podcasts you’re taking about it’s like being drawn into other people’s very detailed long conversations, a bit like sort of eavesdropping or listening to your neighbours and becoming self-conscious that people might be listening to you talking to your chickens. I mean the thing is that probably listening to you talking to your chickens is just as…fulfils the same…I mean it’s not about, you know intellectual topics I assume, I don’t know what you say to your chickens but it might not be unpacking race issues but it’s kind of the same thing isn’t it? it’s about relationships, it’s relational, it’s about sociality. That’s what sound does and whether it’s radio, overheard conversations, podcasts, that’s what it does it connects us through this sort of sense of relationship and sociality I think.

Documenting Sound

Ana: I think this subject of sociality, this idea of listening into other people’s conversations and daily lives, and the immediacy and directness of the medium relates to some interesting initiatives around documenting sound during the pandemic. So there are projects that are trying to create a global community of sounds, for example Cities and Memory launched the initiative Stay at Home sounds. There’s also another one called Aporee which is collecting changing the soundscapes around us, so I wonder what do you make of these projects that are trying to collect the pandemic through its soundscapes, which is about building connections now, but also about how will we remember this present moment – through sound…could you reflect on opportunities but also the limitations these projects afford?

Felicity: I’m a very long-term fan of the Aporee sound map and the Cities of Memory project and like I’ve contributed for quite a few years to the Aporee sound map, I think it’s a beautiful project in terms of kind of creating a global community of listeners and I love going on there and just listening to what’s going on in the world right now. But in terms of like an attempt to document the pandemic my feeling is that when you make a recording, for instance if I go out and I make a recording of something that speaks to this idea of the pandemic I really feel like most of all the person who’s going to benefit from me making that recording is me and it’s going to be part of my map of how I’m making sense of what this moment feels like and I’m not sure that any of us can collectively represent how this time sounds or feels for everyone and there’s some kind of interesting like ethics is maybe a heavy word but there’s to me something interesting about an attempt to capture how it feels. Like there’s no way that we can possibly record all the nuance of this moment and I kind of feel like in a way those projects are kind of coming out of a need of individuals and creators for whom sound recording is an important part of making sense of the world. And I’m not sure if they’ll become like a lasting document of this time.

Jo: The thing about sound and listening to sound is that it’s bodily felt isn’t it? It’s not just about your ears; it’s like a physical thing. There’s the sound, vibrations, etc. etc. And so a sound recording and people’s experience of listening to that is another bodily experience, experience. So they are separate things. But the thing about sound is can you really capture sound if you can’t attach the sort of sentiments that were experienced along with it? How do you communicate that and does it matter because in the listening of the recorded sound maybe different sentiments are produced. It’s like if you turned off all of your other senses and just use sound the world would feel different. So yeah I mean what happens when someone listens to recorded sound without that broader context?

Felicity: That’s the thing is the framework around it because I kind have this memory of like there’s a whole other idea around this idea of sharing sounds because if your idea of sharing sounds is that you record a sound and put it up online and that’s it then that’s very different than if I say if I recorded a sound then I attach it in an email and I write to you about, ‘Hey Jo I heard this amazing sound and it made me think of you and this was the context of me listening to the sound,’ and then it becomes already the context around how you’re going to listen to that sound is so different than if it’s just kind of…and I think that those frameworks of how those sound maps and those projects that record COVID how they’re like the framework around them in a way is every bit as important as what the actual sounds are that people are recording.

Ana: Yes absolutely. I think this is a question that it pertains to sound but I think it pertains to documentation practices in general as well and if you think of the way that an archive is constituted and how if you tried to present that without those frameworks then there is, you know it’s a changed context isn’t it? So I think it’s something that probably translates to many of the other COVID projects that aren’t also just about sound. it’s just generally a really important question around how we do documentation I think.

Felicity: Yeah and who’s at the centre of the documentation like keyworkers and people who have been putting in massive shifts in…in Central London’s overcrowded hospitals the soundscape of their experience of COVID is so far different from like my privileged wander round my nice garden, play with my chickens, middle class idyll that I live in.

Jo: Maybe it’s the contrast, maybe that’s what would be really useful about, or is proving useful about collecting sounds from COVID, that sort of contrasting, comparing, contrasting and trying to give sort of a more rounded, comprehensive sense of the differences because you know we might all be locked down, apart from frontline workers but our experiences of lockdown and our experiences of sound and everything else is quite different. We’ve heard a lot about the rise in domestic violence and child abuse etc. etc. so there’s all these sort of negative things that some of us are not experiencing at all. So the differences in, you know we talked earlier about those sort of comforting sounds in domestic soundscapes but some people’s domestic soundscapes are anything but comforting I guess.

Felicity: Absolutely … And I think it’s really difficult for anyone to try and author a portrait of this period in time when there are so many conflicting and difficult social issues that are foregrounded by it.

Jo: I’ve sort of found myself in this space where I’m thinking about all of those peoples whose soundscapes we will never hear or even some anywhere close to understanding, perceiving, being aware of, which is a reflection of, it sounds quite negative but it’s a reflection of society. So I mean I can’t imagine, as an academic I can’t imagine quite how to make this happen but I think it would be interesting to think about how to explore those inequalities and different life experiences of different groups, not only hidden by the lockdown and by COVID but also sort of exposed by events like the murder of George Floyd.

Felicity: It’s always, it’s one of the reasons I’m so drawn to sound is that you can through listening you can draw together a very disparate collection of perspectives and you can kind of bring them together and you can, by having all these different layers of different experiences you can kind of put them together and say this is part of one whole context. But it’s really hard to imagine how a project like that would come together. And it’s especially difficult to imagine, yeah the issue of authorship, who gets to choose which stories get told and which ones don’t.

And there are some things where, like I had an experience where, so I still have to go the GP for ongoing tests and stuff because of my long-term health issues with arthritis and like I went to the doctor’s and the door’s locked and the nurse comes out and asks me my name and my patient number and everything and have I got a temperature and she’s there in like a full mask with two blue gloves on, I get given a mask and I realise I was like wow this person’s experience of this period of time is so utterly different from me skipping around at home with the chickens. And it’s the kind of situation where it would feel to me utterly disrespectful to say, ‘I’m recording the sounds of lockdown do you mind if I stick my recorder on in your surgery?’

Jo:  Yeah exactly. But if you think about it from the perspective of sounds then I think yeah that’s also what I’m figuring how can I actually…how could you possibly ask someone who’s having a terrible time to record their soundscapes. But if you think about it, you know going right back to the beginning of our conversation, if you think about it in terms of listening and active listening and you know listening beyond your sort of normal field of listening, if you like listening to different voices, different stories etc. then maybe that’s the way to think about it rather than focusing on the sound focusing on the process of listening. And that seems to be what a lot of people are calling for around the Black Lives Matter things.

Felicity: You know, it just reminded me of two things, one is that breathing and the issue of our breath, like there will be some people in this pandemic where their main memory of the sound of this will be somebody that they love struggling to breathe and that for example is a sound that you could never record that sound, the ethics of trying to record that sound it’s sort of unconscionable to be like, can I record this sound of breathing?

And similarly I was listening to a very interesting conversation between Diane Ivey and Ifé Franklin and they’re two black fibre artists in the US and Ifé does a lot of work around telling the story and honouring the memory of her enslaved ancestors and halfway through they were trying to talk about everything that’s going on in this moment and Diane was getting frustrated and she went ((blows)) and she kind of exhaled and Ifé said that breath, the sound of your breath that is the sound, the ancestral memory of your ancestors, of the frustrations that we have felt, and it is George Floyd’s breath that was taken away from him. And so for me that, both the pandemic and the situation with George Floyd, which also recalls the death of Eric Garner and that slogan, I can’t breathe, in a way maybe that will be the sound that I think about which I would never record, when I look back at this historic moment and think about which sounds were important now.

Jo: Yeah I’m tingling.

Ana: Yeah.

Jo: I can’t add anything to that, that was great.

Ana: Yeah I think we’ll probably finish there I think.

Jo:  Yeah.

Ana:   Well thank you very much Felicity and Jo for this conversation and for joining us, it was great to have you.

Jo: Thank you.

Felicity:   Thanks very much for having us.

Ana: A huge thanks to my guests for this episode, Jo Tacchi from Loughborough University and Felicity Ford, for joining us to talk about the sounds of home and the sounds of Covid. In this episode you also heard the voice of Annelies Van de Ven, who lent her impressions of home life during lockdown, and we are very grateful for her contribution. If you’d also like to take part in the podcast, get in touch with us emailing moda@mdx.ac.uk. I’m Ana Baeza and this podcast is brought to you by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University. For more information about this episode, shownotes and reading list please visit our website https://moda.mdx.ac.uk/ . We’ll be back again with episodes, touching yet more aspects of home life and the everyday under Covid. Stay tuned.

Further Reading

Bull, M., Back, L. and Howes, D. eds., 2015. The auditory culture reader. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Erlmann, V., 2004. But what of the ethnographic ear? Anthropology, sound, and the senses. Hearing cultures: Essays on sound, listening and modernity, pp.1-20.

Ford, F., 2012. Sonic Wallpapers. Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture.

Ford, F.V., 2010. The Domestic Soundscape and beyond: presenting everyday sounds to audiences (Doctoral dissertation, Oxford Brookes University).

Seremetakis, C.N. ed., 1996. The senses still. University of Chicago Press.

Tacchi, J., 2009. Radio and affective rhythm in the everyday. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 7(2), pp.171-183.

Tacchi, J., 2003. Nostalgia and radio sound. The auditory culture reader, pp.281-295.

Tacchi, J., 2002. Radio texture: Between self and others. In Material cultures (pp. 37-58). Routledge.

Tacchi, J., 2000. The need for radio theory in the digital age. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 3(2), pp.289-298.

Tacchi, J.A., 1997. Radio sound as material culture in the home (Doctoral dissertation, University of London).

Useful Links

Cities and Memory Project: https://citiesandmemory.com/sounds/

Aporee Sound Map: https://aporee.org/maps/

Radio Garden: http://radio.garden/visit/new-york-ny/9Yi25umJ

Ladydyeyarns: https://ladydyeyarns.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/tv/CA6WhuDJcEN/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Ifé Franklin: https://www.ifearts.com/

The Black Guy Who Tips: https://www.theblackguywhotips.com/

Show Notes

Produced by Ana Baeza Ruiz, with guests Jo Tacchi and Felicity Ford

Editing by Zoë Hendon and Paul Ford Sound

Contributions from Annelies Van de Ven

Music Credits

Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License

Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.