Tactile Listening

A treeline shivers. A stone shifts. Breath takes shape as voice to displace air. Sounds are also shapes to be known through feeling. This Tactile Listening workshop led by Ariana Martinez, Nour Yusoff, Anna RG, and the Sick Music Center shares ways of listening to, interpreting, and performing sound that move fluidly between hearing and touch. This is a hands-on workshop exploring sonic and tactile connections, moving outward from Ariana Martinez's installation, [river through wood with breath] in Pioneer Works' 2nd floor gallery. Using basic materials and our own imaginative sensibilities, we will listen to the sound artwork in the gallery space, interpret this experience as sculptural forms, and use those forms as “tactile scores” to prompt new sonic experiments improvised in real time. This workshop is open to adults. No music, audio production, or artmaking experience necessary.

Workshop Format

1. sonic meditation / sound-making

inspired by the sonic meditations of pauline oliveros, developed to encourage listening attention beyond the sonic, to include the tactile.

• multi-sensory “listening” exercise, guiding our attention through the sounds and layers of Martinez's field recordings.
• sound making together, joining these environmental sounds, moving in and out of awareness of our own sounds, the sounds of others, and the birds, the water, the trees.

1. score making

we’ll provide a set of supplies of different textures (modeling clay, pipe cleaners, stones shells and other objects from the natural world), to build simple tactile “transcriptions” of the sounds created, or an interior sensation

1. score interpretation !

passing these scores to another participant (and in the spirit of the conveyor belt!), we will then interpret and “perform” these tactile scores in a few guided experiments, as a silent tactile performance, in small “ensembles” and with the group as a whole.