Paraphones

There has been a lot of discourse in recent years around listening as a process, listening as a tactile, haptic entanglement — an idea of listening as an immersive, participatory activity. But these instruments invite us to think through listening less as an immersion and more as an interruption: listening not only as something active, but as something noisy, disruptive, something producing diversions and reorientations.

This is not speculative; this is actually how we hear. Humans are very noisy listeners. Ears are not silent — as our auricular membranes receive and react to sound waves, they also produce their own sounds in response, called otoacoustic emissions. This is, for example, how they test the hearing of a newborn baby. They play pitches into its ear, but what they are testing are the pitches that the ear sends back, what we, in the musical field, would normally call difference tones. If the ear is healthy, these will be more or less predictable. But unhealthy ears are also noisy, as recent recordings of tinnitus have shown — their sympathetic resonances can very quickly turn raucous and discordant.

This all transpires at a very small scale, inside the architecture of your ear. But what if we shift our perspective a bit, what if we reimagine the scale of our noisy listening? We can think listening through scales of time and scales of space; through scales of activity, of materiality, and of interaction. We can sense how different scales of agency are nested in each other through the collaborative processes of instrument building. And so these instruments propose to rethink the scale of noisy listening, to see how we, as humans, might learn to listen noisily, to listen to these materials but also as an interpellation — to listen disruptively, as a stimulus; to provoke a response; to spark new digressions and unexpected convergences; to enact listening as a vital chain in a more entangled feedback loop encompassing human and nonhuman voices. These instruments ask the performer to both listen to and provoke their material agency within these interscalar webs of messy acoustic collision.

Playing on concepts of host and guest—or as Michel Serres proposed, the parasite—these paraphones fold performative energies into the body of the instrument. The performer’s contribution is filtered through an instrument with other modes of sound production or resonance, inviting sound waves to collide, to interfere, and to superpose, producing unpredictable tapestries of composite sound. Some of these paraphones feed off other instruments or spaces, while some require more than one human body, and others kettle these various forms of sound production and resonance in acoustic crucibles.

In offering us a philosophy of the parasite, Serres plays with its multiple meanings, in French, of host, guest, and also white noise, which for him becomes a great cosmic background static from which all voices emerge in endless cycles of declamation, interruption, and ventriloquy. Within this white noise, hosts and guests exchange places in complex choreographies of ceaseless, murmuring interdependence and interchange. Interruption emerges as a form of listening, an interference that is always already the ground for some other interference or superposition. To give voice is already to interrupt, to enter and to be submerged into the ceaseless diffraction of other voices.

We can imagine then, how the oscillations and fluctuations of these endless interruptions form their own acoustic wave, a meta-sonority whose resonance prompts us to pivot and reorient, navigating the diverse spectra and scales of interwoven material and human voices embroiled in the flux of feedback.

Paraphones ask how my own interruptions can articulate an interjection that is already swallowed up by the material agencies it provokes, how to become guest more than host.