The Listening Academy – Delhi, Public Program

The Listening Academy – Delhi

9-14 December, 2024

Facilitated by Brandon LaBelle, Suvani Suri, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

Organised in collaboration with Sarai-CSDS

Listening as writing, sonic fictioning, and rhetorical action – thinking relations between sound, voice, writing and language, and the ways in which listening contributes to meaning-making. While writing is mostly understood as an act of inscription, one that gestures toward leaving a mark to be read, in what ways can we think of listening as writing? If voice is fundamental to the crafting and archiving of stories, how does listening participate?

VENUE

Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines, Delhi-110054

PUBLIC PROGRAMME

Monday, 9 December, 2024 / 4:00pm

Sonic Trails – Talk with special guest Moushumi Bhowmik

Tuesday, 10 December, 2024 / 2:30-6:00pm

SESSION 1 – Vibrational tunings, disoriented listenings

with Moushumi Bhowmik as respondent

Sanctified Hearts and Invisible Purifiers: A Story of Vibration, Tuning, and Sacred Resonance in Eastern India, Sourav Saha

This presentation explores the concept of vibration as a sensory, spiritual, and socio-cultural phenomenon within Satsang, a modern socio-religious community from Deoghar, a city in Eastern India. Focusing on satsang adhibesan or devotional congregations, it examines how practices such as chanting, prayer, and silent meditation are believed to generate “positive vibrations” that are not only meant to purify physical spaces and the natural world but as well as the hearts, minds and bodies of individuals. These vibrations are not only central to the community’s spiritual practices but also emerge as contested elements within shared sonic environments, often delineating the boundaries between devotees and non-devotees. Drawing on ethnographic insights from Kolkata and Deoghar, the paper frames listening as a mode of world-making through atmospheric attunement, wherein vibrations emerge as matters and metaphors of purification––purifying people, places, and environments. The paper invites a deeper engagement with listening as a creative and critical practice, positioning vibrations not simply as entities to be heard but as instruments of expression and embodiment within and beyond spiritual lifeworlds.

Bum Baṁ, Nicola Singh

Dr Nicola Singh will give a performance reading that disorients the listening experience. Drawing on recent projects, she will playfully demonstrate the social, subjective and somatic multiplicity and contingencies between language, listening, meaning-making and feeling-feeling. Singh holds a practice-led PhD in Performance Writing (Northumbria University UK, 2017). Her current research explores esoteric sonic practices and the role of sound, listening and language in ritualistic, transcendental, and spiritual experiences.

SESSION 2 – Materiality through notation, of voicing

with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay as respondent

Sonic Borderlines: Metaphors of Listening, Jeremy Woodruff

The project Sonic Borderlines consists of bringing disparate music together, investigating individual subtleties and nuances with a process of intense listening through implicit metaphors of movement and detailed transcriptions/mapping. This process invokes social hybrids, real and invented, while listeners attempt to learn and embody unfamiliar disciplines. Some of these questions presented are: What is different in underlying metaphors of movement between contradictory mindsets of listeners from different backgrounds? How is social composition encoded in these ways of moving and interacting with tones? And how can habitual reception be subverted, refining affective responses by adopting alternates? How can we engage such an expanded listening/performing most effectively in practice?

River Song: A Performative Presentation, Alessandra Eramo

Drawing on my current research into the materiality and invisibility of the voice, the tension between vocality and writing, performative rituals and trance-like states evoked through singing, this performance explores the relationship between voice, gesture and sound in the context of environmental memory and the sonic landscape of the river. The voice, both ephemeral and deeply embodied, can be expanded and transformed through extended vocal techniques, allowing for new forms of expression. Through pre-recorded sounds, live vocalisations, contemplation and mimesis practices, the audience will be invited to join in the creation of an impromptu chorus, collectively shaping a sonic river. In this shared vocal experience we will create harmonies and noises that connect the human and the natural, reflecting on the current environmental crisis. This shared vocal experience will blur the boundaries between the human voice and environmental sounds, and will form a chorus that flows like a river: quiet, loud, still and moving.

Wednesday, 11 December, 2024 / 2:00-6:30

SESSION 1 – Language, Converse, Storying Relations

with Alessandra Eramo as respondent

The dramaturgy of Conversation_Translations at Play, Ingrid Cogne

In my current arts-based research project The dramaturgy of Conversation (FWF - Austrian Science Fund | Elise-Richter PEEK - V709), I have been addressing, more than approaching the uses of andrelationalities between spoken, bodily, and written languages in situations of conversations (everyday/in-situ or created/isolated), the translation between these three categories of language and the ways in which they imply “reading”, “listening”, and “filtering” a range of more or less visible, immaterial, tacit information, thoughts, and knowledge. The multi-layers of the solicited perceptions invite multiple possibilities of interpreting the content circulating within a conversation, when the modalities of its appearance constantly change and have different temporalities. No matter how precisely the situation is planned, it contains a necessary and structural element of improvisation that encourages the challenge of (/an attitude toward challenging) positionings and representations through perception. As a performer and

choreographer, I was trained to let myself be exposed to energies of spaces, peoples, and relations. Energy goes beyond what one sees, hears, or touches: one feels, perceives, reads, and can work with it. As a researcher, I developed practices and methods of activation and facilitation of knowledge coarticulation to support the statement that knowledges “only” exist in movements. It is in the listening/ reading/filtering that meaning is created. At the end, it is the one listening – the protagonist involved in the in-situ or created situation – who “writes” and “reflects” the content (thoughts and/or knowledge).

Seda - A short essay on what I have and have not heard and try to put in a spiral of thoughts, Lale Rodgarkia-Dara

This paper deals with the role of the sonic spectrum and our ecological interaction. What does it mean if research on a human motion and the perception of sound is deeply linked to the language used constructing the existence of this motion and sound? T o this end, I draw on poems by the Sufi poet Lalleśvarī (1320-1392) called Lal Ded and place them on the one hand in the context of language and body and on the other hand juxtapose them with associations of our sound spheres.

SESSION 2 – Limits and Sites of Amplification

with Anandit Sachdev and Suvani Suri as conversants

Broadcaste, Piyush Kashyap

Investigating the synced phenomena of broadcast as broad-caste (how widely propagated myths sustain the bulk of caste system), this presentation will discuss how Listening is brahmanically deintelligentialized to manufacture compliance– historically via dissociative myths and more recently via Loudness that operates the mytho-ideological dissociation physically into neighborhoods, rooms, and bodies.

Hekh: Detecting signals and generating calls, Rahul Juneja

‘Listening’ to immediate contexts, geographies, voices unheard, and conjuring new frames and vocabularies is at the heart of Hekh– a project where the act of listening to the milieu allows for mapping and dissecting lingerings (past, present and future) through specific cultural and geographical contexts in the immediate now. Both Signal and interface, Hekh is a constant vibrato, an ‘undying’ Call, which resonates, amplifies, gathers, pierces, branches, and continues to move, creating spaces and frames to gather, converse, listen, speak, break, and think what it means to be in the arts today.

Sounding the Yamuna, Surbhi Mittal

Surbhi works with the liminality in sound and space. Since 2019, she has been listening to the Yamuna in different capacities - soundscapes, walks, immersions and graphic scores. She will besharing glimpses from her ongoing work that centres the entanglement between linear time as imagined by humans and omniscient time enacted by the river.

SESSION 3 – Listening wo(rl)ds, Writing sound

with Budhaditya Chattopadhyay as respondent

Listening to the Past: The Acoustic Turn in the Historical Film, Shikha Jhingan

This presentation will focus on the recent turn in Bombay cinema towards historical and biopic genres, where sound plays a key role in creating the ‘history effect.’ Film soundtracks mobilize an archive of sound and listening bodies where the ‘everyday’ intrudes into the idea of monumentality of historical time. Silence, sound augmentation, sonic intrusion, shift in perspective, musical cadence, non-human sounds, glitches and unusual tones are crafted to stage this ‘temporal turn’ to sound design and an ‘acoustic turn’ to the historical film.

Writing Sound: War, Memory, and Affect, Nakshatra Chatterjee

What is literary about writing urban sound? Can literary and cultural narratives about sound and listening offer insights into narrative structure, sound-evoked memories, and sonic affect? How emotional experiences are transformed into language? These are some of the questions addressed in this presentation through exploring wartime urban soundscapes in literary and archival texts. In the process, what is analysed is the ways in which the evocation of sound in literary texts is distinctive from other narrative forms.

Friday, 13 December, 2024 / 6:00pm

Soundings at Sarai

Janneke van der Putten

Hemant Sreekumar

Matteo Marangoni

Alessandra Eramo

Surbhi Mittal

Ish S

Vrinda Singh

*The Listening Academy Delhi chapter is supported by Liquid Architecture (Melbourne), Sarai-CSDS (New Delhi), Italian Cultural Institute (Delhi), Creative Industries Fund (Netherlands)