Countering the A-V Litany with Maps
After nearly five years of joint planning, doing, retreating to cabins, of lost microphones, lemon risottos, soaked shoes and jackets, frostbitten fingers, harbor porpoises and tern attacks, of listening, drawing, reading, presenting, recording, writing and shaping, Angus Carlyle, as of September 1st, 2025, continues his path as a sound artist outside of academia and with this, Arctic Auditories.
We are grateful for every shared moment and hour that shaped and elevated the project and will resonate on.
Thank you, Angus; we’ll hear from you.
Angus Carlyle on Countering the A-V Litany with Maps
Jonathan Sterne’s enduringly useful term the “audiovisual litany,” coined in 2003, captures how conventional approaches contrast seeing and hearing according to the perceptual and cognitive affordances each centre. Hearing, according to the audiovisual litany, brings immersive, subjective presence and amplifies the temporal. Seeing foregrounds distance, objectivity and envisions the spatial. In Sterne’s words, “the audiovisual litany…idealizes hearing (and, by extension, speech) as manifesting a kind of pure interiority. It alternately denigrates and elevates vision: as a fallen sense, vision takes us out of the world. But it also bathes us in the clear light of reason”[1]. In Robin James’ interpretation an additional function of the audiovisual litany has been to naturalize “hegemonic concepts of sound and sight and use these as metaphors for philosophical positions. This lets philosophical assumptions pass by unnoticed because they appear as ‘natural’ features of various sensory modalities.” Moreover, “these uses of the litany often appeal only to other philosophers’ accounts of sound or music, not actual works or practices or performances”: this is what James means by their brilliant phrase “sound turn in ontological studies” (a reversal of Marie Thompson’s “the ontological turn in sound studies”).[2]
Even where attempts are made to create space for difference, such as in our Arctic Auditories project, idealisations of sound and hearing can persist in various ways. Such idealisations can inadvertently advance normative approaches to aurality. During the soundwalking phase of our research local collaborators, who we called ‘conductors’, each created a route that was designed to express, through sound, their understanding of environmental change in the Tromsø / Romsa area to a group of listening participants who would follow in their footsteps. Acknowledging that soundwalks may not be a regular activity, we created a manual to support the conductors recruited to our project. In creating the manual, we acknowledged that “some of the advantages attributed to soundwalks relate to how the listeners are led through space, to the way that movement is part of the experience”. We wanted to avoid any assumption that all bodies share the same manoeuvrability, dexterity or tolerance for fatigue. We wrote in the soundwalking manual: “We are conscious that mobility is not a given, that walking is not always possible for everyone. More than this, we appreciate that not all places are as welcoming as they should be, and for some, wandering an unfamiliar shoreline might feel as unsafe as crossing a city square might for others.” Although we suggested that sound-sittings constituted a viable alternative to soundwalking, in practice most conductors did plot routes that involved walking. Aware that environmental listening (rather than musical listening or conversational listening) can be an unaccustomed way to focus energy and that talking about listening can be equally unfamiliar, the manual also offered advice on how conductors could encourage aural attentiveness in their participants. “It can be useful to consider some ‘ear warm up’ exercises before you begin a soundwalk. These give people a chance to concentrate on their hearing and experiment with different ways of articulating their feelings about sound,” we suggested in the manual. The proposed warm-up exercises, drawn from a repertoire of devices familiar from workshops conducted under the auspices of deep listening or acoustic ecology, included suggestions to consider “What do you hear? What is in the foreground? What is in the background? What is the smallest sound you hear, and what is the largest?”
Although the prompts were couched in relative terms, and as such invited an inclusive range of perceptual responses, what these well-meaning suggestions were less effective in accommodating was a more sensitive appreciation of what is beginning to be called ‘aural diversity:’ the commitment to understanding that beyond the idealisation of listening are multiple hearing positions, including ones where the normative dichotomies of foreground / background, small / large are less meaningful[3]. In reflecting on our own project, what we have come to realize is that in adopting a version of the audiovisual litany that idealises hearing, we may have unintentionally – no, in point of fact despite our best intentions – contributed to elevating an expert listener standard against which all other auralities are measured as deficient.
One of our Arctic Auditories conductors – we will call them T- created a relatively short circuit that connected participants to both a family dwelling and the headwater above a dam where listeners could hear a river swollen by the season’s first meltwaters descending a valley in a sequence of loud waterfalls. During a rehearsal of the walk, T told us they found one roaring cataract “really nice, it sounds powerful … you don’t want to look at nature like something really vulnerable and small, you want to see that it’s big and … resistant. This river wouldn’t be so big if it wasn’t for this dam, but still, it feels like real nature to me. I think it’s nice to think that something man-made can fit into nature.” T also wanted to connect their listeners to “the sounds of [electrical] powerlines” which had become a political focus for them after previous activism engaging the sounds of airplanes and traffic.
On the first iteration of T’s soundwalk I, Angus Carlyle, could hear no audible corona discharge from overhead electricity lines and, indeed, no participant volunteered these high voltage phenomena as a part of their listening experience. Applying the assumptions enshrined in Sterne’s audiovisual litany, these reported disparities – between my listening, the participants’ and the conductor’s – might be accounted for by the metaphysical accent on presence as arbiter of meaning in hearing experiences. As a corollary of this emphasis on presence that conventional thinking about sound supposedly encourages, what is not directly perceived is less liable to form part of the collective knowledge created during a soundwalk. Britta Sweers, who was analysing the transcriptions, summarised significant themes emerging from both discussions and interviews and compressed these further into a series of “recording recommendations/ identifications.” For T’s soundwalk, the recording recommendations that were derived from transcript analysis included the waterfall, the ski lane, distant airport and traffic sounds, walking bodies and the suggestion of a “static recording: if it is cold enough: the power lines.”
By contrast, in the first synthesis of the soundwalking as a practice – Hildegard Westerkamp’s 1974 essay which the Arctic Auditories manual indicates is a key text – the sonic spectrum is sketched widely and identifies the effect of sounds which are not present, such as ones “our ears perceive … unconsciously” and those sounds that only surface through part of a dialogic process. “What else do you hear? What else? What else? What else? What else?” Westerkamp’s infectious “what else,” attaches to Mark Peter Wright’s highly generative filter of “asking the question: what are we not hearing? [This] draws attention toward the marginal, the forgotten, the inverse, and the underheard: the idea that there is always something beyond the audible when auditioning field recordings.”[4] This “what are we not hearing” was a verbal encouragement we introduced to the focus groups after the soundwalks, discussions we recorded along with the individual conductor interviews, for subsequent analyses that stimulated the process of creating field recordings from which to develop a soundmap, hosted on the online platform Radio Aporee.
Later, creating nodes on the online soundmap to correspond with the sounds of the waterfall below the hydroelectric dam was relatively straightforward. It was a similar situation with capturing an impression of the impact of taxiing jet and propellor aircraft a kilometer across the water and the nearer effects of traffic on the bridge. One participant in the soundwalk discussion thought “the sound of traffic stood out most,” another that the “sound of traffic was most surprising”. The airport featured in terms of claims that its “sound is carried over the water,” that “the sound of traffic is very constant, including airplanes” and that one of the more significant changes experienced during the soundwalk related to a “plane landing or taking off.” As it is represented in Britta’s analysis, the participants’ discussion had its own analytical qualities with sound sources recognized, their inter-relations assessed, and dynamic processes evaluated. The result is perhaps less like the interiority that the audio-visual litany ascribes to the aural and is closer to the statistical operations associated with seeing. For the soundwalk conductor, by contrast, the auditory events generated by airport activities are understood in a subjective register: “[trigger] new thoughts in me. It’s a reminder of how slowly the climate fight is progressing.”
To create field recordings that could function on the Arctic Auditories soundmap as representations of the importance of electricity sounds, to our conductor T, was a less simple task. In an earlier soundwalk, a prototype devised by Angus, the “what are we not hearing” prompt had already brought the question of electricity sounds to the fore. “As we were walking underneath the powerlines, I realised we weren’t hearing the electrical lines, which sometimes, when the voltage is high enough, has a very distinctive sound,” I reflected in my journal at the time. This suggested the appropriate strategy would involve locating higher voltage infrastructure to record, while Britta’s recording recommendation aligned audible ionisation with low temperatures. In the end, an alternative solution was adopted, one that deployed sensors and receivers that could ‘hear’ electro-magnetic activities considered outside the narrow bandwidth allocated to the human sensorium, a process that inspired a sub-project for me, which lead to an album of audio compositions[5].
T’s discussion of the multiple motivations behind their own soundwalk point to a more fundamental way in which the sensory idealisation of the audio-visual litany can be disrupted: rather than listening being a pleasure and valorised as such, the soundwalk can be deliberately designed to deliver unpleasant listening experiences in close proximity to ones that access to “really nice … powerful … big and … resistant” energies from places where the “man-made can fit into nature”.
Angus Carlyle.
[1] Jonathan Sterne The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke University Press, 2003), 15
[2] Robin James “Look Away and Listen,” https://soundstudiesblog.com/2018/03/05/look-away-and-listen-the-audiovisual-litany-in-philosophy/ [accessed 8/8/2025]
[3] For more on aural diversity see William Renel, “Sonic inclusion : opposing auditory normalism in design through the lived experiences of d/deaf and disabled people in socially public spaces” (2019) https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=3&uin=uk.bl.ethos.782002 and John Levack Drever, “’Primacy of the Ear’ – But Whose Ear?: the case for aural diversity in sonic arts practice and discourse,” (2019) Organised Sound 24(1).
[4] Mark Peter Wright, Listening After Nature: Field Recording, Ecology, Critical Practice (Bloomsbury, 2022), 61
[5] Angus Carlyle, Powerlines, Rural Situationism, RS0201, 2024