Listening to Touch - Nicole Robson

Photo by Sam Walton, 2021

When I think about touch, I think of a sensation of contact, of closeness, pressure and uneven intensities. Touch is not a sensation limited to my fingers but available to my whole body.  

Sometimes touch brings our bodies into contact with others, yet we are always in touch with the world around us. In everyday activities we tend not to notice this touch, but we can draw our attention to it if we wish. While typing these words my focus is on my thoughts, on the letters appearing one by one on the screen before me. However, I can choose to notice the contact of my sitting body on the chair, of my arms grazing the rests, the ball of my right foot pressed into the carpet, the front of my left ankle wrapped around my right, my toes lightly touching the floor. 

In my experience we can only know touch if it is noticed. 

In 1962, the psychologist James Gibson penned an article titled ‘Observations on Active Touch’. In it he distinguishes the act of touching from being touched. Whereas active touch involves producing tactile impressions or sensations through one’s own movements in relation to something else, being touched is more passive, it involves being a receiver of sensations initiated by somebody or something else.

It seems to me, however, that touch may be neither active nor passive, but existing in some in-between space of collaboration and exchange between people, things or phenomena. Touch is a being-with. 

The distinction that Gibson makes between passive and active touch does seem closely aligned to the difference between hearing and listening. Whereas hearing is involuntary and requires little conscious effort, listening is purposeful and attentive. Touch is a sensation not always present to us, but by a careful tuning of our attention we can listen to it with care. 

In my own artistic practice and PhD research I work with sound and space, composing music and installation pieces. For some time, I have considered the act of the listening itself as a form of touch. Listening and touch are both fundamentally spatial. To touch someone/ something is to explore the distance between you and them/ it. Similarly, through listening we can perceive our spatial relationship to the environment within which we find ourselves. Sound is uniquely immersive. It wraps itself around us as listeners, collapsing the distance between it and us. Listening puts us in direct contact with the phenomena of sound, just as touch puts us in direct contact with the texture of surfaces, materials, bodies.  

In the same way that we can choose to notice or listen to touch, we can elect to re-discover the sounding world as a space of fluidities, intensities and vibrations. 

Seated at my desk, I close my eyes to listen. I notice the rain falling on the skylight above me to my left, the droplets fall inconsistently in patches. Sometimes other sounds from outside are heard; children playing, seagulls calling, a distant hum of traffic. Occasionally the muted sound of a single car engine seems to cut through every other sound and leap into the room with me. Beneath my ears, the cat is purring on my lap. I hear the soft hiss of idle speakers in front of me. The radiator to my left clicks loudly and my attention snaps to it. For a small moment it is all that I hear. 

Instinctively, I identify each of the sounds as originating from somewhere and something. I try to ignore these impulses and instead listen to the sounds as traces of phenomena that touch me in this place. I attempt to draw my awareness to how my ears are touched by the palpitations of air pressure in this very spot. I listen not to the sound of things but to their presence in the in-between space of sound. 

As I curve my neck to bring my face closer to the cat, I touch a space where the purr phenomena is more intense, not yet dissipated. I stand up and walk across the room, where there is a wall dividing this space from the staircase. As I step slowly past this wall the sonic scene shifts with my movement, the room tone changes, it is now muted, softer. As I step back into the room the filter is lifted. 

It seems to me that this kind of spatial listening, in which we notice the touch of sound in the place that we are situated is quite often encouraged by the design of sound installations. The American sound artist Max N euhaus is credited with first using the term ‘sound installation’ in 1971. Neuhaus was interested in placing the elements of a sonic composition in space and thereby allowing the listener to place sounds in their own time, via their movement through the artwork. 

I often think of a piece that I encountered at Ars Electronica Festival in 2019. ‘Stay’ by Sine Wave Orchestra invited visitors to take a small sine tone generator, set its pitch and clip it to one of many metal rods suspended vertically throughout the gallery space. Over the course of the festival the gallery became filled with what from a distance, sounded like a cloud of white noise hanging in the air. Stepping among the wires, I became aware of shifting clusters of notes, sometimes harmonic and sometimes dissonant. Leaning into the wires for an even closer listen, individual tones and micro-compositions of different pitches could be heard as they combined in the air before me. The installation created a soundscape so complex and fixed in space that with my movement, I became very aware of my changing spatial relationship to it. The sound filling the air was so rich in detail that even very tiny adjustments to the position of my ears led to noticeable difference. I felt very strongly that through my listening, I was touching and being touched by sound. 

I would like to close this article with a small invitation to you. Wherever you are right now, I encourage you take a moment to notice your place in the in-between space of sound, to dwell there and explore its touch. 

Besides Gibson’s work on touch, I would like to acknowledge other writings that have shaped my thoughts on this topic. Salome Voegelin’s writing on sound as an in-between space of political possibility, installation artist Michael Brewster’s essay on the immersive qualities of sound as an art material and the essay ‘On Listening to Installation’, by Tom Davis.

My own sound installation Being With The Waves aims to draw the attention of listeners to the touchable and and explorable space of sound. To learn more about my work, please visit my website nicolerobson.com.