Research Project/Professional Future

This blog post aims at connecting my research project (audio paper) with this unit.

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The paper focused on testing acoustemology as a method of listening rather than just a theory into unlocking mysteries around the broader inaccessibility of academic sound studies. It practices the theory by contextualising the author’s own listening as a key to connecting listening to Björk on the tube in London with Feld’s original fieldwork in Papua New Guinea.

I wonder how I could utilise my knowledge in my current work and continue to bring influence from literature into promoting my ‘pop’ music. I feel this would take years until I find a very specific insert point in my music, but it is already starting to shadow my way of making music. Being on this course for three years, even though I didn’t enjoy it much, still affected me a lot in terms of my listening as an artist. But how did my listening changed? This would be a self-reflective journey through making and making I think. To refer to Noguchi, doing is the best way to contemplate and consolidate thoughts. I really don’t have a conclusion at all right now, but I feel the importance to state it here still. Strategically for the assignment it would be great if I can come up with questions that link my readings into my current work on this professional future unit, but I really can’t, not yet.

I think the immediacy of the graduation really stunned me. It pushed me to action quicker than I can reflect and properly plan. It is three years of impractical prompts and suddenly I need to apply for a national insurance number. There is no transition, a hard cut, even with this unit. It is still very useful to start doing these things, but there is still no transition, but I just can’t process it in my head yet the fact that I am graduating and I have so much new responsibility as an adult, and more scarily an immigrant from a very different culture.

In the past three years, I have tendency to turn my blog into a self-loathing platform rather than elaborating on my process to support my work and to further contextualise my thinking among other artists. I have been using the excuse that this is because the main fuel for my work is my frustration towards the course. Which is not false, but I could do better and keep certain thoughts to myself I guess. There is an edge within me that I think is time to pack up for the sake of my “professional future”.

I think it definitely is important for me to bring the notion of listening into my music practice. Given my music is not necessarily experimental music, I think it is even more important that I attempt to influence my audience with this attitude of challenging the norms in music consumption. With an oversaturated music industry and an ocean of new music everyday being uploaded and released online, how can I encourage a better listening habit through my music? Instead of making “soundscapes” with field recordings and quote Deep Listening and jerk off to the idea of an ideal listening, how can I explain to people the importance or rather, the joy of slowing down and appreciate a piece of music?

In my audio paper, I tried to bring my joy into an academic context, to frame it as ethnographic writing. How do I in reverse bring sound studies back to a point where it is accessible and even my mum could understand? How do I enable and allow space within my music to be understood on a human level? This is what interests me with Pop music, is the sonic fictional space you could create as a musician, where people can live within (I really feel like you need to listen to my paper to know what I am on about).

I think my main frustration with the course is that it is so idealistic that it disconnects me from a reality that disappoints and restricts me. I never found a way to connect my life in uni with my life outside of uni. I think I become incredibly dull after these years, while people I know are making their mark in the world, I am ranting about my privilege of being an art student in a fucked-up neoliberal art institution. Maybe now my music creates an opportunity for me to do differently, maybe it is a beginning for me to bring my ideal into the world.

My biggest critique about Feld’s research is that he conducted it in a rainforest, and thinks that he could theorise that without thinking about the application of his theory for people like me (alarmingly self-centred) who struggles to survive in a big city like London. I think it is disconcerting how people kept wanting to escape from London. But isn’t there a way to bring the ‘rainforest’ into the environment we live in? Is there anything we can learn from listening that we can utilise in our day-to-day?

All I have is questions, and I believe I will be able to answer them bit by bit in the future; if I am even lucky enough to continue being an artist. People keep saying to me that I am going to do great after graduating, so much to an extent that I don’t know if it’s true anymore. I continue to doubt myself as I move forward and hope this confusion hits the target rather than recoiling and hitting myself.