A Listening Calibration
A Listening Calibration – chance to confront/experience your listening position/condition/capability, as a way of readying/attuning/resting yourself.
May be used before different listening events, performances, seminars etc. where a group of people wishes to attune their listening.
A Listening Calibration:
– We welcome you, and give you thanks for being here.
– We invite you to close your eyes – to trust us and the people you are here with. We invite you to wish each other well.
– We invite you to relax your body, letting your shoulder hang down as if they were heavy – to let them be heavy
– We invite you to breathe, in the way you need to – maybe you breathe deeply, maybe you are not
– We invite you to find comfort in being together, as a group, with your eyes closed, breathing together.
– We ask you to think about all the sounds you have traveled through until this point today – including those sounds you might not have noticed. How have they affected you? Touched you? Imprinted themself upon you?
– We ask you to think about, remember and go back to all the sounds you have generated today – the sounds you have created or transformed – all those you have sent out – by will or accident. How have they touched others?
– Are there some more specific sounds from today you are still carrying with you? Is there a sound you specifically hold on to? That you can not let go of?
– Stay with such a sound while you keep breathing – perhaps now more slowly.
– We now invite you to consider what sounds you are bringing with you into this space – sense how you are affecting the space. How are you both receiving, transforming and sending out sounds, right here and now?
– Listen to each other – to each other’s breathing perhaps – consider in what way the sounding of this space is unique to the fact that you are being in it, part of it, holding it – consider how the sounds will change if/when you exit it, and how the sounds could change if you have had other emotions, another bodies, wearing different clothes, different in any sense.
– In the context of this event, this welcome, and this little calibration, we also invite you to think of the sounds that has been lost – personal experienced sounds that you will never listen to again – maybe the voice of a loved one passed away – maybe of a place re-shaped by buildings, floodings or new vegetations.
– We invite you to remember such sounds. To stay with them. To breathe with them.
– We also invite you to think of sounds lost to the collective world – the sounds of extinct animals or plant species, of erupting volcanoes or melting ice – and how that loss of a specific sound is affecting the sounds are currently taken place – how does the tree sound now, without its past birds, now with a different wind – what new sounds are emerging, maybe shaped by a collective loss or sorrow?
– How is the increasing sea levels changing the sound of their waves washing onto the shore, re-shaping its resounding coasts?
– In what way do we even understand such things – how are our body-minds able, or unable, to comprehend such change in the sounding of soundscapes? Do we as such limited beings only and always experience the small changes – how do we deal with generational and planetary changes? In what way may we listen to these, now and in the future?
– Again, we thank you for being here – soon we will start – for now, in your own time, come back to this space, orient yourself, and slowly open your eyes if you wish to.