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In the midst of ever growing geopolitical and socioeconomic tensions both locally and internationally, is listening to the others ever possible? If we are hopeful that it is, how will our ways of listening need to change in the near future? In this new podcast series, join Professor Suk-Jun Kim and sound artist SHHE, as they bring together guests from across the globe to ask, ‘What can artists do to imagine and encourage such possible futures of listening?’ Futures of Listening is brought to you by the University of Aberdeen in collaboration with Sonica Glasgow.
Su [00:00:11] Welcome to Futures of Listening, a new podcast series brought to you by Professor Suk Jun Kim and sound artist, SHHE. In the midst of ever-growing geopolitical and socioeconomic tensions, both locally and internationally, is listening to the others ever possible? If we are hopeful that it is, how will our ways of listening need to change in the near future? In this new podcast series, join Jun and Su as they bring together guests from across the globe to ask, what can artists and creatives do to imagine and encourage such possible futures of listening? This podcast series is brought to you in partnership with Sonica Glasgow and University of Aberdeen. Thank you for joining us.
Jun [00:01:14] My name is Suk Jun Kim. I'm professor of Electroacoustic Music and Sound Art at the University of Aberdeen and I'm a composer, sound artist and researcher of sound studies, and humming, and immersive sound, and recently I've started a multi-year project called Futures of Listening.
Su [00:01:34] I am Su. I record and create music under the alias SHHE. I'm based in Dundee, so still on the east coast, working often with environments and spaces and exploring the relationship between these things, and sound. It's such a nice thing to be able to find a space to talk about sound, because often we're busy making it and presenting it across many formats, but it's quite rare to get the chance to speak about it together. So yeah, I guess that was one of the core ideas for this podcast.
Jun [00:02:06] To better present and introduce and explain to the listeners about our podcast series, we thought that it would be good for us to have a conversation based on some prepared questions. And actually we have six questions prepared. I will start with the first question to you. Su, how did you get into sound and music?
Su [00:02:28] I I guess for me, music was always a form of escapism growing up. I had quite a challenging experience studying music at school, mainly because of this idea that music is something to be studied and that there is a right and a wrong way to approach it. And it was always something that felt very intuitive to me. I couldn't read musical notation and even the idea of reading sheet music was quite an alien concept to me growing up. I felt very much that music is something that should be felt and not something that could be read from a page. And so, I really struggled with this traditional way of learning music. My first instrument at school was drums. I chose the drums because I thought that somehow that would be a way to avoid having to learn how to read music. But of course, drum grooves are also presented as musical notation. And so with exams, I had to memorise a lot of the pieces that I was playing. I haven't received any formal training. I'm not trained in a particular instrument or a particular approach to making music or working with sound, so it's just been born out of a complete curiosity and an interest in learning as I go.
Jun [00:03:48] In some way, I think I'm also this kind of similar type, although I do have a PhD in composition. But that was long after I had become interested in music, and in particular, interested in sound and electroacoustic music. So, the way I got into sound and music was when I was in in London, Ontario in Canada. After I got my undergraduate degree in theology, I felt like there was no future in that route. So, I decided that I would spend maybe three months in Canada learning English. I just wanted to get away from the oldest pressure and burden. So, I travelled to Canada hoping that you know I would spend about three months learning English and while I was doing that I was hoping that I could get some way out, you know, whatever that was. I was interested in making music, but not in the way that I'm making music right now. But I was not classically trained. After three months, I realised that three months was not enough. Not only to learn English, but also to to find a way out. So, I thought that maybe I could just spend one more year and I found a school called OIART, which is the one-year vocational school teaching recording technology. I like music and I kind of like technology a little bit. So how about me being a recording engineer? Not necessarily making music myself, but helping people make music. So, that school was in in London, Ontario in Canada. So I was there, and I really enjoyed learning all this tech stuff. But what happened was that something strange and very interesting happened there. In the spring semester, I was in a class, acoustic class. So all the recording engineers, they should know how sound works in the real world. The guy who was teaching acoustics, he somehow had a PhD in composition. And he brought to the class a CD and he played the CD to the class. And later I got to know that that piece was composed by Dennis Smolly. Dennis Smolly is one of the main figures in electoacoustic music. So I listened to that piece [for the] first time and I was hooked. I couldn't really call that music, but something really hooked me. After that class, I ran to his office, asked for the CD, because I need to listen to this again. So I brought it home and I listened to that piece again and again and many, many times. I literally listened to the piece a hundred times in a week. So that I can almost remember everything that happened in that piece.
Su [00:07:05] Can I ask a question about each time you listened, did something shift? Or were you listening to try and understand; so, the longer you listened, the more you were hoping to understand about the piece. Or was it just through pure curiosity?
Jun [00:07:18] Yes, the curiosity got me to that repeated listening. What happened was that when I was listening to that piece again and again, I realised that in the beginning, all the sounds seemingly kind of immersed myself and I didn't know what that was, and then gradually I could realise that this is actually sound made up, composed of multiple parts. So that you can gradually dissect the what I initially thought to be a just whole one mass of stuff, and now turning into multiple parts. Then me studying recording engineering at the time also helped a lot because I could make a kind of a bit of a guesswork as to how someone could make sound like that. And so if I had an equipment, then maybe I can mimic it. So that's how I got into composition.
Su [00:08:21] That's so interesting. I'm curious about when you were listening on repeat to this piece, were you trying to figure out from a technical point of view what was happening, or were you trying to explore the emotional response that the music was causing you to express? And did you even consider it to be music or sound? Which leads to another question - what is the difference between music and sound - what's the definition?
Jun [00:08:49] That's a really wonderful question. I think repeated listenings brought me to a position where I can make a really good guess about how such a sound could be made up with multiple parts. But then also you get to wonder why. You know, you could take any kind of sounds and just combine them in any way. But then some sounds somehow work and then touch you way better than other compositions of a sound. And then without thinking too much, you get to start asking questions of which is proper compositional question. I got to realise later why some compositions of a sound work while other type of composition do not work. And another one that I got to realise, this is much later when I reflect on what had happened at the time is that I think I got to listen to the way sounds move in time and in space.
Su [00:10:08] I find this really interesting, and often think about field recording in this context. Is field recording also composition? Because some would argue that you're just hitting record and stopping, but actually you're making a choice. You're making a choice at which point to start, you're making a choice for how long to record for, and then you're also making a choice when to stop recording. And it's something that I work with quite a lot, environmental recordings, and never quite knowing what you're going to find until you have perhaps committed to just standing quite still, and being open to all of the sounds around you. And so, I would absolutely argue in defense that field recording is quite an interesting compositional technique, but going back to what you said about all these sort of different layers of sound and time and place, and how you evoke that feeling of a space as well. That's something that, yeah, I'm always really curious, especially when recording outdoors, at which point do you start, and at which point do you stop recording?
Jun [00:11:14] I know that you do a lot of field recording. You also work a lot with the modular synthesis as a part of your performance. Could you explain a little bit about your performance practice? I know it's quite difficult to explain in a word without actually, you know, showing how you perform.
Su [00:11:36] I love this. We had six defined questions, and this wasn't one.
Jun [00:11:39] Ha, ha.
Su [00:11:40] But everything is connected, right? We've already gone off topic Jun. Well, I think some of the questions that we did have, lead quite nicely into that. I make work across a number of formats - installation and performance - but maybe it's worth sharing that traditionally I've always performed. I play guitar, I sing, I work with synthesisers; and so, field recording is a relatively new addition to my practice, certainly over the last five years or so. And actually born out of, in many ways, a similar experience to what you had had when you were studying, and you heard the CD for the first time; this wanting to know more or understand how it was having this effect or how you were responding to that. I think maybe a similar experience for me, was the first time that I was taking part in an artist residency, and perhaps even this idea of what an artist residency is for. I'd had a very definitive idea of what I might do during these several days that I was there. It was a residency in the Westfjords of Iceland, and I had gone there with the intention of climbing a lot of the peaks.
Jun [00:12:57] When was it?
Su [00:13:00] The project started in 2018. It was a 10-day residency. It was a multidisciplinary residency, so it wasn't just for musicians or for visual artists. And it was a group residency, but you very much had the time and space to develop projects independently. And I had gone there to record. It was in a beautiful fjord called Dýrafjörður. I was born in the Highlands of Scotland, so climbing and walking is something that was part of my upbringing, and still to this day very much something that I enjoy doing. And I had this very prepared itinerary that I had created for myself, of how I'd spend each of those days. The second day that I had been working in the village, there was a huge storm. It was in the middle of winter, and it was quite an erratic storm; there was a lot of snowfall, and it suddenly became difficult for me to adapt the project in the way that I had intended and certainly had planned. And it was the first time - and maybe this links into a question that we had planned for a little bit later on in the episode, about a moment where you perceive a shift in your own listening or approach to being open to sound - because I was left really being unable to work with the instruments that I'd brought, with the field recorders that I'd brought, and unable to venture too far because of the weather, and therefore really just had to stand very still - and begin to adapt my ears to the environment, and also adapt to sort of, rethinking parts of a project. And it became a project where I suddenly realised that when things aren't convenient and when things aren't accessible, of course, the direction that you might have set out on initially is going to have to change. And I think somehow this really [is when] I began to embed this in my entire practice and approach to projects - that actually, you can only work with what you have, and it's so important to try and find a way to also be working with the sounds that are already there in your surroundings, and perhaps less thinking about how much more sound you can create, and put out into that environment. So yeah, it kind of shifted the balance, I think, for me.
Jun [00:15:19] So that's one of the specific moments where you think that the way you listen has shifted in a really meaningful way for you as an artist?
Su [00:15:29] Yeah, I think working with unpredictability as an approach to making, and that has definitely had an impact on a wider practice and leading back into my approach to performance now, it's how I also found my way into modular synthesis. Working with an instrument that I feel very much like I'm still learning, perhaps will always be learning. And it's something that I work with, an analogue modular synthesiser. And so in those moments, also accepting that things may sound different, it's responding to the environment, it's responding to humidity, it can often be falling in and out of tune, but trying to release myself from this idea that a performance has to be something that's perfectly polished and actually being a bit more open to working with what you have in that moment and being a little bit more present.
Jun [00:16:23] That's really interesting to hear that you experienced in that residency the realisations that at certain moments you don't have any control over what's going on. You realise that you are being limited. And then that somehow opens up other possibilities in your listening. I can really relate to that experience. So for me, I can say there are two moments where my I feel that my listening has shifted in a meaningful way. The first one is the one that I just shared with you, that listening to electroacoustic music for the first time. Second moment is actually not an instant moment, but a gradual shift.
So, when I graduated with my PhD degree in 2008, by that time I could say my music had you know had got the awards while when I was doing PhDs and my music got picked up in a festival, here and there, so I felt like I knew what to do. But at the same time, and there is a growing concern in in my mind that this practice of working in a studio alone, usually alone, and then trying to manipulate and trying to control every aspect of a sound, and that became, I became more concerned about that. So, the whole issue, the whole compositional practice that is closely married to studio was becoming a big concern for me. But I couldn't do anything because that's how I self-taught at first and then that's how I that's how my competition became quite successful up until then. So, I just didn't know how to get away from it. After I got my degree, I went to Berlin for a one-year residency at DAAD. I thought that now that, you know, that I got my PhD and there's no supervisor hanging over my shoulder and I know what I'm doing, I'm quite free and I can, if I wanted, I can do anything I want. So, this might be really a good time to do something different. That’s when I started collecting hums, people's hums in Berlin. So, there's a right good opportunity. So that was a start, meaning that gradually moving away from this, what I call studio aesthetics. And then decisively, when I when I started teaching at the University of Aberdeen, that was 2013. So, in 2014 I had small project. This project is walking very slowly at Union Street. So, you know Union Street? It’s Aberdeen's main road, it’s about, I don't know, it's longer than one kilometre or something. So, if you walk normally from one end to the other end, it takes about twelve minutes or fifteen minutes, including cross crossroads, right?
So what I was thinking about is that in order for me to change my compositional habit and also listening habit, I have to apply some restrictions or limitations to me, in the way I listen. So, I did this small project where I started walking from one end to the other end with my headphones on, with my microphones. It's normal, like I was doing sound work. But I would do this very, very slowly. So normal work is about 15 minutes from one end to the other end. For me it took four hours and 30 minutes. That was a really wonderful experience, and then also very painful experience. Your body really aches, and you cannot really listen. And you try to listen but it's not possible because your body lets you know that it's there. So, I did that and that I think has changed a lot about the way I listen. Because I was trained as a recording engineer. You know, what recording engineers do is that they develop this technological ear. So, I was trained in that practice.
Su [00:21:30] Mm-hmm.
Jun [00:21:31] Together with an electroacoustic music composition practice, when you marry them together, you might create some monstrous listening machine in some sense. Often that's really good, but other times that's really detrimental to you as an artist.
Su [00:21:58] Can we break this down further and ask or explore, what is listening? What does that mean to you, to listen?
Jun [00:22:07] These days listening is.. I might answer that question in two ways and these two ways, at the moment, they do not talk to each other. So, this is a concern for me right now. But first is that I think listening is a connection in many different ways. And yes, I I think I knew that the listening is always listening to something, but then more and more these days, I realise that listening really needs someone else or something else that I can listen to but also that I can listen with. Also knowing that when I do the listening, other people or other things that are with me, they're also listening together. So that seems to me quite a wonderful thing that I got to know and I'm trying to find more about what that means.
So that's one element. The other one is that, I think this one probably has connection to the listening that got me started on the whole thing. Listening is to me a philosophical investigation of the things that you are listening with and their essential being, but together at the same time, my essential being at the same time. I will get back to you with the same question. So, these days what is listening to you then?
Su [00:23:45] I feel like increasingly, listening to me is a skill that requires patience and a real vulnerability. And I also think that listening is something that you can only approach without any preconceived expectation of what you might find or expect to receive. So in that way then, listening is a practice in awareness and being open to everything that is around you. And I also think I, these days absolutely would define listening as a form of activism, especially at a time when natural environments are under threat or being destroyed, and also the natural sonics of these environments. And I often think about, I mean traditionally sound and music was considered as a healing practice. Every cell in our body resonates with a particular tone, and there's something about being in harmony with the universe that I often think about, especially when doing a lot of recording outdoors. I feel like we've really lost that relationship with sound - the ability to listen, but also to listen really openly. And maybe it's just a reflection of the world that we're living in today, that so much of the focus and so much of our energy is on the visual. I think it's something like eighty percent of our energy is dedicated to seeing. Listening is actually a very important conduit, and it's something that I'm definitely still exploring as part of a practice. And I feel like the more that I think about it, I feel like the more that my ears expand and there's so many different layers of listening for me as well. I mean, living in Dundee and just thinking about the location of Dundee, a city that's on the banks of the River Tay and the estuary, and it’s very close to the Cairngorms. You can stand in front of the water and not hear the water because of the sound pollution and traffic. And actually, Dundee by no stretch of the imagination is the loudest city that I've ever visited. Actually, it's quite quiet in comparison to many others, but I feel like we have this real disconnect to the natural sounds in our environment. And so, I think listening is quite an important tool for me in my practice, to try and find that connection again.
Jun [00:26:08] So, while I was listening to you about your listening right now, I can sense that there's a sense of being hopeful, but at the same time there is a bit of concern?
Su [00:26:21] Mmm.
Jun [00:26:22] So what's going to happen to our listening?
Su [00:26:25] Futures of listening. I think, will our listening change in future? I think, yes it will, but I do feel like that's a very positive thing. I think it does need to change. What you had said earlier about listening being vital for connection, but it's also how we build trust. I mean, it's so important for communication in so many ways. And I think to find our way back to listening as a tool to form and build those connections with each other, but also with environments, with species, in so many ways, we've just kind of shut off our ears to so many things that are happening. I mean, if we also think about how we're taught now, in a way, to consume music as a commodity, and how we might make music or approaches to sharing or releasing music. There's this, it's almost like we're told that we don't have time to really listen. And so, if you think about streaming and the importance that's placed on releasing a song and choosing the most interesting 30 seconds; what's gonna hook someone? what's gonna catch someone? what's the most, you know, powerful chorus? – and maybe less about actually encouraging people to spend time with something. I feel like listening, absolutely there's a benefit in that idea of deep listening that the longer that you spend with something, the more you learn about it. And I think that's so true of the time that we spend with each other. That's so true when we think about the time that we spend in our environments, in our cities. And also I work a lot with water; actually, it's something that we both have an interest in. So, working with water and thinking about that as a focus, listening to different water bodies tells you so much about the health of the water; life, activity, pollution. What is the water telling us? What are the sounds that we're able to listen to? But actually, perhaps more importantly, what are the sounds that don't exist anymore? So, it's become quite a focus of my practice to make the inaudible audible again, or to try and somehow bring those voices that we can no longer hear back into, back into the conversation, back into a space, and to platform that. Somehow to raise awareness of those voices and those sounds that we no longer have or are no longer audible to us.
Jun [00:28:57] I think you're absolutely right, active listening is an act towards the future. Often when we get to talk about listening to nature, I think some people might misunderstand that we may be talking about listening in the sense of nostalgia. I don't think we are talking about that. We are talking about bringing proactively and affirmatively bringing technology into our listening and our engagement with the nature through this listening. It’s not looking back, you know, being nostalgic about the wonderful times of the past.
Su [00:29:40] Can I ask you; do you think our listening will change in future?
Jun [00:29:46] Yes, listening will change in the future. I think listening in the sense of listening to the futures, listening as affirmative activism and listening is ought to, you know, listening is a must. And listening is a responsibility. Then once we get to realise that aspect about listening, we get to critically reflect on what we are doing right now with our listening. We can do this listening better. Right? We can listen to the others better. We can listen to other organisms, the other animals and other communities better. We can really do better than this. So in that regard, you know, listening must be changed. Because we can do this better.
Su [00:30:39] I also feel like it's a very important tool for learning. And just thinking back to actually how we both found our way into sound and music and composition. And even those sort of formative school years, I don't remember there ever being a time where we talked about the importance of listening as a tool for learning. And it's something that's also repeatedly come up in projects - where listening is the tool for my understanding of an environment, and it's such an important one. And I'm always inspired by this book I read some years ago now, called The World is Sound: Nada Brahma and the Landscape of Consciousness, by the German musicologist Joachim-Ernst Berendt. And one of the opening lines is, listening begins with being silent. And it's something that has sat in the back of my head since first reading, the importance of silence and what that silence also tells you. And there was a question earlier about if we can recall moments where our personal listening changed or shifted. Another example for me was a project in 2023. I was invited to Kurdistan, Iraq, to make a sound work in response to the critical water shortage across southern Iraq. And it was an environment that I didn't know anything about, and I did a lot of research prior to travelling to Kurdistan. I went to record a dam called Dokan Dam, one of the largest hydroelectric power plants in Kurdistan. And the composition was charting the in/outflow of the water through the dam over a 40-year period. There was a chart that I had seen on the wall, and I was really interested in this because there were many periods of time where there was no water coming through the dam. So the installation tried to reflect and represent this quite unpredictable flow of water, because the silence very critically represented the fact that southern Iraq didn't have any water; there was no water available for agriculture, there was no drinking water, there was just no access to water full stop. And there's something about working with silence when you've been asked to create a sound - what if the sound that you're sharing is silence? Because you're really trying to share the reality of that environment or a part of that learning. And so, I think it was also another occasion where I had to sort of take a step back to go, water for me is a sound that.. I've always lived by the river. In fact, I've lived by the same river my whole life, on either side. But it's also a sound that's very comforting to me. It's very therapeutic. And there were times when I was recording Dokan Dam, the water was on full spill, and it's quite an overwhelming sound. And through a translator, as I don't speak Kurdish or Arabic, I was asking what the sounds of water.. how the people working at the dam felt about the sound of water. And they had all said that actually, it brought them this feeling of fear because it was so unpredictable. They didn't know how much was going to be flowing in and out through the dam, and from day to day this could change - sometimes that was a natural flow, and sometimes that's because there had been an order to not let water flow through the dam. And I think, in a way then, that project became quite political because it was the first time that I had to revisit my thoughts on water. I had always thought that by simply playing these sounds of water, everyone would feel quite relaxed, or this is quite a meditative space and a meditative sound. But actually, it's so different, isn't it? And especially when my experience is that I've never had to, I've never lived in an environment where there has been a water shortage. I've never lived in a city where there's been quite destructive flooding. And I also feel increasingly like it's my role then, as someone that works so closely with sound and working in these environments to try and as truthfully and as honestly as possible, try and create something that is reflective of that environment. Especially when perhaps you're presenting that piece or that work in a space that listeners might not have had any knowledge or understanding of, of why water is a weapon in certain countries and how perhaps the sound of water alone can have very different feelings to very different people because of those reasons.
Jun [00:35:26] About that, you know, the relationship between listening as listening in the water, we have to have another episode dedicated to water. I know you have had many recent really interesting projects related to water and also as you know, I'm currently involved in this water knowledge project. So yeah, that's another maybe a few episodes that we need to plan on.
Su [00:35:52] Maybe a nice point to ask, if you could share a little bit more on your futures of listening project? Of course, this is a project that already existed. We met each other through a similar conversation at Sonica Festival some years ago now - that was our first introduction. But are you able to share what is the future of listening? What is the project?
Jun [00:36:12] So this podcast series in some way it has a close connection to the project called Futures of Listening that I have started with multiple partners which started in 2023. The second edition, if you will, started in 2024 and it'll finish in February 2026, called Future Listening: Water Knowledge from Two Cities. So, for that project myself and two other colleagues at the University of Aberdeen, Christian Balako and David Haro and then two international partners Front Lenten in Jakarta, Indonesia and Ubankoop in Istanbul, Turkey. So what we are trying to do is trying to implement listening as a methodology to tap into local water knowledge, indigenous water knowledge that is often hidden within the local communities. Communities where water has been a big issue, on the one hand the flooding or lack of water in Jakarta, and on the water comes to the community as a big infrastructure project that has threatened the livelihood of the communities in Istanbul. Because particularly the project called Kanal Istanbul. So this project is to uncover and help us share such local water knowledge within the communities, or between the communities, between Jakarta and Istanbul, so that we could better understand how we understand water, and why a certain type of water knowledge is dominant at some point and why other types of water knowledge is often hidden or oppressed or suppressed. And because that sometimes happens when crisis hits, like a flooding or mega infrastructures are coming to town. That's when a collision happens between two very distinctive water knowledge, and often is the case where a dominant water knowledge usually wins, and that can cause huge suffering in the communities. So, the project is to see how we can bring out such a hidden local water knowledge to the surface, and then help that local water knowledge and also the communities have a chance and opportunity to bring their understanding of the water to the policy design and policy implementation. That's the ultimate goal. But as you can imagine, there's a lot of challenges, the layers of challenges along the way. So that's the project.
Su [00:39:16] I suppose it’s worth sharing that this is our pilot episode of Futures of Listening. Very much a new podcast project for us, and one that's very generously supported by University of Aberdeen and Sonica Festival in Glasgow. And maybe it's worth us both sharing... what are our hopes for this podcast series?
Jun [00:39:36] Yeah, so the futures of futures of listening…
Su [00:39:40] What’s the future of futures of listening…?
Jun [00:39:41] I'm hoping that with this podcast series, we get to listen to people working in many different field and sectors where listening is an important tool, or in just the way they live, where we can collectively work towards the better futures. Some of the challenges that we are facing as a human race, if you will. Sometimes there are local issues but many aspects about those challenges are global. And as Rossi Bradotti said, we are all different people, but at the same time we are all in this together. That sense of a collective, and facing some certain issues together, and sharing their challenges together, at that juncture I think the listening and the thinking about, and questioning futures listening is, I think, is a really important act we all need to do. So, in that regard, my hope is that this podcast will somehow contribute to the way we listen to the future.
Su [00:40:54] Mm-hmm.
Jun [00:40:55] And how about you, Su?
Su [00:40:57] Well, I think for me, a hope for the podcast series is that there will be people that will listen to it. And that somehow it might help grow a community of listeners who are interested in a whole range of perspectives on listening and what it is to listen, and as you said earlier, to listen with each other as well. And that also, a hope that this podcast series might prompt other conversations, but perhaps in very different spaces. How we bring listening as an act, as a tool, especially for learning, back into the everyday? And so maybe that's a hope that I have for this podcast series; how do we encourage more of those conversations in that listening space?
Jun [00:41:47] Okay! To the futures of listening.
Su [00:41:50] To the future of futures of listening.