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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 [00:01:15] In this episode we have a wonderful multimedia artist, Robin Fox. Spanning five decades, Robin Fox's life in sound has traversed context ranging from the punk squats of noise and improvised scenes to recent forays into orchestral composition for large scale contemporary dance works. As an extension of musical inquiry, he has worked with mechanical synesthesia, blending sound and light signal equivalent since the early 2000s. These audiovisual experiments began as films made with oscilloscopes and has expanded into large scale outdoor activations, including a recent takeover of the iconic Sydney Opera House for its fifth anniversary in 2023. Personally, I met Robin for the first time last year, was it last year?
Su [00:02:13] Last year, Sonica, and I was very lucky to be able to join. And it was actually my first introduction to your work, Robin, and I was absolutely blown away, which is why it's so brilliant to have you here talking to us today about listening and approaches to making and working with sound. Thank you so much for joining us.
Robin [00:02:31] Thank you so much for the invitation. It's such a pleasure to be here and it's lovely to see you both again. I really enjoyed the panel discussion that we had there at Sonica last year.
Jun [00:02:41] Yeah, in fact at that panel discussion we organised with a really generous offer from Sonica Festival and Cryptic, with myself and four other wonderful artists that got to discuss about really a whole range of issues related to listening. So, Robin, I know you have had a long career in music, sound, visual, and also community activities along the way. So how did you get into sound and music?
Robin [00:03:14] How did I get into it? Well, that's a good question. Look, I've been thinking a lot about this. There's sort of two ways to think about it, really. There's this sort of, the unconscious experience of sound and then the conscious experience of sound. And I think that I had quite an extraordinary experience of sound right from the start because my mother, she was an opera singer when I was in the womb. And so, there's something I've been thinking about that for a little bit, about being like a foetus in the amniotic fluid and being in there as a growing child while there's this extraordinary sonic event that's happening, this sort of soprano voice. And I've been thinking about whether or not it's actually that, maybe that was the what pushed me later on to become so fascinated with not just sound, but the intensity of sound and the physicality of sound and the way that sound can move you in ways that are indescribable in language, and I mean I guess you can extrapolate that to music as well. So, music being this kind of ineffable and amazing form of communication that that defies description. And then I remember from a very early age pulling out all of the pots and pans from the kitchen cupboard and covering them with any kind of thing to make drums, and I was obsessed with drums and making lots of noise, you know. So, there was this kind of intensity from a young age, and then in my teenage years, I finally you know convinced my mother. My mother, Cindy John, made computer music in the early, late 70s and early 80s as well. So, she was an experimental composer, so that my house was always full of craziness and music, and she was a very musical person. But I was really interested in just hitting things and making noise, and so heavy metal was my passion as a teenager, and I had played in some really quite terrible heavy metal bands, and was just really interested in again in this kind of powerful, and it was never aggressive, it was like an ecstatically powerful relationship to sound, really. And I was asked by a newspaper here in Australia to describe my first, you know, some kind of special sonic moment, and I chose the moment that I first experienced an ACDC concert, and I'd saved up all my money for this when I was 14 years old, and I went to this concert, and it was the first time I'd ever heard sound through kind of a military industrial PA, like a massive sound system, and it was just such a shock to my entire body, and it felt I don't know, a little bit religious, and I think that that just added to this sense that sound is this very powerful force. But then I guess as I got older, I lost touch with music for a couple of years. And I had to come back to it. And when I came back to it, I went and studied composition at university and I reconnected with the drum kit for a little while, but then sound became my whole life after that. Once I'd landed in this university where even the first lectures were just so life-changing to me, I thought this is where I want to be, and this is what I want to pursue really for the rest of my life. So there was a lot of chaos and kind of disconnection and and not very directed activity. I've never been good at practicing anything, so I never became virtuosic in in any particular instrument. I can play a lot of instruments badly, which is something that I still kind of love. I love that. I love the fact that I still have a lot of play in the way that I approach sound. So I guess that's how I got into it, and then the rest just sort of followed, and I think it followed from that obsession. So once the obsession had set in, there was no real turning back. And I mean, I've never really seen any other any other path for myself.
Jun [00:07:25] So I know that right now, you are not only working with the sound, but you are working with the visual, you're working with many different media altogether. So, considering your practice right now, how do you engage with the sound, knowing that you are doing quite a lot of things all together?
Robin [00:07:44] Well, sound is my first love. So even when I'm making audiovisual shows, to me they're compositions, they're sonic compositions. And it's almost like the light, even though it's so kind of brilliant, and I mean that in the sense of it's so bright, it's so bright and it's such a powerful part of the work that people often assume that that's what I'm really interested in, that I'm interested in lasers and light. And I'm kind of not. I'm much more interested in making music primarily. And then the second thing that I'm extremely interested in, and this is where I think listening is so important, is that I'm really interested in the way that we receive music and the way that we receive sound and the way that we receive abstract information. I mean, I'm also, you know, obsessed with how we how we communicate with language, but it's really really interesting to me how we can construct all kinds of abstract worlds and what happens to us when we're experiencing these abstractions and how we're so involved in the creation of narrative, even where narrative doesn't exist or it doesn't exist in the creation in a didactic or directed way. And so I'm really interested in that. And I got really fascinated during the pandemic about what people would experience when they experience my work, because I don't really get to experience it, I just get to play it. And so I started thinking about what it is about the kind of intensities that I like to create, and almost like the shock and awe of all of this over stimulation, both sonically and visually. And what I came to realise was really quite interesting, I was I got obsessed with consciousness. And so, in a nutshell, I could go on about this for hours, but in a nutshell, I read this amazing book, which has got a sort of naff title, but it's an amazing book. It's called A Day in the Life of Your Brain, or something like that. And it's by a very accomplished neuroscientist. But what she made me realise is that a conscious thought has to involve a certain flowering of neuronal activity in the brain. And she uses this beautiful metaphor of the pebble, like sensory inputs like throwing a pebble into water. And then as those ripples go out through your brain as an experience, there's a certain amount of activity that has to occur before it becomes conscious. Before that it is sub- or pre-conscious. And what she said was it described in the book, it's Susan Greenfield, I think is the author. But she describes that if sensory inputs are coming at you really quickly, it's like the pebble keeps getting thrown. And then the flowering, the neuronal flowering in the brain, never really gets, it keeps restarting and restarting and restarting, and it never really gets to flower into a conscious thought. And I thought that's kind of amazing. And she described white water rafting as a perfect example of a flow state. Like when you're whitewater rafting, you're making decisions so quickly, and there's so much to think about that you're not actually thinking anymore. And so while I had had grandiose notions about the fact that maybe my work increased consciousness, I think it actually decreases consciousness. And it does it in a really beautiful way because the other thing that happens when you're not making those conscious thoughts is that you're in a childlike state of wonder from moment to moment. And this is always, I guess, it confirmed for me what I sort of instinctively already knew, which is that's what I loved about the experiences that I was creating for people. And it's the feedback that I would get from people, is that they would often say, I just felt transported, I felt like a child, I felt like I was like a kid watching a fireworks display, where you're just so overcome by kind of some the sensory amazingness of what you're experiencing that you lose touch with the physical or the corporeal, and I don't know, I just got really interested in that, and then I have since then, working in contemporary dance as well as a very abstract form. You've got this abstract movement language and then the abstraction of music, and those two things coming together. And the fact that the way, particularly that my partner Stephanie Lake works, and I make the music for almost all of her dance productions, it's so there's no story. Nothing, nothing is actually kind of happening in any kind of narrative sense. Yet the capacity for her work to communicate emotional states to people, feelings to people, intensity over time, sort of expanding and contracting and creating sort of absolute, you know, a depth of feeling people have such depth of feeling when they experience these things. And so what I'm interested in is the fact that you can convey such a depth of feeling just by creating something that you have invested a depth of feeling in. And that's the beauty of this abstract communication, is that you've invested a depth of feeling and you manage to evoke a depth of feeling in another person. But what you were intending to do and what they're receiving are two completely different things. It's like the ultimate subjectivity or something. It's just, it's just the communication across a chasm or something like that, that I find really fascinating and beautiful. About, particularly about abstract work.
Su [00:13:28] There's something so interesting there. I'd like to dive in a little bit deeper. And so, finding the sonics through a lot of your work with light and wondering what is listening to you, both as a human being, but also as an artist through a lot of the work that you're making. How integral is that practice? And it sounds very much like listening is a very deeply embedded practice in a lot of the work that you're making as well, and how you're also receiving work. But can you talk a little bit about, yeah, how do you define listening, what it means to you and how you work with it both in your field, but also as a human?
Robin [00:14:06] Yeah, it is interesting because I do think those two things are different in a way. Listening as an artist and just listening as a human being. And, but both of them have something to do with awareness, I think. But when I'm listening as an artist, when I'm making my work, for example, which is when I'm listening to what is happening in the studio, for example, when I'm making music, a lot of what I do is driven by experiment and play. I very rarely, I don't have an inner musical mind like some composers do, where they sort of have a sonic idea and then they work to manifest it in the world. I don't really work like that and I find that notion quite romantic and strange. Like to me, and this kind and I think it also takes us down a dangerous path in terms of mythologizing and romanticising genius in a way. But so for me the work that I make is 80% really terrible and I love that about it, because a lot of it is a journey towards finding the thing that's really interesting, and that's the listening part, is that I'm sort of making things and I'm experimenting with new techniques or something that I've been thinking about, usually more technically, like if I combine this, this and this, I wonder what would happen. Or you know, if and when I first started working with computer music it was funny, the first thing I learned to build was just a simple ring modulator, which is a very simple audio effect. And then I thought, I wonder what happens if you know, if I have a thousand ring modulators. And so then, of course, I built it. So, it's this kind of a megalomaniac tendency and just a need to experiment and hear things. So I think, you know, being attuned to what is happening in front of me in the studio in the listening sense is really important. And I think what's really important about that is that music that works, I think, or music that communicates has to have part of the person who's making it in there somewhere. And I think we've gone down a dangerous path, and I talk about this a lot in relation to electronic music and the mission that we have at MESS, my organisation. And the tendency that digital platforms have, well, how should I put it? I think the digital platforms that make the composition of certain types of electronic music, for example, very easy, have had a very homogenising effect. So if everybody's working from the same software platform and everybody's surfing through the same presets and everybody's arriving at the same conclusions, it's very difficult to hear or feel anyone's personality in the music. And so, you know, a young artist might come to me and they might play an amazing piece of techno that they've made in Ableton, and then they'll say - and I'll say that's great, it's amazing, and it's wonderful that you've done that, and that's everyone should make music. I'm passionate about that. It's great. Nothing no shade on this at all. But then they'll say to me something like, Well, how can I get a gig at Mutek Festival in Montreal? And I'll say, okay, well, let's think about this. And this can be quite confronting for a young artist, but I'll say, Okay, you've opened your laptop and you've made this amazing piece of techno, and so have 6,000 other people in Melbourne today. And then so have 6,000 other people in Montreal today. So, think about a festival director, somebody who's trying to curate an interesting festival for the people in their city. Why are they going to fly you from Melbourne to Montreal if 6,000 people have done something very similar? And it's just, it's no shade on the activity and the fact that that making music is amazing and we should all do it, but it's just that there's nothing of them in that music. And so, because I'm lucky enough to be the custodian of this kind of museum grade collection of electronic musical instruments, I can just say, hey, go to that synthesiser over there that was made in 1974, well before MIDI, well before anything else, and add a line to your track using that synthesiser. And what happens is quite extraordinary because when you make a sound yourself, with a cranky machine that doesn't really hold tune and it's really difficult to organise, and it takes a little bit of work and a little bit of time, it brings you back into your ears, right? Because you're not looking at a screen, you're not looking at drop-down menus, you're not looking at waveforms, and you grab those dials, and it's like sculpture with voltage, is what I call it. You sort of start to tune those oscillators. Now, even if you're trying to imitate something, you're never gonna imitate it exactly. And your oral fingerprint, your sonic fingerprint, your ears are this insanely nuanced organ. You know, we can listen to a million songs with a 1-4-5 progression, you know, a one-four-five-one chord progression. Millions of them. Yet we can differentiate so easily between all of those things. Like the nuance is just absolutely phenomenal. And so when you're doing that, and you add that track, and then I listen back to that same piece of techno, there's the salt and pepper in there, is that line that they've made, because that's theirs. And that kind of investment, that personal investment in what you're doing, it has to be evident. And so, and so when I'm when I'm in the studio, I guess that's what I'm listening for. So when I'm listening as an artist, I'm listening for the thing that makes my whole thing tingle. My whole organism goes, Oh wow, I really like that. And when that happens then I know that I'm onto something that I would share with the world, you know.
Jun [00:20:03] In your response to our initial questions about listening and you recently with the advancement of AI, things are much easier and there is a great promise that things will get a lot easier than now, as you gave me some example of how these days young artists particularly having access to this easily accessible technology, being able to create really wonderful set of sonic phenomena. And I mean those are wonderful, but then now becomes the problem how did that work really connect to their listening. So the question for you now is that, you highlight a little bit here and there, but what is the main theme or topic that is connected to your listening that you are at the moment most concerned about these days?
Robin [00:21:05] Every human being thinks that they're living at the end of the world, right? Like every generation thinks that their generation will be the last somehow. There's kind of a dystopian tendency in the human mind. And I've come to think that maybe that's because we're all gonna die. And we struggle with that. We struggle with our own mortality. And so we have this kind of arc. And we ascribe our own arc and our own approach to death onto the society. It's like a big projection. We project onto the society that the society is dying when in fact it's us that's dying. So it's easy, I guess I try and check myself when I get into really catastrophic thinking, you know, about how bad everything is, but then I look around and I think, holy shit, it feels really bad. Like it feels really bad. And so I think that the things that I'm interested in, in turn in terms of listening, is you know, if you say there's a theme or a topic, the theme is communication, right? Because listening is only one side of a communication. And what I really fear for us, as a species that's getting more and more software like in our manifestations, is that we are not listening to each other at all. And this tendency to, this tendency to extreme binary thinking and very, very resolute sort of walls that are being put up between groups of people, no argument, no debate. You know, you hear this all the time now. No argument, no debate. And you know, and it's really interesting because years ago I was reading some Peter Singer philosophy, you know, some ethical philosophy. And he came up with his model for how you make a better world. That's basically the tit for tat theory, which is that you approach every communication that you have with another human being with openness and love and you do it with all good intentions. But as soon as somebody wrongs you cut them off completely. And this is the apparently this idea where just good people will end up merging together and the bad people who we see all the time, the few bad people can often ruin a society, like a virus or a disease. So this is Peter Singer's principle. It is very black and white. It is very black and white. If somebody wrongs you that's it. You cut them off. And if all good people did that, we'd cut off all the bad people and they wouldn't have any influence over us. And I was interested in that idea at the time, but now I'm kind of seeing versions of that happening where people are saying we're not gonna debate with anyone, we're not gonna do this. And I don't think it's gonna work. Like as I see it playing out, I don't think it's gonna work. So I do really worry about communication and if I had to choose a second, which I will, you know topic, it would just be truth. Communication and truth, these are the things that I find really the areas of being a human being that I think are so important and they're being completely eroded but also challenged. And I think truth is one of the most interesting ones for me philosophically as I get older because, and I think I talked about this a little bit in the panel discussion that we had, but I've been more and more struck as I get older by the fact that the chances of a successful communication are statistically so improbable that it doesn't actually surprise me that miscommunication is the norm. Because I started to think that the only thing that unifies us as people is that we are all completely distinct. And that's an oxymoron. And it sounds like a kind of stupid broadside. But the more that I was understanding the way that the consciousness develops and the way that your brain develops over time, that you're this insanely complicated cluster of neuronal responses and activity, and electrical activity. And essentially communication, when I started to think about it and break it down, was okay, if I have a cluster of electrical activity here, and then I have like language and I have my tongue and this muscle and this weird cultural thing that's developed over thousands of years, and I try and use that medium, so I try and talk, and I guess what I'm trying to do is get the same electrical kind of configuration to happen in somebody else's mind. And of course, that's never going to happen because their synaptic pathways are completely distinct and unique. So, the possibility of me actually communicating an idea into another consciousness seems like statistically almost impossible. So the fact that we can communicate at all is kind of a miracle. Which is kind of funny to think that, but it's kind of a miracle that it happens at all. And then I started to think just recently about this again, and I thought, well, isn't it a beautiful thing though that you can kind of forgive yourself a bit for being misunderstood? A lot of people feel very misunderstood, and it makes them sad or depressed or unhappy. And in some ways, if you do think about it as statistically extremely unlikely, then being misunderstood is probably going to happen. And so you can forgive yourself for that, and you can also forgive other people for misunderstanding you because it's very likely that that's going to happen, and so trying to work I guess towards a system of untangling the way that we handle misunderstanding is just to me, like an emergency or a vital human project that has to start happening because at the moment there is a fundamental reluctance to engage with debate and discourse and that means that the misunderstandings are now complete and they're not challenged. And of course, you mentioned AI, and the problem there with truth is.. so you have this problem of ultimate subjectivity. That's what I'm talking about. Everybody is a completely unique subjective consciousness. And so, does that mean that truth is also very difficult? We've always thought, you know, since the enlightenment that truth is this very simple thing. And then we fall into the track of, you know, the trap of Boolean logic and the mathematical universe where we think, well, we can prove this and we can prove this and we can repeat it and therefore it's true. And so truth takes on a very particular kind of meaning. It's a very particular idea. And the kind of older I get, I'm turning into a mystic in my old age. It's amazing. So now I kind of think, well, that's one way of looking at the world. But the other way of looking at the world through this lens of every single consciousness being completely individualised and unique, it means that all of this objectified external logical process, it doesn't even work. Like that doesn't even work. Because no one's ever gonna even experience that rationale or that logic in exactly the same way. That gonna work very differently for different people. So I don't know, I'm worried that I'm losing my mind sometimes, you know.
Su [00:28:33] I have so many thoughts and probably far too many questions. But thinking about communication and considering listening to be a very integral and these days feeling like it's quite a profound act, or even that listening might be kind of an act of activism, because what we're talking about here is the world that we live in today and so much noise and the inability to sort of sit quietly or even to find those spaces to be able to listen to one another. These are spaces that feel very sacred these days. And just wondering actually at which point a lot of these thoughts or ideas in relation to listening started to really influence how you made work, or how you approached even thinking about making work. And wondering if there was a particular project or a moment that you can recall that shifted your own approach to how you may listen or perceive?
Robin [00:29:34] Yeah, I think that's such an interesting thing to think about because the curiosity is, I definitely have a deep fascination for this and it's obviously a preoccupation. And it is interesting to think where it came from. And I think one of things that sparked it for me was the fact that I was drawn to what would be considered conventionally very unmusical things. I was drawn to sounds and constellations of sounds and things that I definitely called music, that a lot of other people maybe wouldn't have called music. And so I guess I was curious from an auto-anthropological point of view, like the endless analysis of the self, is like why am I drawn to these things that that the majority of people around me seem to find strange? And then of course you start to connect with communities of people around the world, and you realise, oh, there are people like me everywhere who like weird and wonderful sounds that are outside of music. And there was this one instance that was quite funny to me and involved my father, Colin Fox, who has a very classical sensibility, and he was actually on radio for 30 years here. He had a radio programme and an opera programme. He's a very refined man, much more refined than I am. And so we have very different tastes. And when I was a young artist, I was very young, sort of just starting to perform my sort of crazy noise experiments in public and realising that there were a select small group of people who would actually enjoy that. And my father came to a concert. He turned up out of the blue. I was supporting a Japanese noise artist. I can't remember which one it was now, it was a long time ago. And I'm in the foyer of this little community arts centre before the show was gonna happen, and in walks my dad, and I'm like, holy shit, dad, what are you doing here? Like, this is not your world. And he said, ‘Well, you know, I heard you had a show, and so I thought I'd come and see it, right?’ And I played this kind of 20-minute, like blistering, quite full-on, choppy, insane, wonderful, I thought it was wonderful, noise experience, you know. And it was at a time when I was really trying to perform with the laptop. So I built all these controllers for really dicing up and throwing around sound, and it was very active and there was a lot going on, but super, you know, like for somebody who wasn't initiated, this would have seemed like an incredibly insane piece of sound. And he wasn't there after the show. He'd left. Yeah, he'd left, he'd left. But what I thought was so completely adorable is the following day he called me and he said, 'Are you okay?' He asked me if I was okay. And I thought, and I said, Yeah, dad, dad, I'm great. Like I thought it went really well last night, had a really great time, thought it was a great show. And he's like, and what he said after that really struck me and it stayed with me and it could answer this question, is that he said afterwards, he said, ‘it just seemed so angry. It seemed like you were so angry’. And that really touched me in that moment because I thought, oh but hang on a minute, hang on a minute. That for me it was the opposite. And so what I had to explain to him in that moment, I said, Oh no, dad, it's not, it's not angry, it's not aggressive at all. Like what I'm looking for is something that's sublime and kind of beautiful, and that what this is to me. This is beautiful. And he just couldn't understand that because aesthetically it just made no sense because it didn't have any of the sort of trappings of beauty about it. And I think that understanding in that moment that my work could be perceived as aggressive actually didn't sit well with me. I didn't like it. I've never been a fan of you know, toxic masculinity and alpha male whatever. So it wasn't really something that I wanted to communicate. And certainly in the world of noise, there are plenty of what we call ‘noise jocks’ who are out there trying to break people, and it's awful. Like this is absolutely not what I'm interested in, and you know, in the world or in art or in anything. It's just not interesting to me. So I think there was that moment where I started to think, well, how can I communicate that? And so I've often in certain circumstances, I found myself in certain circumstances before where with particular audiences where I've been booked really inappropriately. Like there was one time I played the first ever one of my audiovisual laser shows was premiered at a World Health Organisation conference of doctors. And I'd been booked by some professor of a university who was a fan of my work who wasn't actually at the thing, but I'd been engaged to do this show. And I did think it was really weird. And then when I turned up and I did the sound check, the person who was managing the conference just said, ‘what are you doing? You can't do that. That's crazy’. And I said, well, but that's the show. That's what got booked. And she sort of went into this whole state of panic and I had to do the same thing where I said you know it's a beautiful, like people actually have really transportive experiences in these works. Like it's actually quite, it's not designed to be aggressive. And so I said to her, I said hey how about I just say a few words beforehand? And so I got a microphone and there was, you know, in walked you know 500 GPs, who'd probably never been to a noise concert before. And so I talked to them and I told them that story about my father. And they laughed and it was great, and we had a lovely time. And I sort of explained to them that what I was trying to do is create something that was transcendent. Something that would break the everyday and transport them somewhere into another place. And with that preamble, they really enjoyed the show. And many people, doctors came on stage afterwards and said that I'm so glad you said that stuff before, because I would have walked out in the first five minutes if you hadn't have said that. And I'm so glad I stayed. And so that was this this thing of, again, it's about communication and about subjectivity. It comes back to those points. It's about what I think is beautiful and what I think is sublime is completely terrifying to somebody else. And that's interesting to me. And I think that, you know, even just working in sound all this time and having to understand too that people's thresholds for pain are incredibly different. People's experience of loudness is incredibly different. And so, you know, I've always said to sound engineers when I go into a venue, I really want to achieve maximum presence, but I don't want to hurt anybody. I'm not interested in pain. And I know that my threshold for noise is high. So usually what I do is I get it to where I think it's amazing, and then I turn it down a bit. Because I just know that that my taste and also probably my damaged hearing is affecting that. But it's being, it's being attuned to that subjectivity. It's being so my world is not everybody else's world. And I think that moment with my father in that instance really helped me to fully appreciate that in terms of my work and how it was being received.
Jun [00:37:16] That's wonderful, that's a wonderful story, Robin. So we are now nearing the end of the episode and I have the final question. So, do you think based on what you know, what you've listened, what you have heard, what you have worked with, do you think that your listening will change in the future? And also, if we kinda expand on that idea, kind of sharing the sense of a collective as a human species, do you think our listening will change? And if so, how? Can we have a kind of speculation on that?
Robin [00:37:59] I think it will change because everything does. So my listening will change and so will the way people listen. I think that, I mean, there are two things that are gonna happen to my listening. One of them is that I'm gonna go more and more gradually deaf until I can't hear anything at all. But I think I have already changed the way I listen in the last couple of years. I've stopped, I don't like to have ear earbuds in anymore. And I think that that was a choice that I made when I found myself constantly listening to input, like manufactured input. Whether that was music, whether that was a podcast, and I know that we're making a podcast now, but whether - and I don't know what it was, but I just felt like there was too much information that was not the world. And so, I just wanted to listen to the world. And so, for years I would walk from home to the studio, and I would be always, I'd listen to a podcast that was exactly the right length, or I'd listen to some music and now I do that less and less and I feel better for it, I think. And so when I listen to music now, it's more, I prefer to do it in in a room with speakers, you know, less of it in headphones. And I do worry because I am struck by how people are now just in headphones all the time. And my stepdaughters are 19 and 21, for example, and I, you know, the tendency to kind of just have something in there all the time worries me. And I've noticed people in public now will just, they won't even take them out to talk to each other, so they're just talking to each other with their earbuds in. And I've got one positive thing I'd like to say about the potential for the future of listening, and that is that the crisis of authenticity that we are having with artificial intelligence, where it's getting more and more difficult for you to know whether or not music you're listening to, for example, is generated by a human being or not, and also whether even content that you're listening to, even text now, even things that you're listening to in spoken word, you have no real way of knowing whether or not something is AI generated or not. And what I think that will do, and I think about this a lot, I guess in terms of the making of music particularly, is that once that crisis reaches a certain point, then the human need for music and connection, which music, is essentially to me an exchange of empathies. Like we need that connection, and when we get to the point where we can absolutely not distinguish between the real and the unreal. Then what becomes really important is presence. So what I say to people at MESS is that if you want to know that something's been made by a person, make it. Make it yourself, you know, like make the music. Then you know it's made by a human. But also be in the room with somebody who's making music. You know, so this presence and connection and also I would really love to talk to some of my friends who I see on the internet becoming almost violent, violent. They become advocates of violence. And I want to sit in a room with these people and talk to them because I feel like they've, this disconnected way that we're sort of shouting information into the void, is not healthy. It's not healthy. And so I think that what will become extremely important to people is presence. And listening will become something that we do when we're together. Because you won't be able to do it remotely because you won't know what you're listening to. You won't be able to verify the authenticity of anything. So, you will have to do it together. And I think that this may be an unexpectedly positive outcome of this, of what's become a clinical and sort of vivisectionist like separation of us. So, we've been just pulled apart under the illusion of a connectivity, and we've sold our souls to the gods of convenience. But that will have this other effect, which is to bring us back into physical space with one another, where we talk to each other, where we make music together, and when we make music ourselves, it's the ultimate final step is composition. We all need to compose things to make sure - stop consuming things and start making things.
Jun [00:42:41] So yeah, I hear that sense of hope and sense of the positive, affirmative kind of futures, the thinking in your thought.
Robin [00:42:51] Well, I mean humans are endlessly inventive and, in a way, very resilient. Despite what seems to be a maniacal sort of self-destructive drive. We also have a resilience, and we will find ways to connect and communicate and I really look forward to that being more about being present with people and less about being connected in virtual ways.
Jun [00:43:24] Thanks so much, Robin, for your wonderful thoughts and sharing your ideas that relate to listening.
Robin [00:43:29] It's such a pleasure. That was such a joy. I hope we do it again sometime.