Practice 5: Martin Parker, Letting Your Ears Wander
In this practice, composer and sonic artist Martin Parker, invites you to experience journalling through listening. Beginning with the simple act of paying attention to the sounds that surround us every day, you'll discover how listening can become a creative practice in its own right, opening up new ways of noticing, reflecting and recording the world around you.
Through a series of gentle listening exercises, Martin explores the difference between hearing and listening, encouraging you to tune into sound with greater curiosity and intention. Along the way, you'll experiment with mapping sound through words and marks on the page, discovering that journalling doesn't always begin with writing. Sometimes, it begins by simply listening.
Watch Martin introduce the session
Welcome
Welcome to Letting your ears wander.
This lovely title (given to me by the Present Page organiser, Anna Chapman Parker) delights me because if you don’t read it and only hear it said aloud, the meaning is ambiguous.
Let your ears wAnder and you get to think of listening as an exploration around the sounding world.
Let your ears wOnder and you allow yourself to be taken out of yourself, towards the wonderful, through what you hear.
In this workshop, I hope we’ll be able to do both. By letting your ears wander around your environment - and by listening into it carefully - you’ll discover some of the wonder that’s available any time you turn your attention towards the sounds you share time and space with.
Linking listening to journaling
The Present Page is all about Journaling. As Anna has described in her introduction to the course:
Journaling is one of the most simple, accessible and unpressured creative activities you can do, fitting easily into everyday life whether you have five minutes or fifty, and taking up no more space than a slim volume on a shelf.
In this workshop about sound and listening, we’ll take that idea of simplicity and accessibility one step further. We’ll develop a few tools to make better use of your ears. And to begin with, we don’t even need a notebook.
Later, you’ll probably find pencil and paper useful (to log experiences, capture observations, and deepen the listening process). But for now, let’s just check-in with our ears and find out what’s going on around us.
A listening check-in
Exercise:
The timer below has a simple sound to begin your listening. After two minutes of silence, another sound will play to signal that the listening window has closed.
Preparing to listen
You can listen in any way you like, but here’s a structure I suggest:
- Get into a comfortable seated position.
- Feet flat on the ground.
- Bum towards the back of your chair/stool.
- Legs about shoulder-width apart.
- Hands resting flat on the tops of your legs.
I prefer to close my eyes. When I’m trying to focus on sound, it helps me to block visual stimuli and concentrate on information coming in through the ears.
When you’re comfortable, start the timer - and listen.
Things you'll need for the rest of the session
- Some paper or a notebook
- Pencil, pen, colouring things - anything you like to make marks with
- A pair of headphones (if you want to use the tracks provided)
The difference between hearing and listening
Hearing is passive. Listening is active.
Hearing
Hearing is an automatic function shaped by your own physiology. Everyone’s anatomy is different. Your ears and hearing sense have aged through your own life experience, and you’ll detect different levels of sound across the spectrum depending on who you are.
If you have tinnitus, it may have become more pronounced during the check-in. Or you may have a temporary illness causing sounds to seem muffled. We are all different, and we hear the world differently.
At a basic level, sound travels through the air as waves of pressure. That movement eventually reaches your eardrum and causes it to vibrate. Those vibrations are passed through three tiny bones in the ear. This motion then affects fluid in the inner ear, exciting tiny hairs whose movement creates electrical impulses. These impulses travel to the brain, which interprets them as sound.
At this point the brain does a huge amount of automatic work for us, including trying to differentiate between signals that matter and background noise.
Listening
Listening is a conscious act: something we do with deliberate care.
Concentrated listening can be revelatory, helping you develop a new awareness of what is going on around you. It’s not only noticing that things are sounding, but also beginning to accept (and sometimes understand) why and how they sound the way they do.
Listening is not just waiting for your turn to say what you always wanted to say. It’s inquiring into what someone is saying - and sometimes, why they’re saying it to you in that way.
It’s also attending to the sounds around you and enjoying the combination of noises and silences: multiple layers interacting, swirling around, colliding, and combining with your own sounds and internal noises, almost as a form of music.
Noise
Luigi Russolo and the art of noises
(Image of Russolo’s Intonarumori noise making machines from https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/luigi-russolo/luigi-russolo-ugo-piatti-and-the-intonarumori/)
The Russolo approach to hearing the world is about celebrating noise as a manifestation of human imagination, being, and presence. He takes the view that the world is noisy because of us, and that this is largely a good (and exciting) thing. Noise means progress.
Human beings are inventive and creative doers. We make things, we go places, we break things, we fight, we struggle, we live. Our actions make sound. Russolo wrote music to celebrate this racket, and he imagined the future of music as something that should embrace the noises of the world we were creating, reflecting that chaos, mayhem, and spirit.
To that end, he even invented his own noise-making instruments called Intonarumori (“Intonarumori,” 2025).
Silence
Murray Schafer’s book The soundscape : our sonic environment and the tuning of the world (Schafer, 1994), offers an introduction to the idea of noise as a negative and unhelpful problem for modern societies:
The soundscape of the world is changing. Modern man is beginning to inhabit a world with an acoustic environment radically different from any he has hitherto known. These new sounds, which differ in quality and intensity from those of the past, have alerted many researchers to the dangers of an indiscriminate and imperialistic spread of more and larger sounds into every corner of man’s life. Noise pollution is now a world problem. It would seem that the world soundscape has reached an apex of vulgarity in our time, and many experts have predicted universal deafness as .the ultimate consequence unless the problem can be brought quickly under control. (Schafer, 1994)
Somewhere in-between noise and silence, listening happens
John Cage’s famous work, 4’33, perhaps offers us a pathway into that boundary between noise and silence.
Conceived around 1947–48, the piece was first performed on 29 August 1952 by David Tudor. The piece has no material sound “of its own”. Cage’s point is that to “play silence” to a room full of people creates an opportunity to focus on all sounds other than music. There is also a sound to the sound of listening.
Cage creates a permissiveness: to let in all sounds, to treat them as part of the observational window, and to allow them to become a kind of music as soon as you turn your attention towards them.
Ways of listening
In this session, I want to offer you some tools to help you enjoy and explore sound, and to immerse yourself in a deeper listening process.
The three most commonly discussed are described really well by sound theorist and composer Michel Chion (Chion, 2019). He offers three modes of listening that you can use to explore and appreciate sounds in different ways:
- Semantic listening
- Causal listening
- Reduced listening
Causal listening
This is often the most common way we listen in daily life: we attribute a cause to the sound.
- The phone goes off: someone is calling; who?
- A siren blares out: it’s an ambulance; look out
- A dog barks: it’s a dog, barking
- In music, a similar thing happens: you hear a soaring melody; what instrument is playing it?
Causal listening is practical. It’s about orienting: what is it, where is it, and what should I do about it (if anything)?
Semantic listening
Semantic listening is about meaning. In speech, it’s not only what is being said, but how it’s being said: tone, timing, hesitations, emphasis, politeness, irritation, confidence, awkwardness.
In semantic listening, we listen for signs encoded into the voice, meaning that comes through silences, pauses, and attitude, not just the words.
Consider the phone conversation in the transcript below.
It looks fairly benign, but in combination with the sound recording a wealth of information reveals itself.
Conversation transcript
— Erm, your postcode, please
- Em EH8 9DF.
— EH8 9?
- DF
— can you speak up sir, I can’t hear you?
- EH8
— Ah ha
- 9DF
— That’s better
- A ok
— Just checking it for you
Now listen to the phone conversation...
Exercise:
Listen to that audio again and write down everything you noticed in this interaction. For example:
- What’s the relationship between the two voices?
- Is there a power difference?
- Any regional cues?
- Any attitude, bias, tension, fatigue, embarrassment?
- What do the pauses, repetitions, and “little sounds” (erm, ah, ok) do to the meaning?
Feel free to listen several times (if you can bear the cringe!).
What you have just written is a journal of that sound recording.
Reduced listening
Reduced listening is the tool Chion gives us to explore sound more freely - decoupled from semantic signs and symbols, and removed (as much as possible) from cause and effect.
You might wonder what could be left to hear once you’ve identified what’s happening and the significance of how things are being sounded. For me, this is where “reduced” listening becomes a kind of musical attention: the movement of pitch and frequency over time, densities and sparseness, textures, pulses, the drift and swirl of sound as it shifts around us.
This is an excellent time to get your pens, pencils, crayons, paints out and a fresh piece of paper.
Exercise:
A few instructions. Keep it simple.
- Lay your hands on a drawing implement
- Locate where your paper is in relation to your hands and drawing implement
- Trigger either of the soundtracks below
- Close your eyes (if that feels comfortable and safe where you are)
- Listen, and start drawing/marking what you hear
- Don’t draw the things you might be detecting in the soundtrack; draw sensations, changes in energy, and interactions in the sound
Here are two tracks you can try:
A shopping mall soundscape in Montreal, Recorded by Martin Parker in 2023
A back garden soundscape in Berwick, Recorded by martin Parker in 2024
before listening, I put some charcoal shavings on a piece of paper...
Whilst listening, I moved my fingers around the sheet with charcoal shavings and ended up with this. It’s no great artwork, but it’s something that happened as I allowed my fingers to trace what I heard as it happened.
You’ve just done some reduced listening.
Try this next time you’re trying to reach a relaxed state, or if you’re attempting to cope with a noisy environment that is irritating you.
Aim to listen in this abstracted and removed way. Avoid thinking about the things, people, and objects making the sound. Instead, try to trace (or draw) their energy and urgency.
DO NOT worry if your drawing is full of angry zig zags. They are supposed to represent the energy present in the soundscape as you’re currently feeling.
Deep listening
The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception. (Deep Listening – The Center For Deep Listening, n.d.)
Pauline Olivaros was a pioneer in the field of meditative listening and performance practices. She coined the term Deep Listening to mean listening in as many ways as possible.
So far we’ve covered:
- Causal listening (what caused the sound?)
- Semantic listening (what does it mean? what’s being communicated through how it sounds?)
- Reduced listening (what is the shape, texture, movement, energy of the sound itself?)
Deep listening gives you the freedom to listen in any way that seems important at the time. But what is key in deep listening practices is to find yourself inside the sound: part of the sounding world.
Not an observer looking out at the soundscape, but someone listening from within it.
Sound walking
Sound walking is another tool you can use as a way to journal and document the world around you.
When on holiday, it can be a great way to get to know a new city. Taking into account personal safety, letting your ears lead you to complex sound zones (where layers overlap and intersect) can even be a way to find a bar that isn’t in the guide books.
Sound walking can also reveal new features in the incredibly familiar. Try taking a sound walk around where you live and see where your ears lead you:
- Do you discover new birds or animals?
- Do you start appreciating the way trees move in the wind because of fresh leaves in May?
- Do you notice the end of rush hour as cars subside and the sound of children playing starts to take over?
The point of these tasks and approaches is to let your ears—and the curiosity they ignite—lead the way, rather than your eyes (or your temperature, or your schedule, or the other concerns that usually take over and prevent us from connecting via sound).
Check-out
Let’s do one final listening session to check out.
Exercise:
Using any of the techniques we tried in this workshop, start the two minute timer again and notice what goes on. Feel free to write and draw anything you like; journal it in any form.
Playlist tracks
Below are links to artists whose work is primarily about deep listening and inviting meditative encounters. They demonstrate radical ways of attending to sound: through duration (Éliane Radigue), playfulness (Pauline Olivaros), instruction (as in Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kit’s beach project), or through technology (Kristina Kubisch).
- Pauline Olivaros: Dunrobin Sonic Gems
- Éliane Radigue: Adnos
- Jon Hopkins Music for Psychedelic Therapy (2021)
- John Butcher, Streamers: Streamers, from the album Invisible Ear
- Luc Ferrari Presque Rien
- Alvin Lucier I am sitting in a room
- Hildegard Westerkamp Kit’s Beach Soundwalk
- Kristina Kubisch Electrical Sound Walks
References
Chion, M. (2019). Audio-vision: Sound on screen / Michel Chion ; edited and translated by Claudia Gorbman. (Second edition.). Columbia University Press.
Deep Listening – The Center For Deep Listening. (n.d.).
Intonarumori. (2025). Wikipedia.
Schafer, R. M. (1994). The soundscape: Our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. Destiny Books.
Martin Parker is a composer and a sonic artist. He thinks sound is at its best when you know what you are doing but you don’t know what is going to happen. Martin takes this approach across most of his work in composition, improvisation and sonic art by experimenting with sound technologies, people and places.
tinpark.com/ | @tinparkagram
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The Present Page was created by Berwick Literary Festival and Anna Chapman Parker with funding from Create Berwick, Northumberland County Council and the North East Combined Authority, enabling us to offer these workshops free of charge.
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