Here is his bio:
Alex De Little is a sonic artist and researcher with bases in Leeds and London, UK. His practice encompasses installation, composition, performance and workshops; it is concerned with the interrogation of listening as a way to understand environment, self, and social relations. Alex’s work and collaborations have been featured at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Tate Modern, Somerset House, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Health Museum (Houston, TX), Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art (Copenhagen), The National Science and Media Museum, London Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Walmer Yard, and the Hepworth Wakefield. Alex completed a practice-based PhD with Scott McLaughlin and Martin Iddon at the University of Leeds, and postdoctoral research fellowships at the Universities of Leeds and Nottingham. He is a member of CAVE (Centre for Audio-Visual Experimentation), and an honorary research fellow at Goldsmiths Centre for Sound Practice Research.
Based on this bio I think Alex saying that he is interested and concerned with the interrogation of listening as a way to understand the environment, self and social relations to be very critical. I also consider this a lot and within my time studying for my three-year degree I have found myself accidentally leaning towards my entire focus being on these ideas and questions that present themselves when one listens a lot. I’m keen to know more about his ideas on the same questions that I have.
Floating –> Radialsystem (with Sonic Acts of Noticing and Soft Agency) [2021]
This project was in collaboration with Sonic Acts of Noticing
It was an extended listening and reading walk in Berlin that followed a flow of water from the university to an ex-pumphouse on the edge of the River Spree. The walk was said to engage practices of collective reading and listening as an approach to engage with the flows of water.
The walks were set up in a silent disco fashion with one field recorder broadcasting its sounds whilst someone else lead the walk. The sounds would shift between hydrophone recordings and contact mic recordings. The idea was to amplify or be present in the context of environmental sounds.
I think this idea of unified sound walks is something I’m fond of. The shared human experience certainly amplifies experiences and discussions, especially with something precious as the natural world, after all, it’s not anything one person owns but the whole planet that enjoys it. I’m curious about the setup and further ideas for this piece.
Eastside – What If? (with Hannah Beard) [2021]
In collaboration with Hannah Beard, Alex created a billboard and sound walk that imagined an alternate future for the east side of the city centre of Leeds. A city centre that amplifies people rather than road traffic and is a direct response to the climate crisis. Again with a similar silent disco approach Alex created soundscapes of the proposed future sounds of this newly changed east side city centre if the plans that his collaborate Hannah Beard created became true. A sonic postcard of the potential future. They would walk around the current locations and listen to what they could be and if they take off the headphones they listen to what it currently is.
Following on from the first piece to this one, I’m excited to hear his extended lecture on these topics and the climate crisis, the use of field recordings in this context and how he has pieced together these landscapes. His ideas and intentions within his work and how he responds to a few of my questions.
Post Lecture Reflection
Alex starts by speaking about his background, his undergraduate was in music and experimental music. He became more interested in sound influences after finishing both. He became interested in sonic phenomena and acoustic phenomena and their behaviour in their environments and if you can create a compositional practice around it.
2014-2018 he was doing a PhD in sonic arts and sound studies at the University of Leeds. It was in sound practice and situated ways of listening in acoustic phenomena and to critique ocular visually dominated modes of production. He wanted people to engage not necessarily through space or aesthetics but through intensities of vibrations.
Just before the pandemic in 2019 is what he will start with, the offshoots the tendrils and the things that come from this are what this discussion will become.
He’s led through listening rather than sound, listening as a broad practice, giving and taking attention. A practice is subjective.
Listening as relationality, how we relate to others, ecologies and urban, non-manmade environments. He sees it as a reimagined way of listening, potential transformation through listening is how he considers how we can change ourselves. His craft through the result of this is setting up situations of listening and how we can develop practices that take from what is already there, from existing practices, and new practices such as deep listening. Listening as offering a time for reflection.
Since finishing his PhD his projects have become super collaborative, he believes perhaps it came from doing a PhD and being sat alone for a long time which has spiked this.
He starts with his collaboration, Listening in Spaces.
British High Street of Exchanges, (with studio Polpo) [2020 (2021)]
In late 2019 he was invited by studio Polpo to join the installation. They are a social architecture practice, and they’re interested in the social dynamics of creating and building. Considerations are climate and social justice.
Could the high street become a place of cultural exchange, they wanted to see the high street, not as a place of exchanging capital but how can we draw attention to social solidarity on the high street. He brings up again listening as a way of paying attention, they wanted to convey that in an array of loudspeakers in this form. Studio Polpo set up a lot of access around the city to collect these recordings. They hid microphones around places of interest in the city, one was an afro barber. His task was to take these field recordings and allow the listener to immerse themselves in these spaces, to sit in the barbers and hear these conversations. To hear these interactions that were taking place.
Another project he was involved in was titled Deep Listening Certification Training (2020-21)
He was really interested in the practice of deep listening. He became interested in Pauline Oliveros’s project Deep Listening – Sonic Meditations.
He studied a formalised way of working within listening, and gained his certification. It took him two-three months and he learnt numerous skills within it. After receiving his certification Alex went on to create his own listening circle within lockdown, he created sessions where everyone wrote journals of thought and ideas from listening. And sharing field recordings within sessions.
Sonic Acts of Noticing (with Julia udal and Jon Orlek 2021)
They wanted to do more from the audio from that project, and drill down on the idea of listening in public spaces as a way of reclaiming the spaces. Sonic acts of noticing developed from the ideas that stemmed from this.
We listen to the city at a macro scale, as an ecology of diverse lifeforms and resources and habitats, we might recognise a dynamic, vital system to be stewarded for future generations of humans and other species.
He engaged this framework at certain places, using sound walks, and a field recording with a radio transmitter with everyone on silent disco headphones. Using contact mics hydrophones and then after create listening sessions
Listening With 2020
listening as a way of relating a way around us,
He was calling it material agency and instruments, how instruments have ways of listening to themselves. Listening allows us to see what instruments want to do, and the acoustic behaviour within each instrument. He then created a project in reflection on all this reading and theories,
Listening in the Cthulucene: sound practices for survival
His last project was in collaboration with landscape architecture, Eastside a common ground (with Hannah beard)
The concept was this, remove cars and increase pedestrian crossings. Creating public realm infrastructure for bikes, and feet. Exposing the coveted river that runs through the site. And create a new urban forest.
The city has improved based on the city centre exposing itself. The possibility of sound as a way of articulating space. In response to this Alex considered how to propose ideas of landscape planning through sound. He instead creates and proposes a landscape of sounds which the architectural plan will become.
The power of convincing, the power of actualising. Share the environment that might help actualise the design.
He then created a fake sound walk to help bring more awareness towards the plan they have created.
Overall this was a hugely inspiring visiting practitioner lecture that has brought up a few issues that I’ve been reading about for my dissertation and my portfolio works. I found his passion for sound and the curious ways in which he uses it to be inspiring. I also felt that he brought ideas to my brain I wouldn’t have considered. Sonic planning permission? Sonic Architecture? Excellent!