Practising realism

Where towards a sonic realism stress-tested the claim, this chapter turns to practice.

A way of listening, making, and relating. A stance. A poetics. What might it mean to compose as a sonic realist? To curate, to record, to walk, to mix, to refuse?

These questions do not seek prescriptions.

There is no unified method here. There are invitations.

Practices that honour sound’s autonomy. Techniques that stay close to its vibrations, its delays, its refusals to resolve.

One such invitation is restraint.

To hold back.

To leave silence unfilled by signal or narrative.

Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room does this by doing almost nothing - repeating a voice until it dissolves into the resonant frequencies of the space.¹

Speech dissolves; resonance remains.

The architecture speaking through feedback.

A sonic object shaped by its own medium.

Another is attention.

Deep listening, as Pauline Oliveros conceived it, requires us to be present with all that is sounding: what we prefer, and what persists.²

The room tone. The hum. The outside.

In this, sonic realism becomes a kind of ethical attunement.

To be with sound before capture.

To allow it to arrive as it is.

A third is exposure.

Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks invite listeners to move through the electromagnetic city with induction headphones, revealing the inaudible buzz of infrastructure.³

Here, sonic realism shows up as disclosure: sound present before it is named.

Other practices invert this.

To make a sound not heard.

To withhold.

Raven Chacon’s installations often gesture toward violence and erasure without declaring themselves fully.⁴

A refusal to resolve into audibility.

This too is sonic realism in practice: to acknowledge that some sonic objects are deliberately absent, withdrawn by their makers, or occluded by systems of trauma, of harm.

To practise realism, then, is to work with sound as matter, as force, as neighbour.

It is to engage the sonic field without assuming mastery.

To resist symbolic capture.

To treat listening as co-presence with what is heard and with what stays unsounded.

For artists, this might mean composing with feedback systems rather than fixed notes.

For curators, it might mean allowing installations to be incomplete, reactive, open.

For listeners, it might mean walking without headphones.

Listening for objects. For encounter.

In each case, practice carries the metaphysics: attending to what vibrates without demanding explanation. A discipline of letting sound be.

Notes

1. Lucier, A. (1969 to 1970) I Am Sitting in a Room [composition], recorded on I Am Sitting in a Room [album]. Lovely Music, 1981.

2. Oliveros, P. (2005) Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice. New York, iUniverse.

3. Kubisch, C. (2007) ‘Electrical Walks, 2004 to present’, in C. Cox and D. Warner, eds, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music. New York, Continuum, pp. 355 to 359.

4. Chacon, R. (2018) American Ledger No. 1 [composition], performance notes; and Three Songs, exhibition, Whitney Biennial, 2022.