Reflecting on the texture of air

Be the first to favourite this.

Laura Mitchison is the managing director of On the Record, which produces oral history to inspire social change.

Laura’s work The Texture of Air, documents the extraordinary perceptual worlds ‘overheard’ in two recently closed NHS (British) hospitals.

Here, Laura talks about the context this work, on which she was artistic director together with Olivia Bellas.

Each of us carries a room within ourselves, waiting to be furnished and peopled, and if you listen closely – you may need to silence everything in your present room – you can hear the sounds of that other room inside your head.

Susan Sontag

The room in Prof Howard’s head is his old consulting room, which looks out onto “Shadyville” – the Grays Inn Road. There’s a hissing fire, a ticking clock and a popping sound as the pet terrapins bubble to the surface of their glass vivarium. Knock, knock – a junior doctor enters with fresh shrimp for the terrapins, which he peels by hand, and then trots out to get some rest. Let’s follow him through the murmuring corridor, into the silent anechoic chamber, where The Texture of Air begins.

Together with Olivia Bellas & Nicole Robson, I brought forth the memory rooms of NHS staff and patients at the Royal National Throat Nose and Ear Hospital, and the Eastman Dental Hospital. Hospitals are intensely private, guarded spaces. But, in their last days, they slowly opened up to our gentle enquiry. The two sites were closing down in 2019 after 233 years of independent history. Staff walked us through their operating theatres. Patients let us into clandestine consultations. After dark, promenading musicians captured the acoustic profile of courtyards and corridors, thanks to the tireless curator, Guy Noble, who arranged access for us.

The Texture of Air is a sound walk through inner and outer space, drawn from the rich archive we created. You can witness the moment a cochlear implant is switched on for the first time, the music journalist awakening to a phantom orchestra, the trills and purrs of voice therapy, until the entire sensorium is assembled before you. Each of these little vignettes was chosen because they stretch perception beyond its conventional bounds. The conceit is heightened by music and field recording: sounds are overheard spilling into corridors, a hypnotic dentist takes you below the surface, and underwater recording of the Eastman’s fountain triggers notes on the piano.

For people with ordinary senses, the body is in the world just as the heart is in the organism. We can choose to intellectually split objects into sounds, sights, tastes etc.
But this is categorically not how they appear to us. When something goes wrong with the ear, or the voice, or the nose, our fundamental contract with the whole world is broken – sense data separates from its objects. When patient Nick woke up, one morning, with sudden sensory-neural hearing-loss in one ear, the world did not fall silent, as one might expect. Real sounds were displaced by an “intercranial mariachi band” of clanks, zizzes and hisses, punctuated by a tiny monkey playing a tiny pipe-organ.

The patients we recorded became detectives inside their own bodies, approaching their sense of place with a sort of philosophical curiosity, which we encouraged through questioning and deep listening. Children with tinnitus would hear “bees” and “bouncy balls” and “ghosts.” Adults would characterise and even befriend their phantom orchestras. Figurative language abounds.

It’s surely no coincidence that the area of the brain which is at the crossroads of touch, hearing and sound – the angular gyrus – is experimentally linked to metaphor (Nature, 2005). Taking it a step further, our ability to link unrelated things might be heightened precisely at the moments when cross-modal synthesis is most urgent; when the body schema is being re-mapped by illness. After all, the force of a good metaphor is not the simple substitution of one term for another, but the attempt to change reality by performing a fresh story about it. It fashions a new world from which the original appears unreal. The Texture of Air preserved these fleeting sensory messages from travellers to otherwise unimaginable lands.

Although the soundtrack was created first and stands alone, The Texture of Air is accompanied by a visual track for the benefit of the hearing-impaired. Hard-core audiophiles may prefer to listen with eyes closed. However, if you open your eyes, you’ll get an insight into the dislocation of sounds from things, which the people we spoke to experienced. Think of it as extra-cochlear sound-art!

Another patient, James, was struggling to express how he could sense freshly mown grass even though he had lost his sense of smell. He finally alights on the perfect formulation – “it’s the texture of the air,” he says. James’ uncanny experience of a perception severed from its physical architecture became a fitting title for a soundwalk through closed hospitals that persist in the imagination.

“We’ll all still be together, won’t we?” one of the therapists ask her colleagues towards the end, almost rhetorically. As oral history artists, we wanted to listen to the hospitals democratically. Transient patients and domestic staff had to be on an equal footing with the medical pioneers like Prof Howard. Only the latter can easily insert themselves in to the chronological institutional history, but everyone speaks from their own particularly position of sensory expertise. It’s the little perceptual details that pull you through, bringing “body”, “building” and “memory” into alignment – three notes striking a chord.

Laura’s article is the twelfth in a series of the artists shortlisted for the Sound Walk September 2020 Awards talking about their work.

Laura Mitchison

Award winner

Co-founder of On the Record CIC. Oral History, co-production, creative media.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Also check out

Post
How to get to Third Ward

3 Dec, 2020

Karen O'Rourke created a sound walk with a focus on Third Ward in Houston, renowned for its mix of cutting-edge art and community action.

Post
On memories, loss, and change

10 Dec, 2020

Stefaan van Biesen revisits a walk he shared decades ago, reflecting on change, as well as the lack of change.

Walking Piece SWS22
Are you a Ghost Hunter? An Audio Trail of The Old Church

Stoke Newington Church Street, London N16 9ES, UK

St Mary’s Old Church is London’s only surviving Elizabethan churchyard, where the tombstone inscriptions have been lost to weather and time. This self-directed audio trail pieces together the fragments of story. Produced October 2021.

Post
Clarity during lockdown

30 Nov, 2020

Emma Welton creates hand-drawn illustrated maps as a kind of graphic scores, capturing the sounds of her environment, creating short walks where participants experience new and familiar sounds in different ways.

Post
Home makers, in-between worlds

26 Nov, 2020

Migrant domestic workers in Lebanon and the UK talk about their experience in Ella Parry-Davies' piece 'Home Makers', to be listened to in select locations in London and Lebanon, creating a mix of intimacy, while showing the limits of identification and solidarity.

Post
Sound walks as contemporary art practice

24 Nov, 2020

Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman discuss their sound walk Sandbox, a meditative experience, a training in mindfulness and encouragement to critically think about our individual experience and environment.

Audio about walking
New
The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Rolf Potts — The Vagabond’s Way, Tactics for Immersive Travel, Pilgrimages and Psychogeography, Empathy Machines, Full-Throated Love, The Slow Sense of Smell, Lessons from Thích Nhất Hạnh, Falling Upward, and More (#624) – The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss

28 Mar, 2024

Walking Piece SWS20
The Texture of Air

330 Grays Inn Road, London, UK

Post SWS22
Ghosthunter N16

28 Dec, 2022

Becoming Ghostbuster No 5, and going for the hunt.

Walking Piece
Inside out Homerton

Homerton Hospital (Stop F), London, UK

Free
walk · listen · café SWS22 SWS23
SWS Winners’ circle

2023-09-05 18:00

Online

We meet the winners of the SWS22 Awards. They discuss their work and process, and tell us what inspired them.

Curated news
New
Immersive Media Market Skyrockets, Predicted to Hit US$178.7 Billion by 2032

28 Mar, 2024