Listening Glossary

I’m proud to have written an entry, ‘Classed Listening’, for this upcoming book on Silver Press, edited by the brilliant Hannah Kemp-Welch.

Talking and writing about class is not easy. My working-class background is something I’ve spent a lot of energy trying to cover up as I’ve navigated the worlds of speech radio (BBC R4 and R3 - very middle, upper middle class) and the middle-class family I married into, acknowledging the privilege that comes with that. Hiding aspects of my experience comes with a cost, and talking about it openly, as I’ve begun to do, is complicated. The allure of realising there is now some currency in my background and that it seems to make things possible that might not have been before, has to be balanced against the cost of sharing difficult parts of my life in spaces that might not be sensitive or caring.

In October I start a PhD where I’ll be listening with the community in the council estate where I grew up, a community that I consider to be unheard and underheard for generations, and asking the question - what knowledge emerges when we listen with the community and landscape of that area?

And I’m not talking about the pretence of listening, or ‘giving the community a voice’ - I mean the deep, messy, difficult, gentle, compassionate, reflective and meaningful listening, led by the community, ethically, resisting extractive practice and neat outcomes.

There is no perfect listening, or good listening - only the intention to be open and curious. This new book looks like it is going to delve into that from multiple perspectives, and I can’t wait to read it.

Order here.

Listening Glossary explores the many meanings and practices of listening. In an era shaped by climate crisis, war and deepening social inequalities, listening is increasingly called upon to bear witness – to melting glaciers, disappearing species, militarised borders, extractive infrastructures and other forms of violence and loss. 

This glossary is a practical guide to listening as a social, political and imaginative practice. It gathers over two hundred terms from art, ecology, activism, psychology, education and philosophy across nine decades of thinking about listening as a way of relating to others, environments and structures of power. Entries invite listening through another’s ears or from specific perspectives, encountering forms of listening that range from the non-cochlear to the interspecies. Together, these entries reveal listening as a critical method for understanding and transforming the worlds we inhabit.

Sounding the Shadows album on YYAA

YYAA008: Simon James, Sounding the Shadows

Structural resonances and architectural fantasies performed at the RIBA Gallery in Portland Place, London. Using Buchla Electric Music Box, Wingie resonator, contact mics and a transducer to interact with airborne and structural borne sound from the gallery itself.

Created as a live performance at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) gallery in London, and in dialogue with Jim Stephenson, Sofia Smith and James’ 2023 film and exhibition, The Architect Has Left the Building, which examines the active life of buildings, YYAA presents Simon James, Sounding the Shadows.

Combining field recordings from buildings that feature in the film and a deep library of architecture and landscape recordings, modular synthesiser, and feedback generated by attaching contact mics to the exhibition structure and moving sound round multiple speakers, it explores how architecture is activated by its use, supposed misuse and adaptation by human and non-human life, and how buildings respond in kind, at the level of auditory perception and beyond.

Recognising that architecture is a kind of spatial storytelling, Sounding the Shadows is a companion work of audio theatre that draws on James’ abiding interest in deep listening, socially engaged sound and Maryanne Amacher’s prolonged exploration of psychoacoustic phenomena.

Limited edition release on transparent 'prison edition' cassette (edition of 50) in a custom box. The box is assembled with embossed fine paper from Gmund Paper in Germany that mimics the look and feel of asphalt and concrete.
The release contains a poster on semi-translucent paper featuring a drawing by Simon James of his modular synth.

Buy here

Thanks to Dom, Rupert and Dan (who described the album better than I could) at YYAA.

Prada Touch

Music and sound design for Prada’s advertising campaign for a new range of makeup called Touch, with global ambassador Bella Hadid.

With Tin Drum Music.

Available Light - Morgan Quaintance

Tonight on Resonance FM.

I produced this radio programme that weaves conversation, live performance, extracts from Morgan’s film ‘Available Light’ and field recordings from in and around Cafe Oto where Morgan and friends performed earlier this year.

Resonance FM Thursday 6th Nov 8PM.

Conversation, with Morgan Quaintance and Laura Ducceschi'

Morgan Quaintance and Laura Ducceschi discuss Quaintance's 2024-25 Outlands touring commission 'Available Light!.

Touching down in Brighton on the 20th November at the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA), this year-long, expanded exhibition explores notions of home and belonging in contemporary society through moving image, photography, writing, sound and performance.

In this new piece for radio produced by Simon James, Quaintance delves into the motivations and inspirations behind this body of work, offering an insight into how a guiding concept can be expressed with and across contrasting artforms.

'Available Light' has appeared in different forms at Cafe OTO, the Barbican, Courtisane Festival, Ghent and other locations. For the Brighton date, ACCA will host a hybrid film screening and live performance event featuring a number of invited artists and performers. More information can be found on the ACCA and Outlands websites.

Why Listening?

I’ve been running a lot of workshops this year, continuing to develop the methodology I began with Neolithic Cannibals through my deepening connection with listening. Recently I had a crisis of confidence as I was preparing for a series of workshops that I considered to be my most ambitious yet, using listening to invite curiosity into a space with deep history and trauma. In the midst of this I scribbled some notes down about how I got here and why listening is so important to me. I was in my car at the time watching my son play football.

[The wind howls and rocks the car]

I got here through making music and sound effects, always interested in the more unusual. I created ‘sound worlds’ for radio drama and stories.

[Low calls / high cries in an open lively acoustic]

I found myself sitting quietly making longer recordings, sometimes using special microphones to reveal hidden sounds.

[The force of the wind blows over a metal frame holding netting. It is repositioned and the net expands and flutters waiting to catch something else]

I started to recognise a connection when I was listening. Noticing details I wouldn’t have had I not sat and listened. It felt good and warm.

[Echo blasts the net and it billows]

I made a project on the council estate where I grew up. Listening created a space to engage with difficult and uncomfortable aspects of my life. The stigma growing up there. The long held belief that I’m studpid or will be found out because I don’t know what I’m doing. I was able to confront all that and more through listening and conversely, being heard.

For communities and people that have been hurt by those that wield power, a deep listening is long overdue.

I try to make work that creates spaces and invitations to do that.

[Echo spins, his golden hair whipping around his joy filled face]

I hope to carry that playful energy with me.

Neolithic Cannibals wins Sound of the Year award

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Neolithic Cannibals has received the top honour in the 'Composed with Sound' category at this year’s Sound of the Year Awards, an international celebration of innovative sound judged by leading experts from across the global sound community. I’m so proud of Amelia, Amy, Gracie-May, Harry, Izzy, Leonie, Ieuan, Sophia, and Tassia. Young artists from an area where it is very hard to become an artist, let alone make award winning contemporary art.

“This project was deeply personal. My aim was to co-create something bold and uncompromising with these young artists—a work that resonates in a gallery space as experimental sound art, serves as a window into history and heritage, and prompts curiosity with contemporary social issues. Through imaginative and fantastical soundscapes, we encouraged audiences, who might otherwise overlook Brighton’s class divisions, to explore these disparities through listening”

I also want to thank Curtis and Carlie at Class Divide for opening up the conversation around class in Brighton and nationally and all the work they do to level the playing field in education and attainment. Andrew Comben at Brighton Festival commissioned the work and Lighthouse co-produced and hosted the exhibition. Emily Macaulay at Stanley James Press took my ideas for the gallery and design and realised them brilliantly. I was so lucky to work with her. Curtis also created the amazing visuals - a collage of archive material, drone footage and sequences of glowing Cymatics that represented the shape of the Neolithic Causewayed Enclosure.

Find out more about the Sound of the Year Awards.

Listening Journal March ‘25

Communio

In a subdued community cafe a distant electronic alert repeats a two - two rhythm.

Ju knocks on her walls, then listens with a glass. We discuss listening to a place you don't go to and whether we can listen in both directions, though now as I read it back I can’t remember what we meant by that.

I’m listening outside Cafe Oto.

Rental bike beeps doppler, clicking and whirring past me within the narrow arrangement of tall buildings. High pitched hydraulic brakes, raised voices, distant phantoms and moments of conversations oscillate against urban drone and glass and brick filtered music.

I choose to be on the outside, listening in.

On my journey home from London the air pressure thump of a passing train causes my Air Pods to start hissing like a punctured tire. This has been happening regularly for a while.

Chatter and religious echo.

I’m trying to find space to make space for listening.

Tables scrape as they are folded and tidied away.

A church bell and the soft boundaries of its ring symbolise a listening attention and area. The word communion comes from the Latin Communio which refers to fellowship, sharing and mutual participation. It feels like a good name for today’s workshop.

Read More

Neolithic Cannibals on Radiophrenia

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I’m incredibly proud that the Neolithic Cannibals soundscape will be broadcast on Radiophrenia this year. I have a long history with the Glasgow based radio station, but sharing the work of young artists from the council estate where I grew up is really special. Those young artists can add arts radio station broadcast to their list of achievements alongside International Arts festival.

19/04/25 9.30 - 10.00am

Neolithic Cannibals is a socially engaged sound art project and exhibition from the young people of Whitehawk and East Brighton, and artist Simon James, who was born and raised in Whitehawk. As part of the Class Divide campaign for fairer education, the project confronted issues of stigma and what it means when we listen to the unheard and invisible. Textures, shapes and patterns derived from archaeological materials place the Neolithic Cannibals soundscape deeply within the heritage and history of Whitehawk in Brighton. The listening spans thousands of years, from Neolithic Flint Knapping to the early 20th century geophysical techniques used to discover Whitehawk Camp, and now the young artists from Whitehawk creating a contemporary artefact using the sounds of their environment. Communities connecting across thousands of years through listening.

Listening Journal February 2025 - In to Nothing

I heard these sounds in February.

Mausoleum acoustics, tuned air.

A strained nothing sound. Air thin choral resonances.

Leaning in between acoustic screens.

I step through the curtain, drop my self consciousness and sing. I find harmony with AI, enjoying the secluded, private space to share my voice. I wonder if I’m singing with another human, unseen in the booth opposite me.

I face a wall with my back to the speakers.

Ponies squelch through mud in Hyde Park. The ground I’m walking on is wet. Every footstep slick and glistening. I look up just as a formation of croaking geese fly towards me, passing just over my head. I hear fluttering details of feathers beating.

A voice against a backdrop of cicada’s, wavering tones and ambience, plays from a small speaker cone embedded in an old, brown wooden box. The sound waves leave that box, pass over a floating wooden approximation of a toilet bowl and cistern before activating the wide gallery acoustics.

A soft motorised rhythm pulses, then a hum and a click before that original pulse takes on a ticking higher note that ripples away from me.

Variations of the above sequence surround me.

Distant, faint rising and falling pitch like an air raid klaxon.

Occasionally a squeak ignites the room like a sneaker on a basketball court.

The wooden box voice drifts through to here.

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Echoes of Old Shoreham

Echoes of Old Shoreham

Beginning in March and continuing until August I’ll be running listening workshops in Shoreham on the south coast of the UK.

"Echoes of Old Shoreham" is a community sound art project that captures and celebrates the rich sonic landscape and cultural heritage of Old Shoreham. This collaborative initiative invites residents to explore their historic surroundings through listening, creating an immersive audio portrait that spans the Shoreham Downs from the Adur valley to Thundersbarrow Hill. Born from the success of a listening workshop during the FOLDS Heritage Festival in September 2024, this project expands on the community's growing interest in their unique aural environment.

To sign up email echoes@oldshoreham.org

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Intricate Frictions

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Curtains of water shimmer in fading light. Distinct zones of white noise showers.

Drips, splats, trickles, droplets, flow.

Wind activated waves of intensity, the outside swaying, rippling trees blown in through the huge jagged stone window in a wash of noise that fills the entire sound spectrum.

Every surface damp.

Listening to Cathedral Cave. Words and field recordings over on my Substack.

Emily explores the cave. Photo by Curtis James.

The writing was originally published in Boulderdash Zine 1 available here. Already on to their 4th edition, Boulderdash presents writing around the themes of Stones, Drones and Noise. Highly recommend checking it out.



Listening Journal - January 2025 - Mumbai

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Tinkers surrounded by piles of different coloured soles, pots of polish and assorted tools, sit at the end of each platform tapping small wooden sticks to gain attention from passing passengers. The combined tapping is spatially pleasing, woodblock polyrhythms moving back and forth along the ends of the platforms. A huge air horn blast adds a dramatic counter and now crow caws join the wooden pecking of the tinkerers.

Photo by Jim Stephenson

I was incredibly lucky to visit Mumbai in January to attend the ADFF. STIRR film festival. ‘The Architect Has Left the Building’, the multi screen, multi speaker installation I made with Jim Stephenson and Sofia Smith for RIBA, was being exhibited at the festival and Jim and I ran a workshop and took part in a panel.

I dedicate this month’s listening journal to the sounds I heard during this trip, my first to India. As usual it’s a mix of sound descriptions, metaphors and thoughts on listening. The practice of listening and writing about it is more important than the sharing. It’s worth saying that I didn’t set out to make a comprehensive sound portrait of Mumbai (this would be an immense and amazing project) and instead these are just the sounds that were unique to my time in this sonically rich city.

Thanks to all the teams at STIR, ADFF, RIBA, NCPA and The British Council for making this project and trip possible, and of course Jim for being a great travel companion.

Read it here.

Listening Journal - November 2024 - My Shadow in the Sweet Spot

Things I heard in November.

In a converted warehouse space an unexpected whoosh followed by the briefest whine, form an object in the air. It's the spatial trail that catches my ear.

Connecting with Echo through making pitched down remixes of his favourite songs.

Outside a long, drawn out noise sweep moves into the distance and I listen to its tail trying to hear where it ends. In my imagination it continues, stretching like the freeze audio effect that sustains a sound forever. I can still hear it minutes later.

From upstairs I can hear pitched snare drums on every offbeat and Echo singing along to the slurred, slowed down vocals. 

Today someone asked me if a sound carried on forever and if sound waves continue to oscillate, fluttering and vibrating into the ether, out into space. I imagine distant planets inhabited by beings with incredibly sensitive ears picking up Earth's din.

Liquid, bubbling and squelching bat echolocation. We try a human version, clicking using our tongues, exploring how our ears pick up spatial communication reflected from building’s surfaces. 

Two residents describe their windows shrieking when the wind is strong.

Stomping on drain covers, listening to subterranean booms, touching railings to feel the sound of passing trains. A small child with very good rhythm uses percussion beaters to sound objects around her community. She clambers up onto an outdoor gym apparatus clutching a Zoom audio recorder, eager to record the resonant metal bars that run at intervals along the top. 

I read out loud the lore about the king shouting his secret into the earth and I lose a metal spike that is meant to let me listen to those secrets. 

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Listening Journal October 2024 - A Temporary Sonic Imprint

Some things I heard in October.

The Entertainer floats around Brighton station, bouncing off the glass ceiling.

Squealing sharp travel, the hum of movement, upper frequency details ricochet around the expansive structure clattering against glass and metal. 

The Entertainer is not entertaining.  A train arrives unheard, and bags pass me jingling delicately as zips and fastenings swing. A distant beep, source unknown, smears in the reverb. 

Now a song that I recognise from Echo's playlist, Dance Monkey.

As I walk along the platform to the train, details diminish. It's much more enjoyable to hear the notes float towards me, rippling off every surface, merging with train drones and hiss. I'm sad to shut that soundscape out, but as the train door slides shut, it's gone, replaced with whooshing humming air and tin foil crunched brittle.

Factory songs.

A beautiful story of listening and the connection to landscape and more than human beings. 

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Listen Club 16 playlist

Sounds and music around the themes of Archaeology and deep listening. At Listen Club, The Rose Hill, Brighton on the 26th of September 2024.

Neolithic Cannibals Clip 1 - Neolithic Cannibals  - 4’22"
Cave of Shells - John Kenny - 2’13"
Stone Tape - Nigel Kneale/BBC Radiophonic Workshop - 4’45"
Neolithic Cannibals Clip 2 - Neolithic Cannibals - 6’12"
In the Cave - Pepe Deluxe - 1’51"
Star Carr - Ben Elliot and Jon Hughes - 5’59"
Sound Marks - Rob St John / Rose Ferraby - 7’44"
Mycenae Alpha - Iannis Xenakis - 9’39"
Neolithic Cannibals Clip 3 - Neolithic Cannibals - 6’03"
Vision of Truth - Blake Baxter - 6’31"
The Landscape Listens - Caterina Barbieri - 8’07"

Listen Club is organised by Sound Art Brighton. More here.

Luray Caves, home of the Stalactite Organ used on In the Cave by Pepe Deluxe