Audio papers: an introduction.
Slowing down and breaking up of scholarship into the deliberate vagueness of sonic criticality

This is an introduction to the audio papers featured here, produced by students from the BA Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, UK. Audio papers were introduced into the curriculum of the course in 2022/23 under the stewardship of the then course leader J. Milo Taylor. They are a central element of the teaching on the course, opening new possibilities for sonic research. This text ponders the format and its critical possibilities against the background of scholarly expectations of written clarity, semantic precision, academic registers and referenced value. It reflects on sound as introducing a purposeful vagueness that unconstrains how and what we can know and how we can communicate that knowledge. It further asks how sound, and thus audio papers, can trouble and augment how we think, combine, and produce scholarship?

 

1. Slow motion and vague articulations as a critical space brought into academic and scholarly thinking through sound. 

 I’ve just discovered that for her, besides God, reality too was very little. She could deal better with her daily unreality, living in sloooow motion, hare leeeeaping through the aaaair over hiiiill and daaaale, vagueness was her earthly world, vagueness was the insides of nature.¹

In Clarice Lispector’s novel The Hour of the Star, vagueness is the main protagonist’s earthly world: its depth, where we live as cells and atmos with the world’s materiality, in a blind vagueness, rather than on the surface of maps and with a cartographic view, in apparent clarity. It is represented as a slow motion, literally slowing down the words of her world and how we read the text, inviting a pronounced sonic engagement, in a surprising and simple way; extending the vowels to emphasise the duration of time generated in pronunciation, and within the same sentence opening that space of materiality rather than meaning. Lispector’s narrative presents the idea that ‘vagueness was the insides of nature’: the cauldron within the earth and how it  a l l came together in a heterogenous co-presence; and as something quite fundamental to its material existence from which to understand how we walk upon its surface and within its vagueness at the same time. This is a foundational vagueness, enjoying its contradiction. 

Lispector’s idea is striking if brought into the context of academic research. Vagueness in the traditional sense of research and dissertation writing, for what seems like obvious reasons, needs to be corrected, sharpened, honed, brought into focus, as if the vagueness was an unfocused idea, that simply needed adjusting, as opposed to possibly being an entirely other idea from the insides of nature and how the world came together, as a phenomenon in itself. 

The main protagonist in Lispector’s story quoted above lives with vagueness as with an earthly world. The more she digs, the more vagueness is uncovered. The further you research, the vaguer it gets, blurring clarity in hyperopic eyes. A difficult thought. Clarity is a central criterion, after all, for excellence in research. It would be easier to abandon this idea, but Lispector persistently discusses and explores it, performing in her writing this relationship between vagueness and the bringing of clarity, ‘the great un-finding’ that she reflects on in The Passion according to G. H. and which she suggests, demands ‘handing myself over to what I don’t understand’.² There she discusses the need to resist the forming of the idea, the moment when we are no longer vague, and the work is surrendered to the comfort of hegemony and the dominating force that is shaping and sharpening us. Where we are no longer stumbling and uncertain but find definition in reference to known parameters and inherited structures, and therefore also within their limitations and exclusions. 

 

In response and following Lispector, we understand that sound, the base material of the audio paper, in its unbound vague nature that is the earthly – the relationality of the world which we find at its depth from where it shows how it all came together – creates moments that de-materialise and de-clarify the façade of research, its illusion of totality and cartographic overview. These moments expose the inherited structures on which it bases itself and the hegemonic organisation which it serves and that testifies to the apparent strengths of a particular scholarship. 

These are the strengths that are honed and practised in the institution and its conventional formats. They are the combative weapons and recognised strengths of the structuring of knowledge rather than going into the moment and gathering inside. The structure is hard to shift. But take JJJJJerome, a multimedia artist, musician, composer, writer, and performer, whose practice is concerned with disability, justice, temporality and historical experience, and who works with their stutter, not erasing it for the sake of a “replacement” clarity, and not following the regular rhythms that are entrained as the basis of clear communication. Instead, JJJJJerome breaks, disturbs, undoes and alters what we can understand, challenging hegemonic desires for clear delivery, and highlighting, like Lispector’s characters, their own sense of clarity from the vagueness of a different voice that we hear when we ‘gather inside’, in the moment where things come together, when we are in time with its time and each other.³

How does the audio paper work in the context of this idea of vagueness? How does it challenge the clarity of the scholarly voice and the power that it occupies through grammatical rules, which have encoded messages of class and exclusion embedded deep within them – in the language of the ruling Prince. These remain invisible but forcefully determining; hyper-invisible in the sense of a normativity so established it is not even seen and yet determines what becomes visible as in recognisable and thus valid as the only thing possible. What vagueness is embedded within the nature of sound that the audio paper can release and unleash onto the structure of academic clarity? How can we work with the vagueness of Lispector’s ‘un-finding’ on the level of the sonic; the sound of sentences, the slow motion of words and the long pronunciation of letters, gathering the vagueness that Lispector claims lies within and that replaces the rules of conventional grammar?

We see these questions if not answered then at least practised within the audio papers. They are dealt with in relation to the spatiality of sound making, and in relation to resonance: the way in which voices and bodies resonate within the academic and scholarly space and institution, or not. The slowness and stutter of the voice and words reveal the body not as an identity but as a resonant body, whose audibility reads as validity, as it shows how and which bodies resonate. In other words, it makes audible whose voices and bodies find reflection in the conventions of the institutional architecture, its grammar, and which get absorbed into this infrastructure and thus muted, left without a sound or a space for reflection. The slowing down, as retardation, as stutter and break, reframes the smooth surface and shows its impact on what we hear. It opens a different space for resonance that is not a mirror image but a diffractive speculation, producing no clear mapping but a diffuse geography that induces speculation and doubt. 

The traditional form of academic writing is a space that has no place for stumbling, vagueness, the stutter, the invention of the formless and the gathering of breath. By contrast, the sonic is a space of standing still, holding hands, inspiring and expiring, humming nervously in the face of the intimidation by those who argue breathlessly and without doubt. For sound brings doubt and questions. Sound is troublesome in this way. 

 

2. The voluminous spatiality of sound, articulated via Doreen Massey, brings the scholarly into a plural, relational, indivisible and therefore decolonial imaginary where it submits the dissertation into sonic vagueness. 

The social geographer Doreen Massey suggests that “how we imagine space has effects”⁴ using the example of how the perception of space of the colonising forces in South America defined their project. Theirs was a space mapped from A to B, across surfaces, a land as surface as a horizontal movement with a specific western aim – for colonising forces to grab and occupy, territorially and ideologically. This movement takes the surface as cartography, as a readable grammar, and pays no heed to the possibility of other perceptions of space that the peoples they colonised on the way might have. Instead, the colonised territories, in neo-liberal parlance, become ‘developing’ countries that will, with western help, ‘catch up’ to become a surface too. 

Massey’s description of the colonisers’ spatial view, as flat surface territory to be conquered and controlled, and the subsequent neo-liberal understanding of space and narrative, from A to B into clarity, shares remarkably similar patterns with the spatial design of the scholarly argument as defined by and within a traditional academic protocol. Performing research as a movement, step by step, from A to B, as a line of argument. Thus, it reflects writing’s relationship to the establishment and the protection of power and neo-liberal hegemony. The researcher becomes a cartographer, working along lines of exclusion. The clarity of the argument is then paramount to the map of academic excellence, as a map that reinforces the neo-liberal understanding of the terrain rather than its diffuse geography. As Kia Miller says in relation to the intentions of cartographers in his own country of Jamaica: 

And to think that such spite should pass down even to the present generation – should dictate the thoughtless, ungridded shape of our city, the slowness of traffic each evening – to think that one woman’s pride should add so much to our daily commute – this is something the cartographer does not wish to contemplate. Still, he wonders if on his map he made our roads a little smoother, a little straighter, as if in drawing he might erase a small bit of history’s disgrace.⁵

This terrain that the cartographer maps, defines, corrects, smooths, sharpens and hones, in an effort to align it as perfectly as possible to the grammar of old within which we research, write and live, is of course not a natural terrain. It is not the inside of nature. But through a sleight of hand it is presented as such, because its particular understanding of space and smooth roads is fundamental to academic legitimacy. And of course, hierarchy. It is a map that avoids the other understandings of space that (colonised) people might have. It removes those other possibilities of space and knowledge through its smoothed-out lines of argument. 

 

3. Teaching vagueness: the audio paper as a pedagogic tool to different spatial understandings. 

The audio paper presents the potential to perform that other understanding. To generate another imaginary of space and depth of an earthly world where the heterogeneity of sound’s inherent vagueness is gathered: where knowledge is a narrative spatialised in a diffuse geography and an unreliable chronology; and where all voices and bodies are resonant and thus audible and co-present even in contradiction, rather than muted and organised by the smooth lines of discourse. 

Audio papers present an opportunity to generate a different space for academic teaching and learning. A space generated from within its diffuse materiality, encouraging a digging without searching, and a building without a line. Engendering curiosity without an aim, and a desire for an ‘un-finding’ of understanding in the voluminous space inside of nature.

In this sense the audio paper enables the engagement with knowledge beyond the line of argument and canonic reference in the slow motion of listening and sound making, where things gather differently and create new relationalities, and where thus different and plural knowledge paths appear. These might sound untrustworthy, unmeasurable, vague, irrational for those looking for the line. But their diffuse geography is where we live. 

The introduction of audio papers into an educational context, as a way of producing a different academic argument able to reflect and resonate that lived, felt and plural reality, is an attempt to bring different spaces into what is necessarily – given the structure of universities and indeed the entire neo-liberal terrain, and its emphasis on monetary values – a required form; based on clarity and clear rational argumentation that legitimise validity and price. In introducing sound as a primary knowledge material, we bring other forms of understanding and value to scholarship that are not rational and indeed blur rational claims, proofs and convictions as they are presented in a traditional form and outcome. The sonic does not present, but generates the voice in the plural and removes it from its role and obligation as a logical, rational communicator. Instead vocalities become spatial and thus intrinsically linked to the context of their sounding that they are gathering within. 

What appears when composing and listening to research is a tacit knowledge. A line felt rather than known or drawn. It is the students’ tacit knowledge, the many different ways their ideas will have developed within their lives before even entering the organised and universalised space of academia, that becomes audible and gains resonance through the audio paper. Thus, the audio paper holds an emancipatory potential, where students do not (only) reflect on a research topic from afar and through the channels of conventional scholarship but perform the space of their own experience within that topic. This space is voluminous, relational, plural, and applied. In this sense the audio paper enables a “teaching (…) for all students, no matter what borders they need to cross”⁶, no matter what world they experience and consider real. These are cultural, educational, gender, race and economic borders, which an embodied and participative knowing from sound can sense and cross to generate a broad engagement and plural resonance. 

Crucially this tacit knowledge of the student is not implicit. It is developed in its own language rather than implicated in another. And it is not to be made explicit. Only what is implicit can be made explicit, by seeking clarity and rational shape outside itself. By contrast, the tacit finds knowledge within its own materiality. It is simply there, and we need to learn from it, to be guided by its experience rather than by the expertise that we might have of the ‘universal’ academic form. It is the engagement of the students with their own experience through the tacit and the ‘un-finding’ that changes the space of knowledge, pluralising its possibilities, decolonising its norms. Here is an authority outside of the text and the institution. And this is what a sonic engagement hopes to unlock within the traditional form of academic research. It is a sonic practice but not that. It is academic research, but not that.⁷

This does not mean that the audio paper is not rigorous, critical, legitimate. But its criticality and legitimacy lie not in the protocol of academic language, on the surface line between A and B, that colonised and universalised territory, but on the body; that of the student and that of the sonic material recorded and composed, which generate the knowledge of the audio paper together. And it demands a listening presence in the slow unfolding of sounding. A stumbling vagueness, and slow formlessness which we hear, and through which we come to understand our participation in its knowledge, resisting scholarship’s claim to objectivity and its consequent universalising tendencies.

The sonic incidentally also brings a surprising directness to the research. A sudden moment that falls out of the conventional construction of meaning. It can make you jump. The directness of sound to get a point across is subversive as it sounds as participation: the being with the material, inside of nature, with all voices heard in a heterogeneous co-presence. This directness is lost in academic writing. It can’t be written. Scholarly words are too fast and slick to sound their own alert.

But why pursue this format now? How does it reflect this time?

W.H. Auden said that light verse was a form of poetry that is usually popular in a time of reasonable peace, where the dominating language, the language of the master is accepted, its hegemony naturalised⁸. At more disenchanted times new languages are sought. In this same way the audio paper can be understood as a response to these times of disenchantment, of violence and war. It can be understood as opening a space of resistance in the same space as that of the dissertation, the conventional, academic knowledge path. A resistance to clarity that is clear only by excluding other ways to think and know, and whose exclusion reflect and enable the violence of war and death as the only resonance possible.

Therefore, the audio paper can be understood as a response to these times of disenchantment and crises – ecological, political and social – opening a space of resistance in the (class-)room of conventional scholarship and allowing for new spaces of knowledge to be explored and felt. Across borders, with all bodies present, generating a knowledge environment that is relational, plural, inclusive and felt, rather than fitting into a hegemonic scheme. Generating the spaces of the tacit, of digging, of slow motion and stumbles, that stutter and break with the drive towards universalism and foreground other spaces, that of a co-present gathering and solidarity of being with. In this way the audio paper format offers the potential at least to override clarity with a spatial depth of vagueness, read as plurality, considered as a more fertile ground for the knowledge of a present time. 

Since I must save the day of tomorrow, since I must have a form because I don’t feel strong enough to stay disorganised, (…) since I’ll inevitably succumb to the need for form that comes from my terror of remaining undelimited – then may I at least have the courage to let this shape form by itself like a scab that hardens by itself, like the fiery nebula that cools into earth. And may I have the great courage to resist the temptation to invent a form.⁹

 

Bibliography

Aikenhead, Glenn, “Border Crossing into the Subculture of Science,” Studies in Science Education, 1996, Vol. 27: 1-52

Auden, W.H., Introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse, Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1938

Ellis, JJJJJerome interview with Wren Sanders, them, September 27, 2004. https://www.them.us/story/jjjjjerome-ellis-stutter-music-of-liberation-one-of-them-interview, (accessed 04.10.2024)

Lispector, Clarice, The Hour of the Star, London, UK: Penguin Modern Classics, 2014

Lispector, Clarice, The Passion according to G. H., London, UK: Penguin Classics, 1964

Massey, Doreen, for Space, London, UK: Sage Publications 2005

Miller, Kei, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2017

Price, Seth interview with Gwen Allen, Art Journal Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 79-90

1. Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, London, UK: Penguin Modern Classics, 2014, p. 26. ↩

2. C. Lispector, according to G. H., London, Penguin Classics, 1964, p. 8-10. ↩

3. JJJJJerome Ellis in an interview with Wren Sanders “That’s how I think of stuttering: You can interrupt me, you can roll your eyes, you can make fun of me, or you can gather inside. You can go into that moment, and you can practice being in-time with me.” ↩

4. Doreen Massey, for Space, London: Sage Publications, 2005, p. 1. ↩

5. Kei Miller, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2017, p.28. ↩

6. Glenn Aikenhead, ‘Border Crossing into the Subculture of Science’, Studies in Science Education, 1996, Vol. 27: 1-52., p.2. ↩

7. The idea that something might be a sonic practice, or academic research but not that is adapted from Seth Price, who, when talking of his theoretical writing, explained that he “wouldn’t consider it scholarly work. It’s more in the general area of poetry, although it’s not that”. From an interview with Seth Price by Gwen Allen, Art Journal, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring, 2007), pp. 79-90. ↩

8. W.H. Auden. Introduction to The Oxford Book of Light Verse, Oxford UK: Clarendon Press, 1938, pp. x-xi. ↩

9. C. Lispector, The Passion…., op. cit., p. 9. ↩