Sound tenses: an investigation into auditory permanencies

This thesis proposes notions of auditory permanencies by examining auditor relationships with the sonic. I ascribe the meaning of permanence to relate to relative timescale as opposed to paradoxical notions of foreverness. Assisted by the development of a new conceptual framework called ‘Sound Tenses,’ this thesis positions sound forms including anticipated, imagined, remembered, and forgotten in a validity equal to that of their soundwave counterpart. With the aim of challenging traditional constructs of sounds as brief and ephemeral, the sound tenses framework functions as a device on which to place interpretations of expanded sonic existences. To excavate notions of auditory permanencies, this ethnographic investigation employs a qualitative research interview methodology with a cross-section of 28 people who occupy a diverse range of sonic settings. I examine participants’ auditory specialisms and associated sonic idiosyncrasies alongside the 'everydayness’ of their wider sonic backdrops before conducting six case studies that focus on seven of those participants. Carried out over the course of two years, these case studies transport gathered sonic material back to their origins through a series of fieldtrips, that generate a new methodological technique I call ‘Direct Proxy Observation.’ For the researcher, DPO autoethnographically harvests an uninterrupted sonic view of the space in the absence of the participant, bypassing spatial adjacency and facilitating spatial immersivity. The research material gathered by this thesis unearths evidence of sound as a prismatically persistent, reliable, and even controlling property of potentiality, findings that counter and even undermine the idea that sound is exclusively brief and ephemeral. Participants elucidated their sonic backdrops as permanent fixtures analogous to permanencies traditionally reserved for objects in the visual realm. These implications challenge the visual dominance of the sensate to generate an equality of the senses as a non-hierarchical cooperative.