Learning to listen beyond music

Four years ago, an enforced rest on a Scottish island changed the way I heard the world around me.

It sounds contradictory to say, but after seven years as the editor of a music magazine, I think I’d forgotten how to listen. As much as I tried to emphasise the value of in-depth engagement in the work I commissioned, navigating an online publishing industry preoccupied with making noise rather than fostering attention had taken its toll on my capacity to build my own relationships with sound and music. When I left the magazine in February 2020, I was looking for a reset, but had no real idea what form that would take.

The passage below recounts my first steps towards a different kind of listening, and which I’ve continued to follow in the four years since.

---

I came to the Isle of Muck in the Inner Hebrides for the first time in 2019. An emergency holiday of sorts, planned a few days in advance with the intention of getting as far away from London as possible. I camped for three nights down by a small beach half way along the island’s only road, each day swearing it would be the last. It was mid-August and the wind drove across the flat landscape like an express train, pulling sheets of rain in its wake. I boiled water under an umbrella with a box of borrowed matches and walked forty minutes in each direction to use the bathroom. On the final day, as I was packing up the tent, an eagle passed overhead, hovered for a moment to look me in the eye and continued on its way.

Six months later I was back again, hurrying a wheelbarrow of supplies up a steep, muddy path to the cottage at the far end of the island. This time was no accident. I had handed in my notice as editor of an online music magazine and had come to Muck to leave the internet behind. The plan had been to spend eight weeks. When the pandemic was declared three weeks later, this quickly changed. There was no end date, just a small amount of space and an awful lot of time on an island with no postbox.

As a way to structure the day, I dreamed up small projects using the hand-held sound recorder I had been given as promo by an audio company but never previously used. Record in the same place, at roughly the same time every day, for five minutes. Sometimes I got soaked and could hear nothing but the hammering of raindrops on my yellow mackintosh. At others, the wind all but obliterated any signal, like ink spilled across a picture. When it was still however, parts of the island’s geography came into focus - birds from the garden, waves from the bay beneath, the distant hums and whirrs of the farm at work. The sound of sparrows’ wings as they fluttered beneath the eaves of the cottage.

Through the methodical process of daily recording, a slow transformation of the environment emerged - or perhaps more accurately - a slow transformation in my ability to perceive it. Very few musicians have been able to rearrange my experience of the world. One was Arthur Russell, who played the cello unlike anyone I’d heard before. It had been at least ten years since then, but I felt like it was happening again.

Over the course of the following months, I began to discern timbres and textures I’d not previously been aware of. The way birdsong responded to the weather, how the wind in the grass evoked a sense of distance, how formations of rock and sand changed the break of a wave. With the help of an app called BirdNET, I learned to recognise sandpipers and eider ducks, skylarks and snipe, and noticed how the acts of hearing and naming were intimately connected. I also imagined in my soundscape a subtle change in the emphasis of the seasons, that the proportions of rain, wind and sun were shifting as spring progressed. It may have been a fantasy. As I would later be told by a leading bioacoustician, humans are not particularly adept at perceiving patterns in sound.

If somewhat indistinct, I did though sense that life was becoming cyclical again, no longer tethered to that linear surge of online junk time. I heard the dawn chorus not as a single moment but as a repeating ritual, drawing a small circle inside the bigger circles of spring tides and seasonal migrations. I don’t think I would have noticed the arrival of the arctic terns had I not been surprised one day when their unfamiliar, shard-like squawking interrupted a recording I was making of a lapwing in the long grass. I learned that an owl, hunting in the mid-summer dusk, sounds nothing like I had been led to believe.

Pointing my recorder towards a small stream, I heard it refract into a thousand entwined polyrhythms, all of which were coalescing to form the sound I’d previously understood to be that of rushing water. Although I did not read it until the following year, Nan Shepherd describes something similar in The Living Mountain. “One hears it without listening as one breathes without thinking,” she writes. “But to a listening ear the sound disintegrates into many different notes.” It occurred to me that sound, in one sense so intangible, was in fact deeply concerned with the materiality of things. That it was through sound alone that we understood the world to be a solid place, of surfaces, textures and grains. How frictionless a world without sound would be. How light and how plastic. 

That which I would have previously registered as single, discrete entities such as “bird”, “wave”, “rain” became implicated in a choreography of matter and vibration. There were no outcomes, no finished forms, just physical processes, constantly repeating, never the same. This attentive, augmented listening - because in a sense a recorder is like a magnifying glass - was peeling away the static surface of the world as I had previously known it, to reveal the movement beneath.