Preface

Tonotopia is a collection of short creative writings that have emerged over the course of the Languages of Listening research. As part of the writing-as-research process I use the strategy of free writing triggered by a particular theoretical or conceptual issue. I allow this writing to wander where it wants, posing more questions than answers, including contradictions and irrelevancies, until eventually I get to a point where the thoughts cohere with a compression of language that aligns it with poetry. I take these fragments and shape them further into these discrete poetic writings.

The title, Tonotopia, plays on the term tonotopy, which describes the mapping of sound frequencies to specific areas of the cochlea and auditory cortext. Frequencies that are close to each other, are similarly spatially related in the cochlea, with higher sounds received on the outer parts of the spiral and lower sounds on its inner sections. I like the correlation of sound to space that occurs in hearing, and use the term tonotopia to slip sideways into a possibly fanciful world (a utopia) in which sounds and words share a close interdependency.

These are sensorially silent writings. I have chosen not to include sound here, as I am interested in the potential for the words in themselves to conjure imaginings of sounding and listening. Some pieces are pure descriptions of listening experiences, while others move towards meta-writing in which I am contemplating what it is to write of sound listening. There are also a few pieces that reflect my struggle with the nature of theorising and knowledge industries. I am always anxious that these writings, which are based in my own subjective experience, don’t descend into earnest indulgence. I hope that by infusing this writing with my theoretical explorations—often finding a deeper understanding through this process—that I maintain a level of reflexivity that ensures the writing is robust, rigorous, sometimes even playful and humorous.