What is your earliest sound memory?
As a young kid, growing up on a farm, I was very, very aware of placement of sound. For safety reasons, if you're beside a great big combine harvester or a tractor, or some other vehicle, you have to be aware of where you are in relation to that object. Likewise, with livestock you're very much listening to the sound of a calf, a sheep, or a lamb, and trying to detect if they're okay or not okay. It's actually a really musical environment, but you're letting nature take its course. I think that my patience with sound has grown as I've gotten older. To let each sound – once I've triggered it – have its own life, or season, as it were. I definitely do reflect much more now on that upbringing and the pace, as well as the huge variety found in the sound world growing up in the countryside near the ocean.
You mentioned danger on the farm and how sound can provide warnings. I think a lot about the risk and vulnerability of people walking around cities while using earbuds, and not being well aware of their surroundings.
We find that in a lot of cases hearing damage is not so much from the volume as such as it is due to the cumulative amount of sound. Due to technology, there increasingly seems to be no escape from sound. But before we ask technology to help us with these challenges, I think the human body and the mind need to see how far we can go in order to take control of the situation, and then bring technology forward. Otherwise, we will always be hostage to technology helping us; and if it doesn't work, we'll think it's unsolvable due to bad technology. There's a lot that we can do ourselves. In my own situation, I'm deaf, and you would think, "Oh well, she should cope with sound pretty easily." But it's quite extraordinary, because, in a way, I need to escape from sound more.
You have that beautiful quote, "Silence is one of the loudest sounds. The opposite of sound isn't silence."
Everything needs to be in proportion. If I'm practicing, I practice for no more than 20 minutes at a time. I leave that sound environment, and then I'll go back to it and so on. We're never going to escape sound altogether, but it's very important to think of sound as something you are feeding inside of yourself, because that is what you're doing. We have to define listening and hearing. There's the hearing aspect, where we're aware of frequencies coming through, or the impact of some, but the listening aspect is to listen to that resonance and follow the journey of a sound. Otherwise, we might be receiving a lot of vibration, physically, without being aware of it. And actually, that could be affecting our well-being. What we're trying to do here in the UK is bring audiology students together with musicians, because what's traditionally been happening is that audiologists will test hearing in a controlled environment. They've discovered that hearing can be tested, and it can be displayed precisely on a graph. Nonetheless, the reality of that person moving out of the audiology room, out of the building, and then onto a busy street is a completely different sensation. To go from what was tested, hearing-wise, to what the reality is, listening-wise, as well as being able to function in everyday life, are two completely different things. But they cannot test every single frequency, or combinations of frequencies, or resonances. It's impossible to do that. It would take many, many, many, many lifetimes; and even then, we wouldn't get to the end. [laughter]
The heightening of awareness about the intersectionality of sound and context seems to possess great value. It seems almost as if they were to conduct hearing tests in the middle of a hectic cafe or bustling market, it might be more beneficial or accurate?
Yes, that's interesting because they are now bringing hearing tests to the orchestras – mobile situations where they bring the hearing tests to venues.
You've powerfully explained how blindness, deafness, and mobility impairments are not binary, but on a spectrum. It's not that a deaf person doesn't hear, it's that they hear differently. You have said, "Losing my hearing has made me a better listener." Maybe due to deafness, you are more sensitive to sound, and sounds might affect you more than many other individuals?
Partly, because I'm potentially more conscious of whatever sounds I do receive. And partly because when you've got a hearing impairment, there are a lot of impure sounds and lots of things that are kind of clashing together. When I play glockenspiels or vibraphones, the physical feeling is quite nice. However, the sound that's coming through the ear with those instruments is extremely painful at times. I've got this strange clash there. On piano I love playing the lower part, because it's something that I can sort of hear. It's a frequency that is nice for me – not that I'm hearing every pitch or anything like that – but it's a frequency that I can control, and at the same time it's a physical sensation that I enjoy. I very much enjoy low, low frequencies. I love bass drums and timpani. The higher the pitches, the more distorted they become, and I feel like I can't control that at all. With low sounds, the vibrations are much, much bigger and slower, and I have a chance for that to seep through my body and to also seep through my ear. But with the high frequencies, it's so distorted that it can be quite disorienting.
I gathered from some of your talks and books that you feel low frequencies in the lower body and the higher frequencies more in the upper body – the neck and head.
Yes, yes. That's true.
I tend to be pretty against using headphones when recording. There's no right or wrong way, but I've found that people often play together better when they are less isolated. What are your thoughts about people wearing headphones while recording?
I've been in both situations. If I'm working to a click track, I would be wearing headphones. There's a certain frequency that has to be set for my hearing situation. With the Touch the Sound documentary project, we didn't wear headphones. The whole remit for that was there was no plan B to any of it. It was literally exploring the sound as we came across it, at that moment. For [guitarist] Fred Frith and I to go into this derelict sugar factory, the filmmaker, Thomas Riedelsheimer, was very aware that this was a space that we could paint sound to. That was the idea. It was to have less technology and to let the space speak. That's why sometimes Fred played up on one level and I might be positioned on another floor of the building, to explore how this place spoke. There was no aim to be perfect, there was no aim to come out with a masterpiece of music; there was no aim to create anything, other than what we felt at that moment. The sound is there already, but then what does our presence do to that space? How do we react to that? With that documentary, it was all about patience and waiting for a sound to emerge. Sometimes we hear the sound first through seeing it. Like with the crack of ice. We may not hear anything, and we may not feel anything, but we see the ice cracking. And we know that there must be a whole orchestra under that sheet of ice. We can't say, "Oh well, nothing's happening because I don't hear anything," and then just pass by. Instead, it's saying, "Well, hold on a second." And then using all of our senses to become involved in how we relate to sound. Because hearing does involve all of our senses.
As a percussionist, what are your feelings regarding metronomes, click tracks, and drum machines?
