Human bodies are constantly involved in the cosmopolitics of everyday life. The senses are the gateways to the outside world, but not every person can perceive and regulate sensory stimuli in a way they would like to. For those who have difficulties with this, sound often presents itself in the form of noise or disturbance. I probed into my own aural experiences— specifically in exposure to noise—as a person diagnosed with ADHD. During this process, I had many moments of doubt and was confronted with my positionality. Writing this text has revealed to be, in itself, a process that has made me profoundly rethink how I listen, how sound is organized and how I need to defragment my soundscape.
When thinking about sensory awareness in my day-to-day life, the aural seems to be a conflictual field of interest. Being presently aware of my surroundings is something I struggle with. Listening is a ‘nomadic sense’ because sound is a fleeting phenomenon. If I am not tuning my senses to a sound that briefly presents itself, the sound will be lost to me. Sound can be on the one hand overwhelming and, on the other hand, often easily fading out of my conscious experience. I am eager to tackle my experiential difficulties to enable a more holistic experience through different senses, rather than unconscious ly blocking some connections I can have to my surroundings.
As a person with ADHD, much of the time, most of my thinking is reserved for either reflecting on past situations or preparing for future ones. When I actively try to engage with the here and now, I often have the experience of suddenly being submerged in sound; as if it reenters my focus just by being present in the moment. So I have come to link the two together; when I am consciously experiencing sound, I am grounded in the present.
I have a lot to learn when it comes to the practice of listening. It often reveals itself in a form that ‘disturbs’ or ‘overwhelms’ rather than ‘enriches’. Sounds such as loud wind, trams pas sing by, someone snoring irregularly or loudly stirring their tea, anchor me in the here and now and trigger me to run from the scene. I gather that my body—being a space of conflict when it comes to sound—is an excellent tool for exploring how sound and 'being in the present' are connected.
To illustrate, I share my experience when I visited a per formative reading in 2021 in puntWG, by artist Anasta sija Pandilovska. The performance referred to the changed landscape of the city center of Skopje, the hometown of the performer. A government-initiated project, named Skopje 2014 became a topic of controversy among the city's population. Pandilovska commented: “Despite the resistance, metal partitions take over the square, the river’s left bank, and spread into different areas of the cent re. Drilling sounds mark the start of the building process”. Façade_Override_Façade made use of two sound-making mediums. While playing sounds that Pandilovska recorded of the construction work around her apartment, she spoke to us about her experience of being submerged in that sound. The loud sounds of the recorded construction work made most of her words inaudible to me. I kept trying to move my head in ways that would make her voice override the sounds of the construction work. My focus was on the sound of her voice. I did not pay attention to the construction sounds and I was oblivious to what these sounds could mean to me. But I was quick to attach a label: sound became noise.
My body and brain are constituted by a culture that effectively breaks down reality into classifications that disable a more unified and holistic way of listening. Western health frame works indicate that my listening experiences are impaired by an overt focus on ‘background noises’, and a lack of capacity to focus on a task. Maybe my ADHD body feels impaired because my Western context taught me that holistic hearing is an inability to focus. During Façade_Override_Façade I was frustrated with my inability to hear what I thought I was sup posed to hear. I was failing to block out ‘noise’. If I would not have been so focused on what words were communicated, I might have had a very different experience, an event-specific moment of being presently immersed in sound, rather than a mere sense of missing out on content. Still being impervious and green in the practice of wholesome listening, it is apt to rethink my current listening, as I have tried to do. Rethinking this experience, I wonder whether my body is actually very well-equipped to engage with sound holistically and immersively.
Being more attentive to sound is something we can learn. Since my experience with Pandilovska’s performance, I have attempted to be more attuned to sound. As part of this search, I have been listening to several videos of Indian singing bowls on YouTube. Since my acquaintance with the singing bowls, I now hear wavelike vibrations in the wood on metal steps when I walk the stairs up to my flat in Amsterdam. The moment when I am on the staircase has become a moment when I am pleasantly grounded in the present. It seems that I am learning new ways to listen. But I have doubts. Is it apt for my body to learn from ways of listening outside of the West? Am I ostensibly pulling ancient Indian practices into my Western knowledge frame?
My Western context constructs a fragmented way of liste ning and my body is conditioned to listen accordingly. Ho wever, my ADHD body does not easily adapt to this way of listening, and my listening experiences have suffered accor dingly. I want to engage with more holistic forms of listening as a way to deepen my experience of my surroundings. These can be found outside the West (e.g. Indian singing bowls), but my body is still Western. Which leaves me with the question: In my attempt to remedy my sensory experience, and resist Western fragmentation, am I allowed to search for more ho listic experiences outside the West?
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