What is HARK

HARK is a research project linked to the Social Anthropology department of the University of St Andrews. Huw Lloyd-Richards is the principal researcher.

The project explores some areas of sensory anthropology and began by focussing on Listening, particularly to sound and music. HARK organised a series of participative events concerning listening, set up Listening Groups and developed a number of projects from that base. You can find these described in Past and Current Projects on the website pages here. The project has developed to include exploration of sounds and music with images and words and how in sensory terms these modes inflect each other in our perceptions and cognitions.

I developed this second phase of the project by making videos and layering sound to go with them. These videos are intended to offer an exploratory, sensory experience of the natural world by looking and listening. HARK, like everyone else was constrained by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown but we were able to work on the videos with a number of musicians who composed, played and recorded their responses to the videos. The videos are of four kinds: Ikons which are short instagrams; Haiku which are longer videos usually about 4 minutes; Etudes which are thematic studies up to 20 minutes; and Opus, which are long narrative pieces.

HARK explores embodied knowledge practices. There is an extensive literature on sensory work, knowledge practices and sound studies in anthropology and I note these sources on the Source page. I have also engaged in some theorising from our project work and have documented the project in detail, and these texts, and Working Notes are on the website. We are working towards a Performance of our work in 2023 and the making of a documentary film.

The project has always been highly collaborative and participatory. There is a HARK Collective, a group of musician and dancers who have worked on the various projects and also produced a sound album. We also welcome and encourage participation in our events and try to create sound environments in which participants can play, improvise and find their ‘voice’. To know more about HARK pleas read the more detailed description below.

Please browse the website and we hope you find some material of interest.

HARK Praxis

The HARK Listening Research project is linked to the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies in the Dept. of Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews where I am an Hon. Research Fellow.

This longer note fills in some background to the project. It concerns praxis — what we enact and how embodied knowledge works. So this is not an academic piece of writing and tries to describe our explorations of embodied knowledge and the sensory world, linking sensation and experience with sense-making and value. So this text does not have references to the vast literature on these subjects, for these and bibliographies, please go to the HARK papers, and others, collected on the Sources page below.

HARK is a sensory anthropology project concerned with our engagement with sound/music and vision, in nature, the built environment and the images and sounds we construct ourselves. My role is as the initiator of small explorations, a designer and animateur of events, and attempting to document our activities. I work in co-production with a range of creative musicians, dancers, digital/acoustic sound composers, and film-makers. Key organising practice concepts are: play, attending, beholding, dwelling, wayfaring, and these practices are theorised — see the papers in Sources on this website.

The roots of the project are in my doctoral anthropology work on ‘silence’ and meditative practices. In that work I was interested in what images and words reportedly arise in persons participating in a group process of meditation/contemplation in a religious context — Quaker Meetings. This ethnographic evocation of silent practices can be found in my thesis “The Place that Words Come from…” on the Sources page.

Via an essay I wrote called ‘John Cage Amongst the Quakers’ I broadened out my exploratory research to encompass listening practices in a number of domains, in particular in the concert hall, the natural world, the built acoustic environment, and then to art-works made by HARK. I also began to explore the relationships between listening and seeing – sounds/music and images. I speculated that the meditation/contemplation in and through silence that I studied in a religious context might be rediscovered as a creative practice in listening to music.

I am interested therefore in the meditative/contemplative practices of how we play: attend, behold and dwell, and also in what arises in that space — how transfigurations take place, and how we can find media to express ourselves, and offer conditions for the sharing of experience in the creation of new insights and awareness. This leads to explorations of intrinsic value in nature and notions of gift.

These knowledge practices entail the suspension of our pre-existing frameworks of meaning and interpretation and also their reflective reappraisal. I believe this approach has considerable merit in the re-animation of some spiritual/religious practices. Suspension as a heuristic practice does return to categories, and affirmations in some media or other, often words, and these affirmations and their underlying assumptions can be transformed themselves in a reflexive mode.

To inform the project I wrote a multi-disciplinary literature review called ‘Ways of Listening’. This is a source document for reference and covers a wide range of literature in various disciplines. It includes a schema of ‘Auditory Play Modes’ which is an attempt to map ‘regimes of listening’ and the modal ways in which we listen.

I began, in terms of ‘reception theory’, to wonder why audiences are ‘mute’, and wondered what they would say if offered an opportunity to express their responses to music. I theorized that both their reluctance to speak and their subsequent discourse might be heavily influenced and creatively constrained by a listening regime characterized by the musicological framework of structural listening, exemplified by Program Notes. I was also curious about the way metaphor and symbolism might be developed and even shared by listeners in articulating their responses — a constellating feature I later called ‘metaphor clusters’.

So I invited 60 people to join 8 Listening Groups and recorded and analysed their responses to a listening curriculum chosen both by me and the groups members. The curriculum can be followed in the Past Projects page of this website. Next I explored whether an art-work that might emerge dialogically from the groups ‘playing’ with the texts of their responses. I collated their responses and through this process an art-work in words emerged. I then wrote this into a ‘libretto’ for the piece of music the groups had listened and responded to. This was performed, with a 12 string orchestra, as an Ethnography of Listening.

I next explored how we might create an space for this kind of sensory engagement and began to make a variety of video pieces. I became interested in both ‘framing’ and in the ‘duree’ of attention that could be paid to a ‘one shot’ video piece. I found that even with short miniatures (instagrams) that attention to the natural world in a frame (metaphorically without blinking) often produced, for me, a subtle change in the gestalt (figure-ground) of what I was experiencing. I also noticed that in some these changes were prompted by slight movements in the visual activity, and linked with my attention and moving gaze that these were moments of ‘transfiguration’ in which the mood and atmosphere changed. I was struck by how we move around what we call the hermeneutic circle’ too rapidly. I also noticed that we infer purpose, authorial intent by running quickly to meanings and interpretations in what we see and hear. We seem to find it difficult to reside and dwell in sensory modes in which value, delight (or otherwise) and significance can be sustained (almost pre-verbally). These experiential spaces give rise to feelings of value that seem to be discovered and are intrinsic in the ‘exterior’ world and are also palpably real to us as ‘subjective’ perceptions. Subject and object are a crude and confusing binary. Attention, beholding and dwelling are therefore an entanglement of discovery (the way things seem to be) and creation (our projections and imaginations) and these oscillate in dominance both as epistemologies, and as sensory modes. This consonant with the work of Iain McGilchrist and has relevance to many spheres of activity — my essay on Integrative Knowledge Practices in Health and Social Care is an example of this application.

I began to make four kinds of videos to explore these modalities: Ikons (short Instagrams); Haiku, 4-5 minute pieces; Etudes, longer subject focussed pieces and I had already begun work on the Opus: Hiraeth, which is 1 hour 15 minutes long, has 4 Atmospheres and explores image and sound as mood and atmosphere with a narrative drive concerning exile, migration, sacrifice and salvage.

The next stage was prompted by the COVID-19 ‘lockdown’. I sent a variety of video pieces to the musicians linked to HARK and invited them to compose, play, and record their response, and also to be willing to both improvise with their compositions in the Silo acoustic (see Silo Sessions under Past Projects below), layer it with other sounds, and lead the whole group in a semi-improvised version of it. This latter activity is theorised, following the example of the Ethnography of Listening, as ‘ekphrastic’ practice which is the way in which one art-work gives rise to another. This not by appropriation or derivation but a response that creates a new art-work. So the HARK project entails us in playing with and exploring the art-works we make. Our added components in this process is the encouragement towards improvisation in our responses and the invitation for anyone to come and play with the HARK Collective in our extraordinary acoustic in the Silo.

This sensory anthropology work in HARK is culture bound and ‘western’. It does not attempt to make cross cultural comparisons or to enter the field of ethnomusicology and the grammars of different kinds of music. I have interests in Chinese, Indian and Thai music but they do not feature in this project. Our capacity limits us in this regard. The project is not limited to western classical music genres, although much western musicology is written from that starting point and I draw critically on many of these texts in ‘Ways of Listening’.

A key point of reference for HARK is the field of ‘sound studies’. This field comprises practical site-specific creative installations, field-theoretical work in different environments, sound installations, sounds in nature through to digital sound layering and composition. Our explorations belong in this context, where we create video, sound files, improvise in challenging acoustic environments, and invite co-production with other performers. I work in a number of ways with the sous for videos: in a naturalistic approach using only sounds that occur in nature or by human activity, simply recorded; to musical sound composed/improvised; and to digital composition where layered sound files of all kinds are combined. The Opus is the site of this latter approach.

A significant part of sound-work in anthropology makes connections not just between sounds and cultural practices but also with creative expressions of political emancipative and liberation movements. There are also sound heritage projects preserving cultural artefacts. While appreciating these trajectories and also some of the preservation aspects of retaining the sounds of cultures that might be lost, HARK has not yet pursued this approach.

So it important to appreciate the boundaries of the HARK work (and what to some may seem like limitations). In short, we are exploring the local aspects of sensory listening and looking at ‘knowledge practices’ both in terms of how ‘audiences’ respond and how performers, create, improvise, play and collaborate. In the first kind of exploration I developed a documentary, ethnographic approach that I call ‘Music Poetics’ — thick descriptions of the experience of listening and looking. This was used in the ekphrastic practice in the Ethnography of Listening Project. In a second phase I created videos of various lengths and work on improvising sound with them, with a variety of musicians. Finally the process results in the invitation to participate in these sonic spaces we create and ‘find a voice’. Listening becomes performative play thereby.

The HARK project tries to situate itself as it were ‘up river’ from outcome questions about utility and avoid simplistic answers to the question “what is HARK for?” We seek to explore the gratuitous aspect of auditory and sensory play. It would be disingenuous to suggest that I have no purposes in doing the work, or that the project is not open to interpretation, so when I speak of ‘suspending’ certain presuppositions this is a heuristic process. We recognize that there is no listening ‘tabula rasa’, pure perception, free of cognition, assumptions, conditioning and interpretation. However we also consider that it is possible by deploying certain meditative disciplines to create a space for ‘listenings’. I explore these paradoxical possibilities in an essay ‘On First Listenings’. exploring the paradox that things can both not be unheard yet space and time can emerge for new features of sound to become figural.

Is seems that both listening and creativity need space, stimulation, constraints and a permissive environment — a ‘tight-loose’ balance that heightens awareness but does not cramp it with anxiety. It seems also that suspending aesthetic judgement for a while is helpful and suspension of ‘likes-dislikes’ can be liberating — this opens up a space that is responsive and appreciative rather than critically (or technically) reactive in making appraisals or judgements.

I therefore work with a range of creative musicians, dancers, digital/acoustic sound composers, film-makers in creating works for listening/viewing which can be used to develop responsive and improvisatory play. The key, suspended, sense required to grasp the project is a sense of a focus on the sensory, the significant, the embodied prior to the ascriptions of interpretations and meanings. In a sense we are exploring sensory spaces prior to ‘mindfullness’ (a focal awareness) by opening up sonic spaces in a ‘mindless’ way! Imagine slowing unpicking and unravelling a knotted ball of string into a wide net……….and humming as you do………

There is also another suspension being offered by this ludic practice: to resist the reductive ‘explaining away’ of experience by adherence to a hierarchy of knowing and knowledge which has reductive materialist quantitative explanatory framework at it apex and places qualitative, soft, subjective at the bottom. Resisting these reductive explanations (which also feed ‘dead’ disembodied knowing) is to give experience its place space and embodied life. In formal terms our method, phenomenology (how we describe what we experience) is bound up with an epistemic schema (the ways that we claim to have knowledge) and leads to ontological questions (what is there to know, what are things as they are). This all depends upon the creation of an attention, a dwelling, a beholding which constitutes and is constituted by a play space which generates creativity and expression. We are exploring by looking and listening in two interdependent modes: ‘reading off’ a deductive process of sense making by applying pre-existing frames of reference, in ‘discovery’ mode, and ‘reading on’ an inductive process of allowing what ‘is’ to ‘disclose’ itself through our imaginations. We shift, oscillate between these modes, and favour one over the other from time to time, the play is to notice when and how we do these things and what it means for a reflexive awareness of our assumptions and the relate of new ways of losing and listening. In Lacanian terms we are exploring the inflections and relations between the registers of ‘the Real. the Symbolic and the Imaginary’. We situate ourselves in a middle ground of symbolic/critical realism and chart the pull of the perspectives of naive realism and non-realism.

It is not that cognitive and interpretive features are not important for articulating experience, we cannot live without categories, and theorising is itself another form of play. Schemata without experience are empty: experiences without schemata are blind. We may find that our work can have some ‘practice relevance’ and be used therapeutically as well as playfully. For now we try to space out the sensory aspects to explore the hermeneutic possibilities whilst making space for creativity. We also suggest that imaginative engagement with the natural world, and the world we have made (and the art-works we make in HARK), as an aesthetic experience, directly contributes to our ethical engagement of stewardship of that world. Engaging with the videos and their sound can also be calming.

We believe that an art-works such as the events and pieces we have created can complement and deepen learning about our being-in-the-world and the future of our natural environment. The exploration can be described in rather grand terms: we discover more about ourselves and our human-ness by trying to see things ‘as they are’, and notice how discovery and invention are inextricably entangled, and it is this entanglement when expressed, that is the source of the art-works. We discovered in the Sounding Stones project that ‘things as they are’ has little to do with solid objects, much to do with processes, and everything to do with our appropriation and stewardship of them. In this case the entry point was the sounds of the stones themselves a revelation of their existence in space and time.

So these art-works invite a perceptual gaze, listening, (in)attention and reverie which precedes a cognitive interpretation of images and sounds. We activate our senses in the rich process of sense-making as we move from perception (noticing along the way, reflexively, how we apply our frames of interpretation) to create meaning. Our ethical action is rooted thereby in the body, it’s senses and a sense of belonging – this world is my world, and our world is our home. This aesthetic process of engaging fully with an art-work of this kind exemplifies this mode of knowing, deepening our being-in–the world by simply ‘beholding’, and thereby sustaining our energies as we seek to create better futures. We can appreciate the world, and face the challenges we have created in what we have made with it in this way. This taps the source of our groundedness in nature and engenders an empowering narrative. Dwelling, beholding, attending, wayfaring, reverie, are all concepts that will crop up regularly in the HARK discourse.

What we are exploring is the way people connect their sensory and thereby aesthetic experience (pleasure, curiosity, beauty) through experiences of patterns, light, shape, surface, folds, movement, forms with conceptual experiences like co-presence, absence, immersion, entanglement, interdependence. We are exploring this cusp of transfigurative experience from the sensory to the conceptual in an iterative process. These are related through and immersed in sound/silence by articulating and by then sharing interpretive schema.

There are interesting questions to be explored in the HARK work —what is ‘wonder’? How do we create value and significance, cognitively from perceptions? Is value intrinsic to nature? Can we get a grounded sense of this in the space that falls short of being dominated by the signification of meanings? We are making space for the significance of intrinsic value and searching for the ways this experience is articulated into meanings, concepts and categories. HARK tries to create a liminal zone of tacit bodily ‘knowledge’, which even when expressed in words is highly metaphoric and symbolic. These metaphors as clusters of shared responses we have also charted in relation to sound/music. In the project on ‘Music and the Sacred’ I hint at the ways in which these practices might connect with the discourse on ‘theopoesis’ and ‘spirituality’. In the Soundings Project on the stones of Scotland and their sounds we stretch our imaginations to confront the ontological questions associated with a fundamental materialist view of reality.

These are all rather abstract conceptual ways of thinking about these sensory qualities. To try to open up a more experiential take I will have to share some biographical details. I grew up in an environment, in South Wales where my parents and grandparents spoke Welsh but we as children were discouraged from doing so. This meant that I spent quite a lot of time listening to what I thought were important adult conversations and sermons in church by my father by sensing the general tone of what was being said in the sounds of the words and the atmosphere that was created, When I became a chorister in the Cathedral I sang in a number of languages, Latin, Greek, German, Welsh and English. My way of doing this was by the sounds of words not by their specific meanings, I learned to read music by relating the patterns of sound to the patterns on the page.

Welcome to HARK, contact us if you wish.

The HARK Collective is a group of artists who come together from time to time to improvise and play, edit sound and vision, record sounds, and shiver in the Silo space, many of them also have been part of the composing/recording project in lockdown. As the principal researcher in the project and with my background in events design and learning, I have taken usually the role of part creator, (of videos and sound files) events producer and part animator in bringing these artist together or commissioning work. The Collective gathers folk as we go and we are constantly finding interesting people to work with. The talented crew who have worked so far on the HARK project are as follows:

Robin Mason, cello; Richard Ingham Saxophone and production-Largo Music; Markus Lauterberg, percussion, Alex Waber, percussion, Melissa Jones alto voice; Patrick Cairns tenor voice; Claire Garabedian, cello; Bede Williams, trumpet; Ali Begbie sound recording; Nick Virgo sound composing and editing; John EikCaffery, video editing and website design; Aasta EikCaffery video editing (EikCaffery Creative); Elie Osipovitch, Viola de Gamba and guitar; Gabrielle Weisbuch, dance; Roberto Versluys, guitar and transcriptions; Richard Bates, Environmental Science, Drone footage (Music Planet).

We are hoping to connect with two other artists, Leila Bordreuil, cello, and Claudia Lubao, singer at the next Silo event.

We also thank the University of St Andrews Music Centre at the Laidlaw and the Director, Michael Downes and Head of Programming, Chris Bragg for their continued support.