David Prior (Falmouth University)
While the notion of an ambient literature is not dependent on digital technology, mobile technology has been a significant driver in provoking news ways of thinking about the relationship between narrative and place. In this presentation, I want to look at the forces that have acted upon the development of mobile digital technology and the assumptions brought forth from our histories of listening, watching and reading that have informed the way in which these devices are designed and used. In particular, I will focus on the way in which listening has transitioned from its dominant modes associated with the concert hall, the hi-fi or the radio broadcast into the way in which headphones are commonly used today. I will argue that the history of sound reproduction has predominantly aspired towards isolation and a mode of listening independent from the context in which it is heard. However, sound is inherently a medium of porosity: a prototypical augmented reality which naturally lends itself to the layering of multiple narratives. In this presentation, I will use sound reproduction as a case study for a set of technologies that have often operated against the natural affordances of the medium they carry and I will ask how ambient literature might consider them differently in the exploration of a new poetics.
David Prior is an artist and musician. With Architect Frances Crow, he is a partner in liminal, a practice that explores the relationship between sound, listening and space. Their work encompasses site-specific interventions and sound walks, gallery installations, performances, research and film. In 2010 they won the PRS Foundation New Music Award with their piece, Organ of Corti.
David’s music and films have been performed, screened and broadcast around Europe and North America and has won a number of international competitions including Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition, Cornelius Cardew Prize, E.A.R (Hungarian Radio), and the George Butterworth prize. As a sound designer he has made permanent, multi-ward winning installations for The Imperial War Museum, The New York Historical Society, The Thomas Jefferson Museum and the Guinness Storehouse, amongst others.
David holds a PhD in music from the University of Birmingham and has taught widely across the UK, North America and Europe and he is Associate Professor in Music and Sound Art at Falmouth University where he leads the Sonva research group. David is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art for Oxford University Press with Jane Grant and John Matthias.