Paying Attention to (Theatre) Noise

Abstract

We tend to assume that we pay attention to sound(s) whilst doing our best to ignore noise. Yet, this familiar distinction between listening as a straightforward attentive ‘act’ and hearing as the passive sensation of sound necessarily shrouds the phenomenal nuances of aural attention as process. For example, as I write I hear the heard-yet-unseen sound of children playing next door. Whilst I am aware of the level of sound that these children are producing, I do not, or rather try not to, attend to this sound as such. I try to force myself to attend only to the task of writing. Yet, although my intention is to block out the sound altogether (to listen, if you will, to the sound of nothing), such an act of complete disattention proves to be a near-impossibility when the sound field is so ubiquitously shot through with the sounds of children at play. In fact, when I reflect further, what I am actually trying to do, considering how difficult I am finding it ‘to hear myself think’, is to listen out intently for my thoughts as they momentarily and haphazardly pop into view within this sonic barrage. Whilst I experience this sound as ‘noise’, in the typical sense of a loud, disturbing sound, I nevertheless attend to this sound event as it clamours for my attention. The phenomenon of ‘noise’ thus provides an effective, if surprising, means of investigating the embodied dynamics of (aural) attention.