Islas Resonantes. La escucha como acontecimiento pedagógico desde el sonido en las artes

On October 8, 1988, Pauline Oliveros entered a vacant cistern with three other musicians with the intention of recording a sound improvisation. This cistern, unused since World War II, could hold eight million liters of water and generate 45 seconds of reverberation. The event would become the premise for what Pauline would later call “Deep Listening”, a central concept in a line of research expanded toward pedagogies and artistic practices that propose a new way of knowing through listening.

The Laboratory for the Research of Sonorities and Listening (LiSE) of the Faculty of Arts at UNAM was founded in 2017 as a space to foster dialogues between the dynamics of artistic research-production and sound studies. As its name suggests, the lab’s work is structured around two conceptual pillars: listening and sound. Listening, as a sensitive experience of the world, allows one to grasp reality from the dimension of the audible. Sound, in addition to being a phenomenon, is also a device, a cross-disciplinary and transdisciplinary tool that—when encountered with artistic thinking and other knowledge systems—enables the generation of knowledge experiences.

The pedagogical approach proposed by LiSE is a/r/tography, an artistic methodology based on action research that introduces the figure of the Artist (A), as Researcher (R), who in turn also acts as a Teacher (T). This strategy is posed as a way to explore the world through artistic practice centered on processes, methodologies, and explorations that take place inside and outside the educational space. At LiSE, the intersection of art and sound is explored as a way of thinking with the ears.

Although this text does not aim to be an exhaustive review of the genealogy of sound art, it seeks to present the background of an artistic practice, its frame of reference, and its potential as a pedagogical methodology. Above all, it proposes the idea of arts pedagogy through sound as a collective artwork.

Keywords:
listening; sound; artistic research; a/r/tography