Daniel Alexander Hignell‘s AHRC funded PhD in Music at Sussex aims to discover what relationships lie between the sound object and the sound receiver, and what effect, if any, the playing out of these relationships has on wider society. Examining the role of listening as a phenomenological path to understanding, he investigates the relationship between ‘sounding’ and ‘being’, with a view to discovering what the sound environment can tell us about the individual, the other, and the common ground they inhabit. Understanding that art can ‘build a bridge between perception and communication’ (Luhmann), and that sound, via its universality, ‘compels us to locate common ground in the most basic of our biological needs’ (Kiezer), he seeks to propose compositional solutions to sonic problems, local and global, imputable to the contemporary social system.

FOUND IN TRANSLATION symposium