Festival Focus #2: In conversation with Aimée Theriot-Ramos

“Erotic listening entails a desire.”

Author: Chiara Pitrola

Ahead of the FIBER Festival taking place from 11 to 14 May, we speak to the Amsterdam-based artist and musician Aimée Theriot-Ramos about her research into modes of listening, in what ways machines listen to us humans and to each other, and about the concept of Erotic Listening. She will participate in both the symposium and the audiovisual concert night at Noordwaards (May 12).

Photo by: Victimo Studio

Thank you for joining the festival. Before we dive into the various modes of listening, could you briefly introduce your practice/research and how you situate yourself?

I like to think of myself first and foremost as a musician. I started playing instruments very early on and made the full commitment by going to music school to study composition. While at music school I discovered experimental practices, especially through the work of Pauline Oliveros, Cornelius Cardew, and Alvin Lucier, and I became enchanted by them. What drew me in I think was a sense of not exactly knowing what was going on in this music, like this was a different musical language, and I wanted in. These practices, especially Pauline Oliveros, put so much importance on the act of listening as a starting point, and as a performative act, and I felt very at home following in those footsteps. 

In hindsight, I realised I had been a very aural person since I was a kid, very drawn to the experience of the world through my ears, very aware and very sensitive to the sonic worlds that surrounded me. As a silly but meaningful example, when I was a child, I used to choose my shoes depending on the sounds that they made when I walked. 

There's something about the impermanence of sound—or to make it even less cochlear-centric we could say of vibration—that is just very interesting and inspiring to me.

I decided to take my curiosity one step further by coming to Amsterdam in 2018 and doing an MA course at Sandberg Institute where I could kickstart a more research-based practice. I wanted to situate the topic of listening in today's technologically mediated world. So that led me to the topic of machine listening, which is what I will be talking about during my lecture at FIBER. 

In what ways does our festival theme “Fragments” speak to you and how do you relate it to your work?

We could say that "fragmented" is the 21st century's way of experiencing the world (the urban, economic north, to be precise). Our attention is fragmented because of the endless stream of inputs. An individual needs to fragment themselves and become several individuals to be able to survive. We don't live in a world of hyper specialisation as it was before. We need to learn many different skills, be flexible, spread ourselves out, have different jobs, and multitask. At the same time, on a collective level, the internet has fragmented our experience of culture. Whereas before there used to be a rather straightforward dichotomy of the mainstream and counterculture, now there are so many subcultures and mainstreams, it's hard to keep up! I think this is for the best; there's an audience for basically all forms of expression, and micro-communities that support them. However, it comes with a burden. 

As the world gets more fragmented, the individual and the collective become more and more separated, like oil and water. The self starts to rule over the communal, and politically this is dangerous. This is something I think about all the time, and where I think it comes into my work is in the very simple act of playing music and holding a space for listening. The music I'm interested in making does not impose a single, focal experience, or at least that's not what I'm trying to do. I like to think of it as a canvas, a somewhat amorphous space, for listeners to bring in their own individual experiences, and somehow connect them all together. In that, I think there's an intention to find a sweet spot between the self and the communal, by threading the fragmented pieces together. I think sound/vibration has this magical power to do that. 

Photo by: Gergely Ofner

Recently, you’ve been doing research on how machines listen, can you talk more about that?

When I wrote my MA thesis I looked into a surveillance device that intrigued me a lot called the Panacousticon. This device was designed to spy on people and maintain social control, in a very similar way to the Panopticon. I started to wonder how the Panacousticon as a surveillance mechanism is deployed today, given that our phones are little panacoustic devices and they're all over our intimate spaces all the time. In other words, I started to wonder what it meant to listen and to be listened to in a digitally-mediated world. How online listening has shaped a different type of listening subject, and how the task of listening is applied to machines. 

In 2022 I developed a project with the support of Stimuleringsfonds called Listening in/to the Digital Control Society. Here I collaborated with developer Stijn van Beek to create an AI listening app to try to understand from a technical perspective how an algorithm can be programmed to listen. Also as part of this project, I carried out several interviews with artists, researchers, and musicians whose work traverses this topic. During my lecture at FIBER I will be talking more about this process and its findings. 

It seems that improvisation is also an important element in your practice; as composer, performer and organiser. Can you tell us more about the improvising sessions at The Social Music Club in Amsterdam that you co-facilitate?

The Social Music Club is a continuation of a project I started back in the south of Mexico around 2011. With an artist collective called No.Estacion.Arte we held a weekly open improvisation session over the course of 3 years. Many exciting music and collaborations stemmed from these sessions, which were held with the sole purpose of listening to one another, making space for different ways of making sound, and collectively creating music. The sessions were inspired by the Scratch Orchestra, a very politically charged project started in London by musicians  Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons, and Howard Skempton in the late 60s. We were also very inspired by the Houston-based creative music organisation Nameless Sound, and collaborated with them several times.

When I arrived in Amsterdam I very much looked forward to facilitating a similar space. During the Pandemic, this was obviously not possible, but I had met Koen Nutters from the DNK collective and told him about the idea, and he was really into it. We spent quite some time during the lockdowns taking walks on Rembrandt Park and discussing how we could make this happen, and finally, in February 2022, we had our first session at Buurthuis De Havelaar. The sessions are open to anyone, musician or not. There's something very idealistic about these sessions, where the emphasis lies on getting together and sharing a moment and a space for collective sound-making with no ulterior motive. We bring in scores that allow for anyone to explore making music together, the instructions of the pieces can be straightforward, however, the music resulting from them, and the moments shared in collective listening and performing, can be very complex and special. 

Listening as a social context also appears in other research of yours. Your text and sound piece Erotic Listening as SolidaryPractice is quite intimate and a great example of sensuality in sound. How do you define erotic listening? 

This text, and the accompanying sound piece, *pop* the sound of a bursting bubble, are reflections on the idea of overcoming isolation and loneliness through the practice of collective listening. The title of the text is a direct reference to Audre Lorde's wonderful essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, where she writes about the use of the erotic as a creative and generative power shared and constructed with another. I think the sense of hearing has a lot of overlap with the sense of touch, which is one of the reasons why bringing the erotic to the realm of listening made sense to me. 

A good example of this overlap is ASMR, where an intimate listening experience can cause very physical reactions in the body. For me, erotic listening highlights the political dimension of listening as a way to counteract the inwardness and self-referentiality that permeates the post-internet world. Eros refers to desire. Erotic listening entails a desire: a strong feeling of wanting to listen and to be listened to. It's not a passive activity: it requires a desiring listener. Also bringing in philosopher Byung-Chul Han's writings on listening, I like to think of erotic listening as an act where there's not necessarily any information being exchanged, or any other type of exchange for that matter. It is an active, co-creative, and non-productive (in an anti-capitalist sense) act.

Aimée Theriot-Ramos will perform at Noordwaards on Friday May 12 and give a lecture as part of the symposium on Saturday May 13 at de Brakke Grond. More information: https://www.fiberfestival.nl