WHAT DOES LISTENING MEAN TO YOU?

Ways of Listening is a unique global project asking for a creative answer to one simple question – “What does listening mean to you?”

The project is a partnership between Cities and Memory and The Evelyn Glennie Foundation to raise awareness of the critical importance of listening in all its forms, and the benefits that better listening can bring to us all.

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“reflect on and engage with the constant murmur of the Earth, sounds beyond the threshold of human hearing, to remind ourselves that we share this mysterious and awesome planet. Small, hidden, subterranean, aerial, underwater, infra and ultrasonic sounds, inaudible to the naked ear, can bring a new, potentially hopeful, perspective on the future of the planet and humanity.”

World Listening Project  – https://worldlisteningday.org/

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Over the years I have had conversations that sort of go along the lines of….. 
So what do you do?…

I’m an artist whose main medium is sound… 

What’s that?.. 

Well I paint with sound….

What? How?…..

Well, I look at the world and listen to it. Not just hearing but actively listen. I experience things, I remember things, and as well as looking, I can hear a soundtrack or noise that that thing is and then I create pictures with the sound, sometimes leaving it with little change other times I can use the sound as paint on a canvas to create a picture of something else….
Nice day isn’t it ( Exits stage left).
Most of these conversations are quite short.

As an audio artist my days are filled with the sounds of the things I see. I have always been acutely aware of the mass of sound and noises that surround me everyday, even in very quiet places.

From an early age I realised that although I may be silent, the world was not. To me the world has always been a hum, static, fizz to the ears, drones, and underlying miasma of sound, even, in the seemingly most tranquil of places. Constant noise and static, where things not only have a physical shape but also have a sound wave.
Animate and inanimate sing songs. Their songs and my sound image combine.

Listening is not just hearing. It is something more than that. It’s taking in the world around you, not just the obvious sirens, building sites, traffic and people. It’s also a hidden world of sub noise, soundwaves and frequencies. These undersounds have fascinated me for many years. Some can only be heard through recording processes, such as through the use of contact mics, induction loops, electromagnetic recorders (SOMA) and infrared. These are the sounds that find their way into many of my tracks.

The art of listening is vital to how I create the pieces that I do. Not only in how something sounds in actuality, like banging metal, but also what sonic aura something gives off when I look at it, such as a field of wild flowers. Other sounds lend themselves in their frequencies to have elements of another thing, another picture. Such as the toilet flush in Athens sounding like a crashing stormy sea ( with some minimal processing) or South American pan pipes becoming a little train, and in Rattle and Whirr, sounds that are hidden that can only be picked up by electronic recording processes, sound like a Heath Robinson factory of imaginary machines that produce useless wonderful things.

The art of listening is integral to my audio art. Each original field recording is listened deeply to hundreds of times, for patterns, rhythm, timbre, tempo. Just as a painter puts colours on a palette and combines them on canvas, I take fragments of sound, and with minimal processing, combine them into a sound picture of a jungle, robots, bees, wasps, flies and in this release, a collection of recordings of domestic appliances morph into a wonder factory of noise.

Rattle and Whirr is a perfect example of my process. I firstly listened to recordings of domestic appliances and things found around the house by freekit on FreeSound freesound.org/people/freekit/
After listening I began to hear patterns and rhythms which sparked a childhood memory. As a child I had a book of drawings by Heath Robinson, an English illustrator famous for whimsical, overly complex machines, inspiring the term ‘Heath Robinson contraption’ for improbable inventions. www.heathrobinsonmuseum.org/william-heath-robinson/

This memory, combined with the raw sounds became the basis of my own oddbod factory, a factory filled with strange machines producing gas pies, mystery boxes and the woof for mute dogs. The whole process of creating these eleven tracks involved hours of listening, relistening and re-relistening.

This is the method I use with all my sound pieces. The combination of sight, sound, listening and imagination has remained with me all my life and is deeply ingrained in my work. 

credits

released June 13, 2026

Composed, Recorded, Produced by O Johnson / Museleon
Copyright museleon2026

Field recordings used and reimagined, courtesy to K Johnson aka freekit of the Freesound community under the Creative Commons 0 Licence
freesound.org/people/freekit/

If you wish to find out more about Heath Robinson
www.heathrobinsonmuseum.org/william-heath-robinson/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Heath_Robinson
The illustrator who became a national catchphrase – www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce3gqe0elx3o
William Heath Robinson: London exhibition celebrates cartoonist
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-61522197

Best listened through headphones but beware loud sounds.

There is perfection in imperfection