When sound artists working in phonography and sound recordings describe how they arrived at this vocation, it is not uncommon to hear stories about their personal experiences, the founding moments when awareness of the sound environment emerged… As for me, I remember – me perfectly from intense moments of listening, but my initiation to sound recordings happened more by chance. Because I don’t know how to play any kind of instrument, I ended up using microphones. The transformation of sounds, the strangeness they acquire when transposed to loudspeakers was fascinating enough for me, but I wasn’t able to produce sounds without having to record them. So my work with sounds didn’t become necessary from my listening experience. Instead, it was the practical, somewhat haphazard work with the sounds that, little by little, affected the way I heard. Ultimately, it became clear that my listening had changed, that I was steeped in it, which would change my path and approaches, first the use I make of my body and then the use that, through this, I would make of the world.

This is how I think I returned to questioning my practice as a sound artist and how the composition of ambient sounds became, by necessity, composing as an environment, that is, within the scope of the interaction between the body and its surroundings, according to a place, according to a use of space. What eventually became clear was that listening had to be done with the whole body, the physical body as well as the social body.

When I listen to the world in a different way, it changes, and the way it appears then conveys something different to what I usually knew. The transformation of my approaches to the world, of the way I see or hear is, therefore, capable of transforming my knowledge of the world, is capable of disturbing what I would have taken as truth, through the evidence of perception.

Such a reconsideration of perceptual truth testifies to the presence of an enunciation of the world before perception, a discourse about the world that would be found in perception itself. At the very moment when I hear the “truck passing by” (“truck passing by1”), I am really giving reason to a speech about the world: the one that tells me which truck it is, and what is the objective role it plays in the relationship with me. Normally, I don’t have to identify or question the themes of knowledge and discourse that appear there: “I hear the truck going by”, that’s the truth. But the social-ideological-imaginary construction that an utterance like this represents is clarified when I actually listen to that sound, actively enough to unlearn what I know about trucks, in order to perceive only the sound phenomenon, the acoustic vibration.

Samuel Ripault is a sound artist and specialist in field recordings. He is co-founder of the experimental music publisher Universiinternational and a member of the Ici-Même Art collective in Grenoble. Since the beginning of the century, he has created numerous sound works (some of which have been published by publishers such as Universinternational, And-Oar, Picomedia and Entr’acte), listening projects in different cities, sound installations and experimental pieces for radio.