Elasticity and Resonance: The Audience, Audient

Abstract

The essence of sound in performance is a peculiar between-ness: it resounds in performer and audience alike, situating each in space, place and time. This paper explores that elastic relation to space and time, through the medium of headphones-based live performance and the process of sound design. Through the presenters’s own work in sound design for headphones theatre, the paper exposes the malleability of performance space and time through sound, and accounts for the sound designer’s role in this elasticity. To listen in public with headphones is ostensibly to listen alone: a private listening, in the space of one’s own head. The rise of ‘Silent Disco’ events and headphones-based live p..