Abstract

This PhD is the result of asking: “What do I hear?” and “How do I listen?” on the Lachine Canal in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada, and the Lee Navigation in London, England. In response, culturally-produced ways of hearing are detailed as shaping various habits of listening. By attending closely and carefully to the human, nonhuman and more-than-human voices of urban spaces, the work outlined encourages further place-responsive sonic research practices nurturing openness, uncertainty and experimentation, while also providing methods and techniques to challenge unexamined habits of listening. To begin, I discuss my research-creation practice, developed in dialogue with anti-colonial theories of sonic resistance (Chacon, 2023; Daughtry, 2013; Kanngieser, 2015; Robinson, 2020), and use technologically-mediated practices of sonic-inquiry to “unsettle” my settler colonial ways of hearing and listening. Instructions and examples summarizing this work introduce multiple methods and techniques: sensing-in-motion, amplifying (a) place (via listening), sound fishing and contact reception. I then take a significant and important detour, informed by my methodology of creation-as-research (Chapman and Sawchuk, 2012, 2015), combining my methods and techniques with an analysis of dub audio (re)mixing and instantaneous disc cutting to incorporate kindred modes of sonic resistance—dub and dubplates—emerging from Jamaican sound system practices into my research. This facilitates the development and realization of Dub Navigation (no. 1): a public-facing sonic encounter that expands on sound system re-processing and re-presentation practices (Henriques, 2011). I conclude with the assertion that asking “What do I hear?” and “How do I listen?” is a necessary and ongoing process (for any and all listeners).