Sonic ways of knowing: researching life using sound

But what I want to do today is explore with you sonic inquiry from broadly within my home field of organisation studies.

But I'm trying to approach this now through, with your help, a researcher's practice lens.

And my central proposition is that sound is not only an object we might study, but it's also a way of knowing, a way of knowing life, of knowing organisational life and a way of rethinking method concept and writing so the talk's going to draw on some of my academic but mostly some of my public writing and across different projects I've been been really signaling how my interest in how sound organizes us it organizes the sense in which we belong the authority that that folk take up in their in their lives and what makes what they do legitimate or illegitimate So questions about what is hearable, what becomes withheld, what gets misheard or what is made to count as voice or noise or silence.

So I'm going to move from songs to sound to silence and finally to writing.

So those sort of four key moves to ask what we or our academic fields might become when listening is taken seriously as a research practice.

But I think I should begin personally because this work for me comes from a long history of listening.

Before I started studying organisations for a living, I knew music.

I knew music professionally, rehearsals, voices, rooms, silences, timings, rhythms, timbres.

And I knew that moment where something becomes audible because people are listening intently.

And I think that experience, although I didn't realise it at first, that experience has really started to shape how I understand organisational life.

So when I might say that my work stays with songs, sounds and silences, I mean that both literally and analytically, because for me, songs are not just examples or quirky illustrations.

But and sounds and not simply sort of background noise and Silence is certainly more than absence.

But I contest with you that there are ways through which life is felt and structured.

And so I suppose that the word that matters for me here is audibility.

I'm interested in what becomes hearable when we start to listen and how power works through listening.

There we are.

That's kind of like the big build up.

as to how I'm sort of conceptualising sonic inquiry, asking us to treat sound as a serious mode of knowing.

And I know that the people in this room, the one thing that we will share is that they would take senses and sensory experiences very, very seriously.

And then thinking about how then I speak in my field, about how we can reshape how we study organisations or teach them or write about them.

But maybe before I say anything else, I just want to invite us to listen for a moment.

Not for something dramatic or meaningful, but just to notice what is already here with us.

The point is not that we have to necessarily identify every sound correctly.

But it's enough to notice that we are already in a sonic field.

And so that before we analyze, interpret or attempt to classify or explain, something is already gathering our attention.

But what I want to do today is explore with you sonic inquiry from broadly within my home field of organisation studies.

But I'm trying to approach this now through, with your help, a researcher's practice lens.

And my central proposition is that sound is not only an object we might study, but it's also a way of knowing, a way of knowing life, of knowing organisational life and a way of rethinking method concept and writing so the talk's going to draw on some of my academic but mostly some of my public writing and across different projects I've been been really signaling how my interest in how sound organizes us it organizes the sense in which we belong the authority that that folk take up in their in their lives and what makes what they do legitimate or illegitimate So questions about what is hearable, what becomes withheld, what gets misheard or what is made to count as voice or noise or silence.

So I'm going to move from songs to sound to silence and finally to writing.

So those sort of four key moves to ask what we or our academic fields might become when listening is taken seriously as a research practice.

But I think I should begin personally because this work for me comes from a long history of listening.

Before I started studying organisations for a living, I knew music.

I knew music professionally, rehearsals, voices, rooms, silences, timings, rhythms, timbres.

And I knew that moment where something becomes audible because people are listening intently.

And I think that experience, although I didn't realise it at first, that experience has really started to shape how I understand organisational life.

So when I might say that my work stays with songs, sounds and silences, I mean that both literally and analytically, because for me, songs are not just examples or quirky illustrations.

But and sounds and not simply sort of background noise and Silence is certainly more than absence.

But I contest with you that there are ways through which life is felt and structured.

And so I suppose that the word that matters for me here is audibility.

I'm interested in what becomes hearable when we start to listen and how power works through listening.

There we are.

That's kind of like the big build up.

as to how I'm sort of conceptualising sonic inquiry, asking us to treat sound as a serious mode of knowing.

And I know that the people in this room, the one thing that we will share is that they would take senses and sensory experiences very, very seriously.

And then thinking about how then I speak in my field, about how we can reshape how we study organisations or teach them or write about them.

But maybe before I say anything else, I just want to invite us to listen for a moment.

Not for something dramatic or meaningful, but just to notice what is already here with us.

The point is not that we have to necessarily identify every sound correctly.

But it's enough to notice that we are already in a sonic field.

And so that before we analyze, interpret or attempt to classify or explain, something is already gathering our attention.