Listening Against the Signal

Commissioned work — developed for and presented at the Deep Listening Symposium (Tate Liverpool × Liverpool Hope University, 2026).

Listening Against the Signal is a sound, painting, and moving image project developed in response to Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening — a practice that expands attention and treats listening as embodied and relational.

Rooted in the attic flat where I live in Tuebrook, Liverpool, the work emerges from a long co-existence with the pigeons living in the roof cavity above me.

Using a contact microphone, I recorded vibrations travelling through the building’s structure — wood, plaster, and roof. The sound work is built entirely from the pigeons: their calls, movements, and physical traces. Rather than framing these sounds as interruption or background noise, the project approaches them as an active form of co-existence.

The work also sits alongside my experience of tinnitus, a constant internal high tone that cannot be switched off, positioning listening as the co-presence of internal and external frequencies rather than something to be resolved.

The sound piece became the basis for two paintings in which colour shifts with light, revealing and obscuring tones so the image is never fixed. The paintings were then translated into moving image, extending the project’s focus on perception, attention, and deep, embodied listening.