In Which to Trust?: With audio descriptions

documenting listening experiences through captions

in collaboration with Bill Davies, Josephine Dickinson, Ed Garland, Alan Jacques, and Terry Perdanawati.

How does sound actually “sound”? Through In Which to Trust?, listeners are invited to rethink their understanding of sound. In this work, five aurally diverse listeners interpreted 32 identical audiovisual clips and documented their listening experiences through captions. This work reveals how vastly different our actual listening conditions and capacities are. The differences between the sonic sources and the various captioners’ interpretations leave us a choice of what we should refer to when talking about sound: the objects, our hearing apparatuses, or both? In which will you trust?

The five aurally diverse collaborators are Bill Davies (autistic and Hard-of-Hearing), Josephine Dickinson (Deaf and cochlear implantee), Ed Garland (a person with tinnitus), Alan Jacques (a person with Ménière’s disease), and Terry Perdanawati (‘normal’ hearing).

In Which to Trust? centers on diverse experiences as a vital form of knowledge and blatantly exposes how the notion of sound still glorifies the idealized, healthy, and ‘normal’ pair of ears.

Work details

Year created: 2024

Medium: 5-channel video and joint stereo audio

Duration: 36 minutes

Cast

Concept: Jay Afrisando

Sound-Captioners: Bill Davies, Josephine Dickinson, Ed Garland, Alan Jacques, and Terry Perdanawati

Project Manager: Terry Perdanawati

Sound Recordist, Mixing Engineer, and Videographer: Jay Afrisando

Audio describers: Sandy Guttman and Jay Afrisando

Audio description narrator: Casey Palbicki

Monitors for the Curb Appeal Gallery exhibition courtesy of: Ashley Trumbo, Bri and Joy, and Emma Marie Martin

Sounds and visuals recorded at various places in Minnesota and Wyoming in 2021 and 2022.

This project was supported by the Jerome Foundation through the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship 2021-22.

About the sound-captioners

Bill Davies is a professor of psychoacoustics. He has a lifelong interest in sound, especially human perception of complex sound scenes. His own hearing is somewhat divergent, with a typical age-related loss at high frequencies, a noise-induced loss from loud rock music, and some processing differences associated with being autistic.

From a working-class background, Josephine Dickinson took a Classics degree at Oxford, then studied composition with Michael Finnissy and Richard Barrett, and later published four books of poetry. She has collaborated widely with artists, musicians, and writers. Profoundly deaf since childhood and totally deaf since 2012, her experiences throughout this and after receiving a cochlear implant have fundamentally informed her artistic practice.

Ed Garland is the author of the essay collection Earwitness: A Search for Sonic Understanding in Stories, which won the New Welsh Writing awards in 2018. He recently completed a PhD at Aberystwyth University in the analysis of sonic experience in contemporary fiction. He experiences permanent tinnitus and noise-induced hearing loss above 3kHz.

Alan Jacques is 76, a retired doctor and classical pianist/accompanist with extensive concert experience. He has had Ménière’s disease for 15 years, with severe bilateral hearing impairment. He can converse one-to-one with hearing aids, but has almost complete cochlear amusia for pitch. He continues to play using the psychological ‘inner ear.’

Terry Perdanawati is a part-time copywriter and translator and a full-time art enjoyer. Trained in business administration and English as a Foreign Language, she used to be a corporate secretary and English instructor before working with Jay Afrisando on his music and art projects. She is currently a hearing person.

Exhibition

Institute of the Arts and Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 12 January - 2 March 2024. Curated by Rachel Nelson.

is sound is tactile is visual is sound is, Curb Appeal Gallery, Chicago, IL, US, 14 October - 11 November 2023. Curated by Sandy Guttman.