Precarity and Voice: Articulated Architectures of Dispossession

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This doctoral project investigates, through spatial sound recording, composition, writing, and documentary - intersections between housing as a lived socio-economic experience and voice as it is embodied, shared, heard and articulated within the home. In 'an era of chronic insecurity and growing inequalities' (Standing, 2011) the voice is a site of testimony and refuge - it bears the trace of our environment's impact on us, and carries the weight of our agency in response to it. Building on Brandon Le Belle's 'poor acoustics', Jacqueline Waldock's 'sensory ethnography' and the sonic practice of among others Cara Tolmie and Evan Ifekoya - this PhD combines situated ambisonic voice recording and vocal choirs in locations such as Guardian Properties, with surround-sound polyvocal installation, writing, and traditional documentary techniques - including oral testimony - to ask how individual voice connects with collectives through precarious architecture, and what forms of socio-political impact this creates for the individual inhabitant and communities.While current theoretical approaches to both voice hearing/embodiment and precarity and its effects proliferate within the humanities, and significant acoustic research within fields such as acoustic ecologies has enabled an understanding of how individuals are constituted as bounded selves, connecting with communities through architecture, there remains a distinct lack of practice-based artistic research that brings these subjects together to find applied and important insights to this urgent problem. Drawing acoustic research and oral testimony into conversation with affect, neuroscience/s, neuro/auraldiversity studies, music, and sonic art will provide the theoretical foundations for my situated spatial sound, writing and documentary practice; both to redress this lacuna and produce new knowledge pathways that traverse diverse fields/disciplines.