Slought is pleased to announce Listening for Democracy, a workshop exploring the methods and politics of field recording. It will feature composer Tod Machover, sound-studies scholar Naomi Waltham-Smith, and Penn graduate students Roksana Filipowska and Maria Murphy, and will take place on Friday, November 17, 2017 from 10am-12pm in the Mediatheque at Slought. The program is part of Machover's Philadelphia Voices project, in which residents of Philadelphia are being asked to submit field recordings of the city's soundscape, including the voices they hear in their neighborhoods, using a purpose-built app. Commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the project will premier in April 2018.

Urban environmental sound is composed through the social relations of city life. How do the shortcomings of liberal democracy become audible in soundscapes? How can listening to our cities aid in the struggle against such conditions? The workshop will address these questions by bringing together Machover's effort in mobilizing community engagement and Waltham-Smith's interest in how urban field recording reveals unequal distributions of precarity and insecurity in our cities. It will focus on discerning, via the ear, the ideals and effects of democracy.

Together with Penn graduate students who have undertaken innovative work with field recording, Machover and Waltham-Smith will introduce students to the techniques, strategies, and politics of urban field recording. The workshop will examine the status of recordings as representation, document, and creative intervention, investigating the extent to which field recording is a democratic process. Participants will make field recordings at different locations around the city in order to explore what soundscapes reveal about the nature of institutions, communities, and social practices in Philadelphia.