We had a Dwell Time meeting today finalising the last bits of planning for our exhibition opening this Thursday and looking at the various funding applications we’re planning to apply for. We’ve been doing lots of interviews for this project and we’re also launching a film featuring some of these interviews. This weekend we’ll also be at the Piece Hall in Halifax for their Wellbeing Festival and I’m looking forward to the conversations with the other practitioners and visitors there. These will be structured audio-recorded interviews more than dialogue in a balanced sense but interviews take a tangent into more natural dialogue. The pre-amble dialogue is interesting too where we explain the project and seek the necessary permissions for the audio recording. A common reservation that people have is they don’t like the sound of their own voice. I empathise with that as I dislike the sound of my voice recorded too. I remember reading the reason our own voices sound so odd to us recorded is because when we speak, the sound that we make is not only heard by our ears as soundwaves like everyone else hears and that recordings pick up, the sound we make also reverberates through our body and is heard that way as well. When we listen to the recording, it’s missing that latter part.
One of the reasons I think I’m so interested in dialogue at the moment is I’m a bit deaf in my right ear and struggle hearing especially when there’s a lot of background noise. Sometimes dialogue becomes hard work to work out what other people are saying or it becomes hilarious as I mishear and take the conversation somewhere completely different based on a misheard word!
