Sonic Sensing 

Optional Home Nesting 

1. Have the house for yourself 

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2. Make yourself comfortable: if you have a ritual to find ease, follow it. If not, just make a cup of tea/coffee and savour it with no screens/books or any other external stimulation (fidgeting, stimming, tapping, shouting, sounding or any other bodily actions that you might find grounding or pleasurable are welcome). 

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3. Lie down and allow your mind to wander, take a moment for ease, for low effort being, for release, for nothing at all. 

Part 1 - Vibrational Orientation 

From here on you are continuously sounding with your voice. Make it low effort. If there is silence this is always an active silence, a needed rest, not a pause. 

4. Find verticality (or remain lying down) and slowly hum some sounds with your mouth closed. Feel the vibration inside your body. Forget to listen to the sound, focus instead on the sensation of the vibration in your body.  

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5. Start moving casually through space as you are sounding with no particular direction. You’re walking at a relaxed pace, with a soft gaze, you are in a drifting motion. (Skip if lying down.)

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6. Continue humming continuously. Vary the sounds you make with the curiosity of the explorer, finding different caves and crevices inside yourself that you can feel through this humming vibration. If your hums were short, try a long one, if low in pitch, try high. If stable, try rhythm. Do this for a while, feeling the sound in contact with your body.  

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7. With your mouth closed still, bring the vibration to the area of your mouth - tongue, teeth, soft palate, lips. Feel the vibration in those areas. 

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8. Vibrate your lips.

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9. Slowly and tentatively part your lips and allow the vibration to move from the area of your lips to the very close air immediately surrounding your mouth. Take your time with this. 

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10. Keep humming: move between mouth open and mouth closed - feel the difference between the vibration when it is contained by your body and the vibration in the proximal air. 

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11. From now on, you retain the option of switching between humming with your mouth open or closed, negotiating your own extension into the environment, returning to internal humming when needed.

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12. Transfer the vibration from your lips to an area of air directly around your head - hum in this zone imagining the vibrating air enveloping your head in a cloud of sound, touching your skin from the outside.

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13. Increase the area of vibration to include your entire body - imagine sound enveloping you like silk, cocooning you. 

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14. Fix your gaze on a visual spot across the room from you. Move the humming vibration to all the the air in between you and that spot. 

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15. Move closer and further away from that spot, feel how that affects your sound. (If lying down, skip this step.)

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16. Find different visual cues in the room and send your vibrated air towards them. Try out closer ones or ones further away. 

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17. When your sound reaches its visual destination, imagine it being reflected back at you, replenishing you. 

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Part 2. Space and Objects 

18. Find a physical place closer to you (an alcove, a corner of the room, a chair, etc.) and make it your temporary home - give this place your sound and let it change your sound. Physically lean into it, see what bringing the weight of your body does. Let the space push or pull you. Touch it, feel what touching can do.

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19. As you relate with the space, find a fragment of a phrase or of a melody that emerges out of your explorations - loop it, lean into it, get moved by it.

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20. Lose yourself inside this loop, allow it to change with each iteration, find its crevasses, potentials and exciting spots - be moved by pleasure.

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21. When the joy of the loop is starting to diminish, start moving through space, sounding, looking for pen and paper.

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22. When you pick up the pen and paper, allow your sound to be affected by touching these objects, attune to how they feel.

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23. Start doodling on paper and sounding at the same time - do this aimlessly for a little while.

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24. Allow your doodles to turn into words - intentionally don’t speak or sound these words but continue sounding.

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25. Start writing a short story on paper, a real or imaginary event of no particular importance but of attempted linear (in)coherence. Disregard spelling. Proceed with ease. Continue vocalising out loud with no intention other than to keep going. Don’t sound out loud the contents of what you write down.  

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26. Continue writing until you’ve filled a whole page. Continue sounding until you’ve lost track of what sound is doing.  

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27. End. 

Duration: approximately 1-2 hours.

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I include here a step-by-step breakdown of a workshop situation, one that can be done in a domestic setting and in non-domestic workshops with others. This is not an instruction score but a way to archive in writing an embodied process. It is a way to think-through, sediment, and in the case of this thesis, communicate this knowledge to others in order to get a feel for the kind of workshops I now lead. The instructions are incomplete - I would not give these to someone else to follow as the words themselves are not enough. The attunement between bodies, the ability to ask or answer questions, the ability to shift the language to fit the encounter, the ability to skip, change the order of events or duration of each one according to what is needed in the room, are all essential to how this work is encountered and shared. The written form presented here captures a snippet in time and allows for a sense of progression and specificity within the individual steps to transpire. 

The breakdown below contains a lot of elements I’ve discussed previously: voice as pleasurable sensation, voice as sonic eco-location or act or situating and relating to space, voice as removed from sonic outcome, voice as a background activity that helps transduce this background into the open air, voice as melodic and textural loops. It took the entire doctoral research to develop this content, and more importantly, to develop myself as a facilitator, performer and pedagogue that is capable of supporting this kind of sonic knowing in myself and others. The way I practise this work now is alongside Fitzmaurice voice work - the trauma-informed voice pedagogy I have recently certified as a teacher in. Fitzmaurice pedagogy helped me develop an awareness of the somatic responses of participants as well as tools - both verbal and practical (including touch, sound and sight) - to help them navigate an embodied journey while retaining autonomy of their own sensorium. This kind of learning from within, always checking in with one's own sensation before making a choice, is the kind of approach that has enabled my own development and sense of expressive empowerment.