Sonic Detection is part sonic noir, part performance document, and part critical investigation of listening at the margins for readers interested in prospecting the boundaries of performance studies, sound studies, and interdisciplinary writing.
The book opens with a group of sonic detectives (exact number unknown) who investigate the mystery of an as-yet-unidentified event that leaves traces only in the acoustic atmosphere. This hybrid fiction propels the reader up and down the UK coast and offers overheard fragments from a faded seaside resort, a container shipping port, a former coal-mining town, and the Scottish headquarters for North Sea oil. A heterogeneous collection of texts follows, from creative-critical essays, performance scores, engagement with the archives of earlier sonic detectives (including poet/performance artist Fiona Templeton and the sound art collective Bow Gamelan Ensemble), to a series of dispatches from expert witnesses with their ears to the ground.
Sonic Detection is not so much a monograph as a polygraph, tongue-in-cheek associations with questionable forensic technologies firmly in place. The book emerges from a decade-long collaboration between artists Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley, who used eavesdropping as an expanded creative methodology. The project began as a series of hyper-local, community-based performance works in coastal locations in the UK (from Bournemouth to Aberdeen) and grew into an international, multi-disciplinary life work devoted to an ongoing, organized curiosity. Sonic detectives hold open a collective sonorous space. They are the embodiment of the phenomenophile, lingering longer in listening.
About the Authors
Rebecca Collins (d. 2024) was an award-winning artist researcher and lecturer working at the intersection between contemporary performance and sound. Her main research interests were in listening, performance, sound studies, and creative/critical writing. Rebecca’s practice focused on the dynamics of the sonic operating within specific environments and technologies to explore methodologies of writing and making contemporary performance. She shared her scholarship and practice through multiple forms, including live performance, limited-edition vinyl, radio broadcasts, exhibitions, workshops, text scores, policy documents, and academic/experimental publications. Ultimately, Rebecca was interested in how critical, fictional, and performative interventions might cultivate attention toward our contemporary condition. Rebecca was a Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Shortly before her untimely passing, Rebecca had been named a Ramón and Cajal Research Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid (for 2024-29).
Johanna Linsley is an artist and researcher who works across performance, text, and sound. Her work is collaborative and often iterative, resulting in multiple outcomes or versions. She is interested in contemporary performance and Live Art; documentation of performance; sound, listening, and the voice; queer domesticity; and modes of assembly and collective imagination. She has published research in Contemporary Theatre Review and Performance Research and Cultural Geographies. Her work in performance, both solo and with the London-based performance collective I’m With You, has been presented throughout the UK and the USA, and in Brussels, Copenhagen, Zagreb, Bogotà, and elsewhere, at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and in London at the Hayward Gallery, the Barbican Centre, the Wellcome Collection, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Johanna is a founding partner of UnionDocs, a center for documentary arts in Brooklyn, New York. She was a postdoctoral research associate on the Wellcome Trust-funded project Challenging Archives, working with the archive of performance artist Franko B, and was also a research assistant on the AHRC-funded project Performing Documents, both at the University of Bristol. She was a postdoctoral research associate on the Leverhulme-funded project Acts of Assembly at the University of Roehampton. Johanna is a Lecturer in Creative Practice and Head of English, Creative Writing, and Film at the University of Dundee.