To Listen by Touch: Studies with a Contact Mic and Hydrophone Phonugria Nova, Dinard, 2026
The stethoscope, the hydrophone, and the contact microphone were not invented for the same purpose. One was built to diagnose a patient's chest; the other two use forms of transduction whose histories intersect with early twentieth-century technologies of underwater detection.
During a week-long workshop in Dinard, France, a town given over to summer leisure, and under the mentorship of sound artist Gilles Aubry, I worked against two inheritances at once: the militarized history of piezoelectric listening technologies, whose early applications included submarine detection during the First World War; and the quieter authority of field recording as neutral capture, the fiction that a place's sounds can be collected and assembled without a point of view. My method was rougher. I took a hydrophone and contact microphone for a walk: attaching them to a trampoline, dragging them across sand and seaweed along the shoreline, pressing them to a granite rock face agitated by the tide, taping them to an inflatable floatie and recording both its skin and sealed interior air chamber, and lowering them against the vibrating mass of a tidal dam.
The recordings sound bodily: wet, muffled, rhythmic, a slurp, a pulse, sound heard as though from inside rather than at a distance. What's left is a sensation of closeness without the alibi of science or the alibi of the postcard.