Suk-Jun Kim

(de)touch, a binaural radiophonic composition, is an obvious nod to Jean-Luc Nancy’s project on touch. When Jean-Luc Nancy says that ’[t]ouch belongs to every part of arts because touch belongs to every part of senses,’[1] he is arguing not only for touch’s primacy in every sense, but for the reason for its primacy in senses; being a movement in and of itself (‘when the movement stops, touch stops’), touch is the process, performance in other words, of every sense. As such, the being and the becoming of touch are inevitably fused. Every sense, including listening which is hearing’s becoming, performs touch as it creates and activates the ontologies of every sense. But how exactly does touch work here in listening? How does it move or perform? What does it produce and what are the consequences for listening? What do we ever get to know things that we listen to? Do we ever get to know things by listening?

With (de)touch, I would like to tackle these questions, first by rendering sonic touch-images, if you will, of (intuitively speaking) and about (rationally or inferentially speaking) listening-with. Here the ontologies of listening-with are taking cues from Nancy’s being-with, which he develops from Heidegger’s Dasein whose existential condition is being-with others [2], as well as his analysis of the very act of listening [3]. Compositionally speaking, these are to be explored through creating various kinds of listening-with-others and observing the gaps and spaces, and the push-pull forces that these will engender. Secondly, with (de)touch, I aim to emphasise that listening as touch acts on the in-between space of limit and possibility[4], a distance or proximity that Nancy said touch needs to exist, and that it is precisely in this way listening touches—at the limit or on the surface of—what we can posit as knowing. Accordingly, equal attention is paid to the negative movement of listening as touch (hence the prefix, de-).

(de)touch explores listening as touch and (de)touch in the composition with various excerpts from the field recording that I have done for Futures of Listening: Water Knowledge from Two Cities. Here, the structure has a loose two part-form. I hope that this two-part structure will give much emphasis on the process and effect of each movement of listening: touch and de-touch.

Suk-Jun Kim is a South Korean composer, sound artist and researcher/professor at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. He has published two books, Humming (The Study of Sound) by Bloomsbury and Hasla by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg. His research focuses on sound studies, immersive sound, phenomenological approaches to listening, electroacoustic music, space and place. Having been awarded first prizes in international electronic compositions, Kim was a resident composer at Artists-in-Berlin, DAAD, Germany (2009) and a Leverhulme visiting fellow at the University of Aberdeen (2010). In 2023, he initiated a large-scale sound studies and sound art project Futures of Listening by collaborating with the National Asian Culture Center (ACC) in South Korea and has led its Sound Lab Team. Between 2023-24, He was the Principal Investigator for Futures of Listening: Water Knowledge from Two Cities, an ISPF ODA challenge-oriented research project funded by the British Academy between 2024-2026.