Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Art and Performance

This book proposes sonic detection as a framework for open-ended, collaborative intellectual and creative practice. The book is situated at the intersection of sound studies, performance studies and interdisciplinary writing. It emerges from a decade-long working partnership between the two authors, Rebecca Collins and Johanna Linsley, which began as a slowly evolving eavesdrop on the east coast of the UK1 and has become an ongoing practice of aural attention modulated through text, performance and audio work. Our work together has been presented across the UK,
and in the US, Brazil, Spain and the Netherlands, with support from major institutions like Arts Council England, Snape Maltings, Sound & Music and the Live Art Development Agency as well as educational institutions, community-based organisations and DIY venues. Our first album, Stolen Voices 001, was shortlisted for a Scottish Award for New Music in 2021.2 The work presented here is also the product of exchange with many interlocutors, some formal and structured, some incidental and overheard. So while the book should be understood as a coherent whole and not an edited collection, it also departs from conventional ideas of the monograph. It
might better be called a polygraph, with a tongue-in-cheek association with lie detectors and other questionable forensic technologies.