Gail Priest and Joy Zhou
“Underheard: sharing listening”

Joy Zhou and I started having conversations in April 2024. We had heard of each other but as we live in different cities, had not met. While aspects of our practices may be quite different, we found we comfortable communion through a shared curiosity about sound, text and their related conceptual applications.

Rather than producing a catalogue essay, we offer a collaborative listening-writing project that reflects our ongoing conversations. Working with the provocation in Joy’s title, we sit comfortably in silence together, we sent each other three sound recordings, to which we wrote responses.

The sounds we recorded capture spaces and the actions and relations that occur in them: relations between people; between people and things, and between things and things. Sound itself is a relation, the result of surfaces coming into contact; the result of matter — organic or inorganic — in motion. These interactions create vibrations that move through the air as sound waves allowing small actions to impress upon the space around them. Even when we try to be silent, our actions speak and create a communion with the space. When we listen, we hear not just the sound, but the characteristics of the space in which the sound is made, as the vibrations subtly activate it.

The spaces of these recordings are both intimate and public, as Joy and I return to our family homes over the festive break. They offer a listening in to our subtle interactions and our understandings of sound and listening as we navigate these spaces.

Only after you have listened to the sounds and read the texts, we then offer you the context of the recordings, inviting you to listen with a naked ear.

— Gail Priest

Joy Zhou, Sound 1

12 December 2024

Gail Priest, Response

The bite of voices

Over the rattle of crockery

The space of space — near but far

In ear shot

A shot of coffee

A shot of sound

To hear the smear of words.

A table at a distance

We are not with them

But we share the air

Their vibrations

Our vibrations.

As I am getting older, I worry that I will lose my hearing. I can still hear my sounds and others very well, but conversations in crowded rooms are getting harder. Sometimes I panic that I can’t make sense of the words.

And I am greedy for words as a habit and a living. My burning intention is to separate out the sounds into their units of consensual meaning. But if I relax, I can try to let the sounds remain unidentified, allow myself to not make meaning, and hear voices as something for others to decipher, while I content myself with sounds — word sounds that are as random as the scrape of fork, or the clunk of a cup.

Gail Priest, Sound 1

11 December 2024

Joy Zhou, Response

I hear rhythmic silence…

This is our first attempt of capturing silencing and listening to silences

These silences are out of context.

Listening to this silence makes my silence suddenly seem to be so chaotic…

I turned off the lamps,

The blue light from the computer faintly illuminated my face,

My head slightly tapping with this rhythmic yet irregular vibrations, the clapping of two surfaces…

From the other side,

The moon lit through the window glass,

Faintly illuminating the plants in my room,

Silhouette of the leaves swaying in the no wind,

Or was that my body spinning around this three-sixty stool,

…

Like a quiet night in the countryside,

With a cybernetic cricket.

Joy Zhou, Sound 2

19 December 2024

Gail Priest, Response

clinks and tinks

squeaks and bumps

whistles and pings

tinned tunes and tubular gurgles

vessels and viscera

I love the smallness of all these sounds. The flatness. The equanimity. No one thing demanding more attention than another. Task-generated, procedural. All sounds holding equal space, equal weight. A democratic sounding asking for a democratic listening.

Gail Priest, Sound 2

25 December 25, 2024

Joy Zhou, Response

I hear magpies here and there, calling each other.

Flapping of wings, birds speak, birds sing.

I wondered, where are you Gail?

The tinkling of a metal spoon ceramic mug hitting in spiral motion, the sound of making yourself a drink…

Or wait, maybe that’s my grandma making herself a coffee in the kitchen…

I hear helicopters - you must be in the countryside.

Whenever I go out to a quiet creek for field recordings, I hear nothing but the running water and helicopters.

I only realised a couple of plays later, that was you, were also pouring water, in sync with my grandma here.

I thought that was the sound of a creek...

Distant bird sings, blends in with the music singing peacefully in the background near my apartment. I couldn’t recognise if the song is from here or if this is your bird’s song.

The magpie sounds were so aggressive, almost like they are shouting and vomiting at me. Or maybe I’m just being super self-conscious? Anything that doesn’t sound like a praise could be a curse…

I’m looping this audio as I’m writing this text. Each time I’m hearing a fuller picture. All of a sudden the sound of mic pop brought me out of your staged silence reality.

Joy Zhou, Sound 3

3 January 2025

Gail Priest, Response

An action and its consequences.

A long gong…

Long…

…gone

I’m not sure if the reverberation goes for as long as I like to think it does.

I’m not sure if I’m willing it into a longer existence.

Where do sounds go to die?

If sounds are the consequences of our actions.

Then they come with responsibility.

We are responsible for what we put into action.

For the way we make the air move.

And the way we move through the air.

Thinking like this gives each action a weight…

Makes weightless sounds heavy.

Too heavy perhaps?

This burden of being and acting.

This way of thinking…

But we could also think lightly of this.

A sound liberated by action…

A sound freed by movement.

A manumission…

—a word I just learned that means freedom via the latin

manūs and ēmittere — to send away from the hand.

This long gong

A sound sent away by the hand.

Gail Priest, Sound 3

2 January 2025

Joy Zhou, Response

Plastic and metal, 

machine humming, 

slow steps, 

peeling apple skins like sharpening pencils, 

or that could be a carrot,

or potato

now,

I’m asking myself to pause for a moment,

and making attempts not to label the sounds but simply sit with them, because that’s my go-to action, to start labelling, when I make myself listen

... but I wonder if I can let go of this instinct.

My mind is now overheated and could not stop taking the lead in making sense of them all… then my thoughts are distracted, in between random thoughts and the looped playing of sound… like, I learnt/invented a new word lately, “de-humanisation”, in the context of high tech world, where human is used as machines to achieve the highest possible productivity… that shaky metal is vibrating too close to the vibrancy of my current state of anxiety. Its speed is pulling me out of the slowness of my home visit, returning back to a worker mode.

…

Ten minutes in, the machine humming does not sound like noise anymore, and I’m starting to have the capacity to listen through it -

It sounds like an airy tractor just started in engine in distance

I’m still having trouble just sitting with it in silence, but at least I’m now trying to listen in more detail.

Joy Zhou, Sound 1

Chaos of traffic and machines are penetrative, even mumblings bouncing back and forth against the ceramic tiles are giving me a headache. This silence is not silence at all.

I’m here 10 minutes early, waiting, and feeling the nerve in silence, yet never been so alert to everything that’s happening around me.

Gail Priest, Sound 1

Sympathetic vibrations. The kitchen dish rack is rattling, seemingly of its own accord. It’s channelling the vibrations of the fridge through the cupboards. The appliances in their own conversation.

Joy Zhou, Sound 2

I’m curious about this sound of metal chopsticks hitting porcelain bowls during my family dinner. The orchestra of utensils, hitting each other and played by my family. It must be received differently when you listen with a different cultural context.

Gail Sound 2

Each December 25, I have an early morning of cup of tea in my backyard in Katoomba and record the soundscape. My backyard is between two roads but on this morning each year there is very little traffic. This little ritual gives me my final moment of me-time before generally losing my sense of self over several weeks of family and social visits.

Joy Sound 3

Riding through a 3km long tunnel. I could see nothing except the light under the bridge leading my way while listening to my movement. Everything was so quiet that I felt like I had tinnitus. I could only hear the rustling white noise in my head. Settling into this darkness made me feel uneasy. So I paused my recording and followed up the trail.

Gail Sound 3

Visiting my elderly parents in their holiday home for the last time, as they will soon sell it. It’s stuffy and the dying bearings of fan they bought over 50 years ago sets the rhythm and tone. My father moves around then settles. I knit. We don’t do silence often in our family so this moment, heightened by the action of recording, feels both awkward and special.