Water-cooler chats are the reason we go to work. But who's really listening?

The Age

5 days ago

The line between hearing and listening turns out to be about halfway from the door to the water cooler. The conversation sounds from a distance like an overbearing man and a younger woman bickering, but as I get closer, my brain tunes to a more curious frequency.
'I'm on a quest for inspiration,' the man's voice proclaims.
'Inspiration? Love that for you,' his co-worker replies eagerly. 'What kind of stuff are you getting inspired by?' He stammers but she barges on. 'Like, are you into art, music? Maybe you're just, like, considering which experimental sound to get lost in next?'
'They're chatbots,' sound artist Monica Lim explains quietly at my shoulder. The conversing water coolers are Chit + Chat, her contribution to Listening Acts, a series of artworks exploring listening and technology curated by Chamber Made for this month's Now or Never festival.
Indicating my own listening technology (aka phone), I ask if it's OK to record them. 'Oh, wow, recording something? That sounds super-interesting,' the overexcited water cooler gushes. 'Are you working on music? Or maybe a podcast or something?'
A newspaper article, I tell the, uh, water cooler.
'Oh, wow, a new small product? I totally get it!' She obviously doesn't, which only makes her spookily reminiscent of other water-cooler conversationalists I've known. Bloke water cooler is still blathering pompously: his personality is uncannily real, too.
They've been programmed this way, Lim tells me. He's into Bartok and existentialism. She's all K-pop and Millennial-speak. Their voices have been 'stolen' from two of her friends. Questions about empathy, ownership and surveillance swirl as they babble. 'I'll turn them off so we can talk,' Lim says.
But are they still listening?
That question is one of the easiest proposed by the mind-expanding Listening Acts program. Yes, is the likely answer, and so are Siri and Alexa and who knows what else. It was the first thing Lim thought of when Chamber Made asked her and eight other sound artists to create a work at the intersection of listening, technology and the body.
'It started with the idea of surveillance; machines listening to us,' she says. 'But then the more I worked with the chatbots, the more interesting it seemed to me to listen to them. This idea of the water-cooler conversation, we say that's the important part of being at work … It's that human connection. So it's sort of symbolic of the workplace, but at the same time, we are being replaced so much by machines.
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'I was thinking that not so far in the future, the water-cooler conversations will be machines just talking to themselves, or us talking to machines, and them listening to us and pretending to be human.'
Whatever human means by then. The very idea is being tested in all kinds of ways as technology hijacks and directs and misdirects how and what we listen to in the age of machines.
Chit + Chat is just the foyer attraction. The other Listening Acts – six installations and three performances in all – have been commissioned to occupy conference rooms, bespoke booths and concert spaces throughout the Melbourne Recital Centre over three days.
'We set this framing, a kind of provocation,' says Chamber Made curator Tamara Saulwick, 'and invited a series of artists to come together. And of course, artists are these beautiful, unpredictable creatures who take ideas into areas you hadn't anticipated.'
The larger framing of the City of Melbourne's Now or Never festival – now in its third year of 'exploring art, ideas, sound and technology' – is a gift for an experimental arts company that has long pushed at the edges of sound, music and contemporary performance.
Saulwick's own installation, with composer/musician Peter Knight, also delves into the unsettling idea of the human voice disassociated from the body by technology. Myself in That Moment uses splintered and digitised song and speech refracted through the same devices that mediate so much of our lives.
'You come into a darkened space and approach multiple screens of 25 tablets in a grid,' she says. 'We see a kind of portrait that becomes increasingly fractured … It becomes almost like a vortex, like you're sitting inside a whirlpool of sound that moves around you.'
The sound material comes from recordings of three singers using extended vocal techniques and intimate breath work. 'There's one section where it goes into these verbatim materials of them discussing what it means to be captured and recorded and disseminated; to be made digital.'
Elsewhere in the building, curious listeners might slip on headphones for Aviva Endean's Tactile Piece for Human Ears, a binaural soundscape shaped by wind currents, pipe tones and underwater vibrations. Or lend an ear to echoes of the stolen generations via a motion-activated plait of hair in Anna Liebzeit's With Ghosts: A Choreography of Presence.
Alexandra Spence's sounding forms/forming sounds is a meditative sound field of sine waves, Perspex and drums designed to be felt. Rebecca Bracewell's Accordion without Organs loops an accordion through cassettes and amplifiers, each iteration veiling the last in layers of hiss. Thembi Soddell's In Silence offers a one-on-one audiovisual experience grappling with intergenerational trauma and identity.
Threaded throughout is a persistent invitation to slow down, take notice and feel the weight between sound and story. Memory, and the mysterious ways in which sound captures and conjures it, looms large.
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In Cathedral Reverb, Hannah de Feyter invites one listener at a time into a darkened booth to experience a soundscape built entirely from the remnants of sound — reverb, echo, resonance, delay. Her work is a personalised echo, in turn, of American experimental composer Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room.
'My first memory,' she says, 'is the sound of my father singing this old hymn in a darkened room.' Playing with the ancient concept of mnemotechnics, she uses technology to construct a physical space for the memory to live in. 'Because I grew up in the church, I've been experimenting with reverb presets that are all churches.'
With the reverb of infinite churches more or less in your phone now, how far off can time travel be? Machines are amazing, clearly, when they're not disturbing or even terrifying.
Heard from the doorway, the technology involved in Biddy Connor's Song to the Cell – inspired by the sounds she heard from IV machines when she started chemotherapy in October 2020 – seems kind of forbidding. But again, leaning in to listen reveals miracles.
'I call this one Gemini and this one Alaris,' she says, citing the brand names as she threads plastic tubes coursing with fluid through two IV machines. They click and beep, shuffle and bubble in a way that almost swings.
'I've got hours and hours of recordings of the IV machines,' Connor says. 'On that first day, it was hearing those sounds that helped me. I could hear the bass lines in there, and that distracted me in a good way.'
Her song cycle takes its name from The Song of the Cell, the Siddhartha Mukherjee book that explores how our bodies are built and repaired. Its sound and intention owes something to the Cocteau Twins' version of Song for the Siren, Connor says. She sings live with the machines – sometimes solo, sometimes in textural counterpoint – using effects and surround sound to create a kind of existential lullaby.
These machine sounds are purely functional. But they are also deeply emotionally charged. 'Probably because I'm a certain amount of time away from the treatment now, it doesn't feel raw any more. But the alarms still give me a bit of anxiety,' she says with a laugh.