A listening archive and critical analysis of cassette recordings of young voices on music and distress
Being heard does not guarantee being fully understood
“Above all, we all want to be heard. We want to be understood: heard in accordance with what we believe we are saying.”
Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand
This archive brings together selected excerpts from cassette recordings of young voices gathered during the shared listening, mediation and working process developed through the ~BODIES workshop-laboratory.
Their names have been replaced by numbers to protect their identities, voices and words. The recordings were also transcribed and translated into Morse code for listening and reading in the related publications. All the original audio files were analysed with algophony and AKOÚŌ, and the results were published on the associated web platform, together with the modes of listening, spectrograms, waveforms and technical data for each file.
The original recordings were also transcribed, and a concise synthesis of their content and key phrases is presented. Every transcription and translation, every technology and process used in this analytical device and web platform, and language itself with all its codes, functions as a form of anonymisation: it protects the participants’ identities while revealing the impossibility of fully understanding their thoughts and feelings.
What enables us to be heard does not guarantee that we will be understood.
“A language learned solely by listening, whose highly recognisable signal is used to ask for help”
International Telecommunication Union, on Morse code.
Note:
Transcription is understood as a technical mediation. It may contain errors, omissions, inventions, hallucinations, unintended translations or imprecise phrases. The analysis distinguishes measurement, transcription, inference and interpretation. Sensitive phrases must be treated with care, like the people, opinions, thoughts and emotions to which they belong.
A project forming part of Mikel R. Nieto’s Horizontal Listening research programme, in collaboration with La Panera (Lleida) and with support from the Spanish Ministry of Culture through the “Public Grants for the Creation, Research and Production of Artistic Projects in Residence” (2025).
