Perceptual ghosts: a study in acousmêtre and observational documentary

In a documentary, voices are often synchronised with a visible speaker, which structures how a viewer may interpret a voice’s causal, spatial, and semantic information. That is, who is speaking, where they are speaking from, and what they mean to say. What a voice activates, in this form of listening, are any number of cultural codes and modes of signification. But how might voices be listened to, and contemplated differently, when the speakers are hidden? My creative practice research investigates this question within the sounds and voices among a reform Catholic order, the Friars of St. Francis. Through my research investigation of filming, sound recording, and editing, I find several ways to embody, synchronise, and dis-embody sounds and subjects over time, and provide juxtapositions through which a viewer can shift listening modes: navigating the semantic, causal, and textural information in voices, which are temporarily identifiable in compositions alongside sound and noise. In my exegesis, I analyse two documentaries which reflect Michel Chion’s idea of the acousmêtre, and consider how it may be possible, by recontextualising voices and sounds in a documentary, to find a more fluid relationship, and continuum, between causal listening, cultural signification, and listening that may bypass habitual modes and responses.