Phonating Hand Dryers: exploits in aural diverse composition and co-composition

The talk will chart and underline a series of concerns that have coalesced under the terms auraldiversity and auraltypical hearing (Drever 2015). Driven out of a desire to communicate research findings in an apt manner, this narrative will specifically explore the creative and interpretative practice that has accompanied a standard quantitative acoustic study of the noise impact of high-speed hand dryers in public WCs (Drever 2013) . On embracing the scope and complexity of aural diversity, however, finding an apt manner has been far from straightforward and is ongoing. Departing from the imposition of the composer’s ear towards a greater awareness of auditory positionality, the series of hand dryer sonic works (including acousmatic, site-specific installation, gallery and live performance) represent a range of composer /performer/ audience relationships, the most successful of which have been a process/ workshop based compositional approach bringing together multiple authors through the method of phonating, an approach that echoes and yet challenging Tomatis’ Law on Audition and Phonation: ‘The voice reproduces only what the ear can hear’ (Tomatis 1963/ 1996:87).