Listening to be heard
My introduction to New Constellations was when I was invited to Gemma’s house on Dartmoor to record some early thinking about what became, and in essence already was, New Constellations. I’ve done much more complicated things in audio before, and since, than sitting in on those initial conversations under blankets by the fire, holding out a recorder in my extended, weakening arm. But it was the start of a relationship with New Constellations that has allowed me to push the boundaries of what I had been doing with sound and interviews to that point.
My interest in audio is using it as a tool to help people communicate. That sounds obvious and perhaps is, but it is in thinking really hard and really carefully about what that means in different situations that I have found the most effective and interesting things come about.
Honestly, a lot of people come to me and tell me they want to make a podcast. And I am the world's biggest fan of ‘podcasts’ (and it is how I make a living), but even so, often my advice is, “don’t make a podcast, you don’t need one, and it isn’t going to do what you think it will.” Defaulting to making a podcast is a very limited way of thinking about what’s possible, and I think people should be more imaginative. That said, we actually did make a podcast first, kind of. I’ve written about that already, here.
As we enter a much slower, more introspective place, I’m going to write about some of the more adventurous and experimental excursions in audio that I have been grateful to explore as part of New Constellations. Lots of people can articulate the power of the recorded voice, of radio better than I can, and I'm not going to do this here. But I have developed, with the others, some methodologies for using recorded sound as part of the New Constellations Journey process which I think are both effective, and different enough to be worth sharing. Something that taps into the unique potential of audio for self and group reflection. Something which makes use of all the different ways of speaking, hearing and listening at the individual and collective level.
To briefly explain this, a couple of weeks before every journey we send each individual participant a series of prompts on cards, with a phone number to call to leave a voice message. The prompts are tailored for each journey and group, but the questions people are asked are simple; Who are you? Where do you live? What are some of your hopes, what needs to change? It doesn’t feel particularly intrusive of us to ask that because it’s so mundane. All this happens before anyone has any idea of what they will be doing on the journey.
When people get together on the first day of the journey, they gather in a circle and listen to a 10-15 minute audio piece into which I have edited their voice along with everyone else’s in the group. One by one they listen to one another, the group of strangers sat in front of them, before they know much at all about who each other are.
Participants on the journey often have at least one thing in common, perhaps they work in the same sector, or live in the same place. But in lots of ways these groups are always extremely diverse, and many may think they have little in common with others in the group when they first walk into the room.
10-15 minutes is a long time to collectively listen to something, there are moments of awkwardness, fidgeting, and powerful moments of connection as these different people are heard responding to the same prompts.
Most people are not used to hearing themselves at all, and when they hear their own, familiar voice combined with other people’s, something magic happens. Something in that experience binds people together.
Watching these connections form through the experience of listening together has been amongst the most emotionally powerful moments of my career, if not my life. What people realise is that they are not alone, that they love and fear the same things, and that is an instant way to make people realise that they are not so different from one another. It sets the scene for difficult conversations. People have cried, we have cried, in those sessions. I think somebody crying is a good metric for stuff I try and make. It would be a problematic, very creepy thing to design for, and I don't, but people cry for lots of reasons and when it happens it shows that some connection has been made or something is unlocked.
Even in recent journeys when we know what is coming, we are often blown away by the power that this process has. For the people of the group, everything after that first listening session is never quite the same again.
But for each group, you have one shot. Once the genie of this first playback is out the bottle, it can’t be put back in. We do similar things later with recording and playback in the process, and these have their use and value, but it’s never the same as that first time. We have learnt this through experience over several iterations of the process; the tone and mood changes as soon as people understand and are conscious of what’s planned. When we invite people to make further recordings, they try to perform and say things they know will be powerful, or communicate a particular idea or version of themselves. They know they are being listened to and they feel a responsibility or a desire to control their output to some extent.
Making these things can be strange in the sense that I can feel very close to people who I've often never met, or closer to those that I have, in ways that are not informed by mutual interaction or experience. I have seen that closeness reflected in them also, which is stranger still, and something which does not happen in anything like the same way with other forms of documentary making, audio or otherwise.
After that first playback, people often start talking directly to me on the subsequent recordings they might do. “Hey Jo, hope you are well”, “Hey Jo, I’m feeling a bit tired today so please try to edit this accordingly”, “Hey Jo, I played the audio to my husband and…”. Something has shifted. It feels like therapy, and I’m the therapist. For the record, I’m not a therapist but I have done a lot of interviewing, and this process can feel like it’s providing something for people. I hope it does.
The issue of consent is something we have grappled with and still take very seriously. The recorded tape can be at times emotional and raw, even with the simplicity of the questions posed. People can feel exposed and vulnerable. It’s this that makes the process powerful, but it’s a huge responsibility and essential that we are aware of our power and manage that carefully. We secure formal written consent to use people's recordings, but the responsibility is really in the editing – to make sure that you are doing your best to reflect people as they would hope to be heard.
The journey audio is for the 15-20 participants in the room. In many cases the group has chosen to share a version of their audio journey with the world to communicate their experience of the process, but this has not always been the case. We need everyone's consent to share more widely and there are lots of reasons why people choose not to. Consent is not assumed and we check with people at every stage of the process.
Working on the journey audio, and some of the other experiments we have done with sound, has reaffirmed my belief that there is so much that can be done to challenge the expectations of what recorded sound is and can and should be used for. Having worked in ‘audio’ (by which I mean podcasts mostly, if not exclusively) for many years now, what we have done at New Constellations feels unusual and it feels new. It’s not a podcast, although much of it is released as such. It's not sound art, though we try to make it with artistic intent. It’s not purely a facilitation tool, though it is in part this. It’s something more, and hard to define simply because it’s so ingrained in the approach to the whole of what we are doing with the journey process and New Constellations more widely.
There are a lot of people who have tried to replicate what we do. I don’t think it has universally been as successful and I think I know the reason for this. It’s only going to work if it’s given the time and care and attention it needs. Asking people to record down a phone line is not the innovation.
The thing that has made this work is the everything.
I was very quickly sucked in by the energy and vision that Gemma radiated when I met her in January 2020, and it has continued to sustain and inspire me. So much openness, trust and drive to do things and make change is what characterises this whole experience for me. What sprouted as New Constellations was a combination of the specific qualities and experiences of Gemma, Iris, Lily, myself and many others we have worked with over the last several years. It’s felt like people have brought their whole selves to the creative process, and I see the mark of these people in everything we have made together. When it comes to the audio we have made and played for people, it wouldn’t be the same, or even work, without Lily’s attention in making participants comfortable, Iris’s framing and reassurance when we play out, or Gemma’s vision which is thread through it all.
Attention is a word I have thought about a lot in working for New Constellations. New Constellations has given attention to things. It has noticed things and it has paid attention to those things. The attention also comes with care; everyone seriously cares and if they didn’t it would have unravelled.
It’s everything, the people and the process, the attention and the care that’s made the audio so powerful, and it’s happened at New Constellations only because we allowed ourselves the time and space to think about that everything at a deep level and push to make it work. Audio has been not just a tool, but completely integrated in everything else that happens. It’s a process that relies on people’s engagement and trust. You can’t fake it, you feel it or don’t feel it. And if you don’t, it doesn’t work.
Here are a few examples of audio pieces we have created on journeys, with gratitude to all the crews whose voices you hear:
To explore all our 50+ audio encounters, including several from other journeys and many more with people and communities who have guided our thinking, visit newconstellations.co/listen/ or search ‘New Constellations’ wherever you listen to podcasts.