Hope as Very Low Frequency Practice (A Side): Listening as Being-With Uncertainty

This chapter, the “A Side” to the third chapter in this volume, explores hope, uncertainty, and non-conforming gender in relation to experimental sound practices with very low frequency (VLF) signals. VLF radio signals—normally imperceptible without specially tuned antenna-receivers—are pervasive in urban and natural environments, emanating from both atmospheric and technical sources (including earthly and cosmic weather, electronic equipment, and the urban electrical grid). As such, attuning to these signals can work to complicate normative human/non-human, artificial/natural, and perceptible/imperceptible boundaries. Through reflections on a collaborative VLF project (entitled Split Solstice, created with Owen Chapman), experimental sound and listening practices are considered as methods for attunement to difference and emergence, and for the ongoing renewal of relations with our surroundings. Transness, considered as an experimental, improvised practice and capacious unsettling force, can work to challenge received (colonial, capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchal) notions of consensus reality, opening possible worlds and forms of embodiment that are viable but often remain unimaginable or inarticulable within dominant frames of reference. Conceived as a deep longing for freedom, an open-ended question, something that may always remain in motion, transness echoes sound’s movement, ongoing mutations, and resistance to full containment. This chapter considers what less extractive, situated, and collective forms of listening might sound like, and how these approaches might amplify capacities for sensing perspectives, bodies, and forms of relation that usually go unheard and unrecognized, and that may require different forms of attention to be perceived.