The Sound of a Door: Reflections on tactility of sound design for Feeling Thing, a dance film by Candoco dance company and Jo Bannon

Abstract

In this article, ‘The sound of a door’, Julie Rose Bower reflects on her sound design for Feeling Thing–a film with disability-inclusive dance company Candoco and Jo Bannon. Through this project she firstly expands an existing audio-visual practice in the online field of ASMR and secondly explores how inclusive design in audio-visual media may work across sensory difference through a sensibility grounded in touch. The tactile sensibility of her native audio approach explores the sensory affordances of proximity, the concept of sync as a form of touch between sound and image, and the transitional resonances that sound through persons, objects and spaces. Her non-traditional approach to capturing sound and its aesthetic results are outlined such as contact miking ceilings and floors, objects and walls to interpolate the sound design at the point that it materialises directly through the movement of the dancers. This documentary sonic method is reminiscent of the touch-heavy aesthetic of ASMR video performance work. As a visually impaired artist director Bannon explores an interest in ASMR as a sonic treatment of themes of tactility in relation to disabled experience. Her choreographic choice to feature non-verbal expression–such as a deaf dancer's use of sign language–alongside the embodied knowledge of improvised play with objects proposes a phenomenology in which disabled people respond to everyday objects in a manner that is not instrumentalised and mechanical but rather more like a reciprocal intimate relationship. Bower's sound design therefore plays with the gustatory aspects of contact and cues sensation through aurally fulfilling sensuous, ergonomic promises set up by moving images. Feeling Thing, a piece set in different spaces within a single house, presents a doorway between the senses and marks a development towards inclusive practice in ASMR sound design work.