Headphone Theater and the Performance of Perception

This chapter examines the use of binaural sound technologies in headphone theater to stage and exploit multimodal perception. Drawing on Lars Elleström’s framework of the modalities of mediation, it examines the specific mediality of headphone-conveyed sound and its corporeal consumption, arguing that headphone theatre stages the performance of the listener’s perception. Listening involves the embodied reception of and participation in what Marshall McLuhan calls ‘auditory space’ and is explored here in four examples of headphone theatre. In Darkfield’s Séance, the audience are seated in the dark, while in Lundahl & Seitl’s Symphony of a Missing Room, sight is restricted though the audience is mobile. Requardt&Rosenberg’s The Roof, experienced by a standing, collective audience, and Silvia Mercuriali’s Swimming Home, experienced in the privacy of one’s bathroom, play with the interaction of audio and visual information and intersensory effects. Headphone theatre facilitates a form of self-aware immersion that draws attention to multimodal perception, with emphasis on visual imagination, haptic response, audiovisual processing, and proprioception, demanding self-reflection from the inside-out. The chapter argues for the capacity of headphone theatre to stage the performance of aural perception and to highlight the porous relationship between self and environment; audience members are provided a heightened awareness of their own body schema and being in the world.