itinerant space

As a part of Bryan’s ongoing practice-based inquiry on self-sonification, Phantom V3 is a sound installation that investigates self-listening as an unstable, embodied, and recursive auditory process. The work consists of a double-pendulum-inspired rotating microphone system situated within a spatial arrangement of pre-recorded cassette tapes containing sonic materials gathered through Bryan’s self-listening practice, including sonic memories, earworm interruptions, tinnitus, bodily sounds, remembered voices, and other sonic traces of lived experience. As the motor rotates, the microphone moves unpredictably through space, generating a fluctuating relation between capture, playback, orientation, and sonic reappearance. A further layer of the system is its feedback structure, where the collected sound also influences the motor’s behaviour, producing a recursive loop in which listening shapes movement, and movement in turn reshapes listening.

Conceptually, the work extends Hildegard Westerkamp’s notion of the ‘microphone ear’ beyond field recording into an installation context, where the microphone becomes not simply a neutral recording device but an unstable listening body within a constructed soundscape of self-memory. In this way, Phantom V3 proposes self-sonification as the materialisation of a shifting process through which the self becomes audible to itself. The installation therefore stages self-listening as a dynamic ecology of attentional, bodily orientation and recursive affective response. As a research extract, Phantom V3 occupies a significant stage in Bryan’s doctoral inquiry by translating theoretical concerns around self-sonification into a materialised, artistic, and operative system. It functions both as an artwork and as a methodological experiment, a means of testing how autobiographical sonic material, mechanical unpredictability, and feedback-based behaviour can jointly externalise the fluctuating and often nonlinear nature of self-listening. In doing so, the work contributes to a broader rethinking of sonification, shifting it away from the auditory display of stable datasets and toward the qualitative, and experiential dimensions of lived auditory experience.

Phantom V3 sits at the core of my doctoral research trajectory, which investigates self-sonification as a qualitative and practice-based expansion of traditional data sonification. Rather than treating sonification as the auditory display of measurable data, my research asks how sound can materialise lived, embodied, and introspective experience. In this context, Phantom V3 functions as a research extract that tests self-listening as an unstable and recursive process through an artistically practical, operationalised rotating microphone system, cassette-based sonic memory, and feedback-responsive motor behaviour. The intention of the extract is to move the research from the interdisciplinary theoretical proposition into practical testing. At this stage, I am exploring how self-listening may be staged as a generative and dynamic field shaped by unpredictability, memory, and embodied response. The extract takes the research toward a more ecological, processual, and practical understanding of selfhood, distributed across media, movement, and sonic recurrence, offering both conceptual and methodological insights: conceptually, it suggests that selfhood exploration may be approached sonically through listening and externalisation; methodologically, it demonstrates how practice-based installation can operate as a form of inquiry into listening, where knowledge arises through the iterative development of autobiographical sound materials, moving microphone systems, and feedback-responsive mechanics. More broadly, it potentially contributes to sound art and sonification discourse by proposing that recursive auditory environments can serve as a means of researching the self’s unstable relation to memory, bodily sensation, and mediated internal sonic phenomena.