11. Listen Like A Fish

Feeling Sound — Episode 11

Listen Like A Fish

Hello, how are you doing? I hope you're well. Today I'm taking a walk around Whaley Bridge, dodging what turns out to be the back of a restaurant and half expecting the train to pass and make me jump. Whaley Bridge is where I spend a lot of my time doing sound baths and gong baths, at Riverside, Whaley Bridge, and I'm out here a little early before one of my sessions, so I thought I'd take a walk, head towards the canal basin, and have a chat with you about hearing, listening, and a little bit of silliness in the title of this episode. What if you could listen like a fish? I say that because today I'm blurring a few of my worlds - podcast producer, sound artist, field recorder, meditation teacher and sound therapist all at once. I love blurring these things, because creativity is just another way to get to meditation, and I love using technology to help people get there.

Right, I hate crossing this road. Some kind of party happening here. Whaley Bridge's main road is honestly the worst one to cross. Got away, got away, got away. I'm passing the railway pub, I can see the station, and I'm walking past whatever that coffee shop is where people always sit outside - it's actually a bike shop. All of that, and maybe this is the moment for you to tune into what you can hear too. Maybe it's cars right now. Over the course of this episode, together, we're going to listen to a lot of different sounds. It's a hot, warm summer evening, Wimbledon's still on, we've just had the World Cup, and there's that kind of buzzy energy in the air, people out, mingling, doing stuff. I really love noticing those little transitions, how the sounds and the energy shift as I move through a place.

Sound walking is something I've started doing more and more over the last few years, and I didn't even realise it was an actual, named thing - I've just been doing it for years without knowing there was a word for it. I'm walking past the chippy now - smells good, sounds good, looks busy. This is really about the difference between hearing and listening. You'll notice I use both those words. Hearing tends to be more passive, but listening takes effort - it's when we're analysing, decoding, working out what a sound is, where it's coming from, who it's coming from, and what our response to it is. A lot of that happens subconsciously. Different sounds affect different people in completely different ways. As a field recordist, I was once told by a colleague, who was creating soundscapes for people living in Brighton, that you'd think birdsong would be a universally relaxing sound - but for some people there, it terrified them, because it just made them think of seagulls swooping down and stealing their food. We all have different responses to different sounds, a bit like sound baths - some people love the gong, some people really can't stand it. That idea, of tuning in to what we listen to and how we respond to it, is what I want to explore today.

I'm also going to play you some clips from a recent sound walk, recorded using a variety of microphones, different ways of listening to the landscape. That particular landscape has been on my mind a lot lately, because it's been badly affected by a huge wildfire in the Peak District, in the area of Crowden. I've come to a bit of a dead end here, so I need to head the other way - I've reached the canal basin now, and I can see the cars slipping into the distance, passing some huge old cotton reels. They're actually quite beautiful.

wildfire that started in June: 2026

So today I want to recap some of the ideas behind deep listening - that's a term associated with the composer and self-described listening activist Pauline Oliveros, who I've mentioned a few times on this podcast, and also with Kay Lindahl, who wrote a beautiful book I keep coming back to, called The Sacred Art of Listening. It's actually quite busy down here at the canal basin, so it's probably not the best place for me to linger and record, so I think I'm going to head up what used to be a huge old tramway. I'm going up a hill, so I might get a bit breathless.

So who is this episode for? This idea of rethinking how we listen is really for people who find it hard to switch off. It certainly helps me. Our brains keep planning, narrating, processing - and even when we walk in nature, we can't quite land in it, can't quite be fully in the moment. Your mind might still be half somewhere else, maybe still thinking about work even once you've arrived at a gig or a sound bath, rather than fully in that moment, experiencing the sound in front of you. If you've never really thought of listening as something you could practice, then I hope this gives you something to think about.

Coming back to Kay Lindahl's book, I've scribbled all over it, because it makes me think about listening in so many different ways. One of the ideas that's really stayed with me is her sense that one of the most precious gifts we can give another person is to really listen to them - with quiet, fascinated attention, our whole being fully present. And that phrase, listening with our whole being, really stood out to me too. The idea that we listen beyond our ears - we listen with our bodies. Sometimes the sounds we're taking in aren't even received by our ears at all. I mentioned in a previous episode, when I was talking about menopause, some of the research into low frequency sound - for a lot of us, low frequency sound is so quiet, or so far below the human hearing range, below 20 hertz, that it's actually our bones and muscles doing the hearing, or the feeling, more than our ears. So it's about listening with the whole body, not just our ears.

This idea about time and attention isn't something we usually associate with listening, but it's so special, isn't it, when there are so many things distracting us today - phones, half listening to a friend while we're already thinking about what we're going to say back, or interrupting. Sometimes people don't want advice or a solution at all - they just want to be heard and understood. How many conversations have we had, in relationships or with family, in the middle of a disagreement, where that's really all that's needed? All of this comes back to the skill, the practice, of listening.

That brings me to Pauline Oliveros, an American composer, and something of a listening activist, who's since passed away, but who made an enormous dent in the world of electronic music. When I did the episode on silence a few weeks ago, this was something both Pauline and Kay talk about in their books - that silence isn't the absence of sound, but the space that makes real listening possible. That space in between is something so many of us are missing, when we're struggling with a full, overwhelmed mind and an endless to-do list, trying to keep up, do more, be more. Making listening a priority, stopping to really notice what's going on, what someone's trying to say, what I'm feeling, what's actually happening in my body right now, actually sounds quite radical when you put it like that.

The other theme running through both books is reflection - slowing down enough to let our true response surface, rather than just reacting. That's something I've talked about before around meditation, this gentle training of the mind that teaches us to slow down that instant emotional reaction, the monkey brain that kicks in by default when we feel triggered or challenged. So it's about slowing down rather than reacting, and also about presence - which is a strange thing to bring up when we're talking about listening. I imagine that wasn't top of your list when I mentioned the word, but presence is about connecting at the level of the heart, not just the head.

So, let's get listening. You can probably hear that where I've landed sounds very different to where I started this walk. The more I explore Whaley Bridge, the more I love it - people tend to think of it as just a road you drive through, maybe the A6, or that huge reservoir that almost flooded the town and had to be emptied. But what I find, the more I walk here, are these quiet little corners, these old medieval trackways of history. I'm walking along a muddy gravel path now, nettles and weeds to my left, trees to my right, an old dry stone wall half hidden behind the weeds, and a public footpath running under some really nice dappled shade. Not many birds yet, not quite sunset. This path I'm on now runs close to Goyt Mills - there used to be a tram that carried goods up and down here, and I'm right by it now. There's a stone engraved with what looks like 847B, and you can still see bits of the old train line, and where the trains used to turn. Rewind the clock a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty years, and this would have been noisy, bustling, industrial, without all these trees around - much more exposed, much more sky visible. Would it have been peaceful? I don't know. But I love thinking about places like that, from different points in time. Maybe you've got a space you walk through often - can you think about it from a few different perspectives too? I can hear someone walking behind me, having a good chat.

So wherever you are, here's a bit of an exercise, if you fancy taking your own sound walk - you could call it walking meditation, if that label works better for you, or just an opportunity to listen. First, notice the layers of where you are. I like to start close - what surface am I on, how does the air feel on my face, what's the temperature like - then move further out. I can actually see two butterflies chasing each other on this trail, and I don't know why, but I always love seeing two together. Then there's high and low - what's under your feet, is it crunchy gravel or, like here, not much gravel left and quiet shoes that won't crunch much at all - and then up high. No clouds today, so the sound might carry differently to how it would on a cloudy day, when the clouds almost act like a muffler, reflecting sound back down to earth. Then there's left and right. A lot of us listen through headphones, and I like recording in stereo - nothing particularly fancy, I keep it simple - but I love working with binaural sound, and some of the soundscapes on my Bandcamp use full 360 degree sound, where you can close your eyes and feel cars or people moving around you, and notice whether the sounds are different on the left or the right. One of my favourite places to try this is on a bridge, because if there's water running underneath, one side often sounds completely different to the other, and it's just not something people usually think to notice.

There's a little task for you today - that sound has depth, if you go looking for it. It's simply an observation practice. The next thing is dropping the idea of liking or disliking a sound - listening beyond judgement. We're not deciding whether a sound is nice or annoying, we're just letting it exist, and that's a really useful skill to bring into meditation, or sound baths too - starting to notice the sensation that comes up, or the story attached to a sound, without getting caught up in it, just letting it come like a wave or a cloud, and then letting it wash away. It's a bit like listening to a new album - you don't know it all yet, so you're just letting the sounds arrive, rather than skipping ahead the way we do with playlists these days, jumping straight to the next thing instead of sticking with an album all the way through. My challenge to you, and to myself, is to stick with it, and to listen with curiosity - whether that's a soundscape, or wherever you happen to be walking. Maybe it's the endless strimmers in a quiet neighbourhood, someone perfecting their garden, maybe it's screaming kids, or a barking dog - some of them are pretty yappy, aren't they.

You might even try thinking about the shape of a sound - how high or low it is. If you had to draw it on paper, what would it look like? One line? A few squiggles? An oval, a triangle? What that's really doing is using sound as a way to practice being with discomfort - and so many people talk to me about anxiety. Sometimes the antidote to anxiety is learning how to be with it, so that it eventually dissolves, starts to fade, because you've acknowledged it, you've seen it, and it stops having quite the same grip. For me, listening, and sound baths, are just another way of thinking about that.

Then there's finding the gap - noticing where sounds start and where they end, whether there's a silence between them. A few years ago, I spent quite a long time trying to record the sound of rain for a soundscaped monologue performance - I needed it as the pinnacle of the piece, and because I was after lots of different rain sounds, I basically had to wait around for it to actually start raining, which was pretty funny given where I live. But one thing I noticed, when it rains, is that some of the birds near me go quiet, and then as the rain eases off, they come back singing - something I'd never have noticed if I hadn't learned to sit with that moment and look for those subtle changes, the gap, the presence, the shift.

The next one is listening with your whole body - noticing where a sound actually lands, whether that's a vibration in your chest, in your feet on the ground, or through your hands on a surface. Just starting to notice how different sounds land, how you feel them, how you receive them - these are all signals our bodies are giving us all the time, we just don't always notice when we're not in the habit of paying attention. And the last one is stealth listening - these little mini meditations, opportunities to be more mindful in everyday life, rather than the more formal practice of sitting down for five, ten, fifteen minutes. Brushing your teeth, waiting for the kettle to boil - all these small windows are sonic meditations just waiting to happen. I remember, when I lived in Manchester, waiting for trams at Cornbrook, which is a brilliant spot for this, because there's so much to take in - trains passing left and right, people moving around you, building work going on - and if it felt safe to do so, I'd close my eyes and try to listen more deeply, without the visual cues.

Then there's the rise of the Merlin Bird app, which is genuinely brilliant - you hit the microphone button and it tells you what birds are singing around you. I've used it in all sorts of countries and I love it, but it can also stop us from truly listening, because we're so quick to want to know what a sound is, rather than just being with it. When people hear a bird, the first thing they usually do, if they can, is look for it - trying to spot a kingfisher or a woodpecker or a cuckoo, when actually, I've heard all three many times and never once seen any of them. So instead of leaning on sight, we can lean on listening instead - that's the stealth listening practice in action. All of these are just tools for deep listening in everyday life, whether you're out in nature or in a city. I do this practice in London a lot, actually - one of my favourite moments is moving from the street, down into an underground station, onto the tube, and back out onto the street again. I love those little transitions, when you're really tuned into where you are and what's happening around you - different languages, announcements, station names you've never heard before, whether you're in London, Paris or New York, noticing those small differences, like the platform gaps or the flooring underfoot. It's a slow, noticing way of living, just done with our ears instead of our eyes.

To finish, I want to play you a few clips from the sound walk we took in May, so you can hear a bit of why I love playing around with different microphones. The first clip is from a geophone - microphones that are normally used to record seismic activity, so if there's an earthquake, a geophone picks up the low frequency movement. More recently, sound artists have got hold of them to capture samples, or just to listen to the world in a different way - sticking them on bridges, or onto rock, or mud. It's definitely worth Googling - geophone. On our sound walk, we tried a couple of things with it - first, sticking it onto an old, rickety wooden bridge and tapping and banging on it, and then, with another participant, pushing it into some old moss and rocks in a disused quarry. It's gritstone rock round here, which is why this area's known as the Dark Peak. We couldn't hear much at the time, but once I got home and did some editing and amplifying, there was clearly something happening - you can hear a motorbike and a train passing in the background. So that first clip is us banging around and being a bit silly, and the second is those tiny, quiet crackles from the rock - it's honestly hard to put into words, but I find it fascinating that you can look at a rock and think, how could I possibly listen to that? And there you go - point proven, it's absolutely possible.

The next clip is from a binaural 360 degree microphone, which we placed beside a fast flowing brook, right on a rock in the middle of the water. I'll give you a good stretch of this one - close your eyes, and you can pretend you're standing in the middle of a brook in the Peak District, at Crowden. And then, sticking with water, I want to take you underwater - back to that idea of listening like a fish. A hydrophone is brilliant for recording underwater, and in that same spot in the brook, you can now slip beneath the surface and listen from there instead, just for a few moments. We captured loads of other sounds on that walk too - a conch shell, blown into and echoing across a quarry, and a huge elastic band tied between two trees, which made this strange, vibrating sound when the wind caught it. It was just a brilliant opportunity to play, and that's what I think this kind of technology gives us - the chance to listen from new perspectives, and to see the world with a bit of childlike curiosity again. I do these things I call audio postcards, recordings I capture as I travel, and I invite other people to send in their own too - you can find them over on my Bandcamp, everything from cafes in Vietnam to the jungle in Thailand.

So I'm going to round things up here, as I'm about ready to grab a drink at the co-op - if you know Whaley Bridge, you'll know exactly where that puts me. I'll leave you with something Kay Lindahl says, about what it means to truly listen - offering another person our whole being, fully present. So here's what I'd ask you: when did you last truly listen, rather than just hear? Maybe try tuning into the furthest sound you can reach right now, wherever you are, without moving, just using your ears. And what might rest feel like, if you arrived at it through curiosity, rather than collapse? Maybe listening, and practising that, could be your way in. As the cars pass left to right and back again, and people grab their last bits of shopping before the sun goes down, I'll sign off, as I always do, with the sound of the sea - recorded, this time, at Cemlyn Bay in Anglesey - just for a few moments, before you head off to whatever's next. Have a great rest of your day. See you soon.