Listening In Towards Sound: creating soundscapes to sound our presence

Employing the arts based methodology Performative Inquiry, attending to emergent moments, those of surprise and discovery, I am inquiring and listening in towards where sound, performance, identity, and place intersect. I am interested in how sound performs identity, how identity is performed by sound, how we can relate to place through sound, and what forms of knowledge are held in sound beyond the lingual. This research inquires into how students and educators, as co-researchers, perform and are performed by deeply listening with and into our environments as we create soundscapes to sound our presences. I explore these performances, researching while in a holistic pedagogic environment in a Montessori middle school classroom. What do we attend to? Why are we attached to certain sounds while others are ignored? What becomes highlighted into the mix and what becomes muted into silence? What stops us? Why does it matter if we listen?