Brandon LaBelle : Coming together to share ideas, knowledges and practices is an essential part of The Listening Biennial, especially in ways that enhance local perspectives while finding connections across social, cultural settings and histories. To begin this collective conversation, I thought to ask each of you to briefly introduce yourselves, and also to say a few words about your interest in listening — how does listening play a part in your work?
Dayang Yraola : I was born in an art-engaged environment. My mother was an ethnomusicologist and my father and his entire family are musicians. I attended the University of the Philippines area studies program, but my practice mainly is in arts management, collections management and curatorship.
At that time, I already had a curatorial practice, which was why I accepted the task with much hesitation. The collection contains hours of magnetic tapes that had to be played in real-time while digitizing.
After so many hours of listening to chants, gongs, and whatever else, one gets bored no matter how interesting the subject. To entertain myself, I shifted my attention to incidental sounds that were captured in the recordings such as a baby crying, dogs barking, a door creaking. This sparked my interest, which later brought me to find out more about sound studies, then later to sound art. To cut the long story short, this has brought me to study R.
Michael Brewster. This also led me to start focusing my curatorial practice on sound. My work now is more on documenting the ecology of practitioners who are working with sound. There is not one book written about sound practices in the Philippines.
