SpokenWeb Podcast

Welcome to the SpokenWeb Podcast, which is a series of stories about how literature sounds. [Music fades]

My name is Hannah McGregor–

And each month, we’ll be bringing you different stories that explore the intersections of sound, poetry, literature, and history created by scholars, poets, students and artists from across Canada.

Along the way, they start to rethink the texture of how they move through life.

Now, sit back, get comfortable in your body, and enjoy Season 6, episode 4 of the SpokenWeb Podcast: “From Me to You, a Sonic Glimpse at Proprioception.”

Walking down the street [sound of steps], proprioception.

Playing the drums [sound of drums], proprioception.

Reading a book [sound of pages flipping], yeah, funnily enough, proprioception.

I’ve known Maia for a few years. We work together and do other stuff. [Laughter]

Actually, I don’t really know what it is or why it’s relevant to someone who’s in the humanities, like Maia.

Let’s start with a simple definition. To cite Gary Merrill in his book Our Intelligent Bodies. Proprioception is the sense of the relative position of one’s body in space and time. So a spatiotemporal orientation, which means that–

Can you just back up a little bit there?

It all started in 1826 when Charles Bell began to study the anatomy of the brain-to-limb connection–

So, your body is always in space and time, right?

It’s our sense of our own body in space and time.

So, your sitting body position in this room, for example, or your body position when you walk and navigate the space of, say, like a sidewalk, these are spatial and temporal states.

Your body and your sense of it are relative always to an object in space, to space, or even our own body, just five seconds ago.

Think you’re knowing how, if you close your eyes and you put your hand behind your head, you’re aware that it’s there. That awareness of your own body is your proprioception. And this sense, what you feel with your eyes closed, is what helps to maintain one’s sense of orientation, one’s sense of balance.

It’s as simple as that.

To see, I have my eyes.

To hear, I have my ears.

What about the proprioception? Is that a verb?

But to address your question first, we have these things called “proprioceptors,” which are receptors deep in one’s body and tissues. These proprioceptors sense a variety of stimuli having to do primarily with movement, from velocity to vibration to deep pressure. This information is monitored via the central nervous system and is signalled to the brain.

But I don’t want to oversimplify it because proprioception is actually a “distributed sense.”

It’s not in or of any single bodily location, nor informed by any single kind of stimuli. Our five major senses also contribute to proprioception.

We do, well, we’re always relative to a source of sound. And that sense of our relative position to that source of sound is an aspect of how we orient ourselves.

James can explain it better than me, though.

Let me introduce you to James Healy.

Basically, the only way that we know where a sound is coming from, if your eyes are closed, is because of your ears.

[You] have your pinna. What that will do is taper down high frequencies coming from behind you. It will absorb some really high frequencies and let the “lows” wrap-around, which means that if you hear that quality, it means that something is behind you.

Because of the way they’re facing, they’re not absorbing the same high frequencies as if something’s in front of you.

So, if you were to chop up your ear or something, like pull a little Van Gogh thing or whatever, you actually would have a lot of trouble figuring out where things were.

But what if I told you that isn’t the whole story?

Allow me to defer to our next guest, Théo. [A keyboard click, followed by a chime of an incoming video call]

After finishing my Bachelor’s degree in Media Informatics, I actually started off with a degree in Audio Engineering. [Keyboard click]

Here, he is describing his project. [Keyboard click]

The position of the instruments relative to yourself influences how the music is being processed and ultimately heard.

My aim with this project was to build a virtual reality application that reconnects users with the spatial characteristics of sound by allowing them to mix audio in a fully three-dimensional environment. Proprioception is an essential part of my project as it bridges the user’s physical presence with the virtual space in the real world. We naturally use our body’s awareness to orient ourselves, understand distances, and locate sounds.

My goal is to replicate and enhance this connection in virtual reality, where spatial audio is not just something we hear but something that helps users feel embedded within the environment. [Keyboard click]

With spatial music mixing, the goal shifts to recreating a more authentic auditory experience by treating each sound as a discrete entity existing in a 3D space, free to move and adapt based on the listener’s position. [Keyboard click]

This interplay engages proprioception, allowing users to feel their position within space and making the virtual environment feel tangible and responsive. Proprioception, therefore, comes into play not just as a means of feeling present but as an integral part of how users interact with the virtual environment.

As they move, the spatiality of sound continuously informs their perception of the world around them. This combination of spatial audio and proprioception makes the virtual environment more than just a visual or auditory experience. It becomes an embodied interactive space that adapts to the user’s movement and perspective, creating a more intuitive and immersive sense of presence. [Keyboard click]

I feel like these days, everybody’s plugged into their headphones all the time. And when we listen to music, or we’re watching something with our headphones, all of that sound is just inside our heads, between our ears.

Because I come from a theatre background, which is very open and communal. But I think that we, as listeners of sound in every context, deserve better than that. Like, we deserve to feel the sound in our body. And to really like “propriocept it.” [Laughter]

Meet Eija. [A chime of an incoming video call]

I just finished my master’s in Art Education at Concordia University. I’m an artist and a scholar. I come from a background in fine arts. I’ve recently been becoming an academic [Laughs], and my work has to do mostly with, I guess, studying, augmenting, and disrupting how bodies move through urban spaces. [Keyboard click]

So my project, in kind of broad strokes, is about how moving through public architectural spaces is really actually an educative experience. So, my thesis project looks specifically at the architecture of Montreal’s underground metro system. It was useful for me to look at a highly programmed structure. Therefore, the metro is a place in the city where bodies have to be highly organized in order to move efficiently through space. And it has to be able to accommodate, like, a lot of flux of movement. And there’s a very kind of obvious rhythm structure of those spaces. Therefore, I investigate the dominant movement patterns of those spaces through experimental long-exposure photography. And also so experimental performative, like sonic investigations, I would say. [Keyboard click]

Here, she discusses Lawrence and Anna Halprin. [Keyboard click]

Essentially, my first approach to trying to document these variances or similarities in movements between vectors had like a. Just kind of an inclination. I think it’s probably from my artistic training. I have seen a kind of long exposure to photography. The opening and shutting of the camera lens are very similar. These vectors are in space and like architecture.

So conceivably, I could if I stayed still. The bodies are moving in space; I could conceivably document that in-between space.

And so I realized that I needed to actually figure out a way to capture time and space in an intentional way where they were kind of connected. So, in my photographs, I started thinking about rhythm analysis, which is the study of the rhythms of everyday life, especially everyday motions. I developed a walking practice where I was walking in time with groups of people during rush hour. So I was using a metronome in my ears, and I was able to, as I was walking, adjust the metronome time so that the beats per minute lined up with my footsteps, like the pace of my footsteps and, therefore, the footsteps of the crowd.

Brian Massumi is like a Montrealer and a preeminent scholar in the field of affect theory. He talks about proprioception in a self-referential sense. So, it is something that registers the displacement of the parts of the body relative to each other rather than finding your location in space based on your surroundings.

Yeah. So I think in terms of my own practice, it’s something that I have been trying to unfold and unpick and start thinking about how. I mean, I’m still in the unpicking phase, but my fantasy is that in my future work, I’ll be able to move towards thinking more clearly and enacting the production of things through gestures first without thinking about the outcome.

I’m a professor of English in the Department of English at Concordia University and a fellow of the School of Irish Studies, partly because I teach in that area. I’ve written especially about the expatriate French writer and Irish author Samuel Beckett. [Keyboard click]

Here he is walking us, pun intended, through that work. [Keyboad click]

And “excursus” is a word that has come to mean a kind of a digression, but which literally means “to rush out.”

I went back to that term, excursus, and attached pedestrian to it to make it clearer.

Because there’s such a large body of modern and particularly contemporary texts, what I find in so much “walking literature,” which has famously alluded to generic classification, are traits as old as these terms.

The excursus presumes that you’re walking out.

By and large, it’s experienced through the body, it’s experienced through a weather world. It’s congressive in the sense that all kinds of other elements either precede you or accompany you to do so.

That is to say, the living, moving, proprioceptive kind of shared cognition that the walk precipitates is characteristic of a wide body of literature. And I thought, well, I’m going to tell you really what these books do have in common.

These are works that think in terms of the it this way, the tour rather than the map. You know, you don’t see it from above in an abstract, schematic way.

You are walking it.

You are faced with it.

Someone’s saying, “Oh, we’ll go left here,” or “Oh, I made a mistake, but it’s okay, we can turn here, and maybe we’ll find our way back.” And if you’re lucky, you get lost because, as one of these writers, Tiziano Scarpa in Venetian, says, the great thing about Venice is that you get lost in it immediately.

That’s when you start to really walk because you start having this proprioceptive awareness.

Where am I?

How am I moving?

What’s next to me?

You start paying attention to your movements, and you see more through confusion or defamiliarization.

And I think that disposition to experience has a lot to tell us. So, what one perceives in one’s immediate vicinity and through all the senses. There’s been fascinating work on how we think with our, through our skin.

You know, I always talk about thinking not just on one’s feet but with one’s feet. That sense that if I listen to the body, it actually has something it’s been trying desperately to say. So, it has actually tried to develop my proprioception.

And I’ve been learning from them and then from the books which practices remind us how much is happening in the immediate vicinity and how many of our senses are available to absorb it and to interact with it, to recognize one’s, one’s place in it.

The literature was teaching me something about something you think you know how to do, how to walk around. But I think, in fact, you have to learn how to walk. There’s the first, simply the bipedal gait, and then there’s actually learning how to think with one’s feet. [Keyboard click]

Back to Dr. Furlani. [Keyboard click]

Bears can walk, but it’s a propensity; it’s not a species attribute at all. And you see that, of course, with the very young, how difficult it is. It is striking that walking is actually precarious. And it has been characterized basically as a perpetual successful recovery from a fall.

You know, we are not brains in a vat. We would not have the same thoughts if we were in a vat. When you walk, you realize how much you’re getting from other sources of being and how your ideas are altered.

And the way I would put it, it is not only the body that has a mind of its own, but the body’s mind, you know, minds what it’s doing, minds itself, and mind restriction.

And it’s by walking that we’re reminded of it. I’m a white middle-class male, so I’ve had fewer, and I’ve had to be reminded how difficult it is actually to go here or there or at this time at this place.

Here, he is talking about that. [Keyboard click]

But, one of them is like I’ll fall into a certain kind of rhythm which will remind me of my wife who died of cancer many years, 21 years ago. And she was German. So, there’s a kind of German phrase that just came out of me from walking, remembering, walking with her.

Like it’s, I mean, you know, Emma by Mia Unterwegs Tsuda, you know, always with me and towards you and then, so you know that again, that sense that you’re always walking with someone, whether you remember it or not, is very strong in me. And it’s a way to actually be with that person.

Again, partly because when you’re walking as well, you’re walking alone, you’re not kind of, you’re not molested – and I really use that word advisedly – molested by the shock element of the city. It is more important than ever, I think, now to be a bit militant about it for us actually to be unmolested.

And one of the only times we are is when we’re walking from A to B. And that place between A and B is actually most of our lives.

The important thing is the walk.

It is not where you started, where you are, and where you end, but the actual place where you spend most of your time in the middle, and we miss that middle thing.

So when you walk alone, it’s one of the only times when you can actually be alone, but not solipsistically alone by “you never walk alone,” let’s put it that way. You cannot walk alone.

Like in theatre, when you’ve been doing a show, however many times you kind of intrinsically know where in space the path to your light is. And then you get there, and then you feel the warmth of the light all of a sudden.

And I feel like that has to do with proprioception. It’s like the path getting there and spending that time in the middle from getting to your spot or even in clown. There’s this idea of the actor’s awareness behind the play within clowning. And I feel like there’s a proprioceptive element to that actor’s awareness as well, where you have that feeling of your body and the feeling of your body in space and the feeling of the movements that you are making outside of the performance in the context of theatre as a performer, but also as an audience member. And maybe wear proprioception as we talk about it as this sort of ultimate form of presence. But what about when proprioceptive awareness can kind of get in the way of being embodied or being present? And this might be a really stupid example, but I’ve been at theatre performances where the person next to me is taking up the entire armrest, so my arm is squished up on my torso, and I’m just hyper-aware of my body’s placement in space that way. And it kind of becomes a barrier to entry for that kind of presence.

It’s like we’re always breathing, but when we become aware of it, maybe that breathing’s a bit interrupted. Maybe it’s not as natural a feeling as blinking. When you start thinking about your blinking, it gets disrupted.

And there’s also like this relationship as we’re talking about, or maybe we’re not talking about, but we understand proprioception to be a precognitive thing that our body does. But at some point, those precognitive awarenesses often become cognitive. And how does that change what we are proprioceiving? Also, proprioception is an amazing tool for writers in poetry and prose where, oh, I’m writing a character in a situation, so let me put myself in a similar situation and think about my proprioceptive awareness and how my body feeling and finding the words for those qualities and Placing that into your work. So I’m going to start doing that.

So what about you? Why do you care about proprioception?

I focus on his name as, Charles Olson. He has 1965; we’ll call it a poem essay, actually called Proprioception.

Though if you know Olson, you’ll understand. I can’t just casually get into it. And I did consider getting into that for the episode, but that wouldn’t actually really explain why I care. Not in any real way, at least.

I care about proprioception because I care about being, like, really being present in my body. And what that means for poetry. Sure, but what does that mean in and of itself? Something came up in almost every interview that I haven’t really talked about yet. It’s the idea of perception, specifically proprioception, as an enactment. This idea comes from the philosopher Alva Noe. And for me, it reframes my relationship and my interest proprioception to my capital S self, and to you too, because, as Dr. Furlani said, we never walk alone in the spirit of enactment.

I want to end with an exercise, if you’ll, what’s the word–

I want to end with an exercise by composer and scholar Pauline Oliveros’s 1996 score Rhythms, which Eija actually cited as inspiring her project.

Ryan, listener, wherever you are, I invite you to stand, walk for a moment, and follow along if you’re able. Here’s Eija again.

What is the meter and tempo of your normal walk?

How often do you blink?

What is the current tempo of your breathing?

What is the current tempo of your heart rate?

What other rhythms do you hear if you listen?

What is your relationship to all the rhythms that you can perceive? Of at once.

In the end, I wasn’t able to include a lot of it, but a huge thank you to James for everything.

Thank you to Théo Bouveyron, who was so gracious in participating despite the time difference between us.

Thank you to Eija Loponen-Stephenson, whose art and thought are an inspiration to me.

Thank you to Dr. Andre Furlani for taking the time and letting me make him so late for his next meeting that day.

And thank you to Ryan Litvak, who makes every project more fun. Thank you for listening.

The SpokenWeb Podcast is a monthly podcast produced by the SpokenWeb team to distribute the audio collected from and created using Canadian Literary Archival recordings found at universities across Canada.

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