Abstract
“You’re not allowed to clap like an ordinary person, but you’re allowed to bray like a donkey? I mean see PMQs ... they’ve got this weird noise they do. It actually sounds like a drunken mob”Former MP Mhairi Black interviewed in The Times (Turner, 2015).
This practice research project investigates the sounding cultures of the UK House of Commons (HoC) and how they affect the quality of oral debate. It investigates how the sounding cultures of the HoC impact on whose voices are heard, and consequently on the legitimacy of the Commons in its role at the heart of the UK’s democratic system. The study responds to the brief set out in my Master of Artistic Research (MAR) studentship entitled: Noisemaking, Performing and Listening, as functions of opinion formation in UK civil society. The aims of the MAR are to investigate the results of affective communication on the practices of UK government debates and opinion formation among civil society, using practice-led methods relating to the performance of body, gesture, and noise.
Sound, democracy and the public sphere uses critical sound practice to assess the aurality of debate in the HoC. I define aurality broadly as a holistic model of acoustic communication for a particular space or community, encompassing sound-making, rules and norms around sound-making, the materiality of sound and the embodied listener, within a single communicative framework. It is a framework for thinking about sound and communication which embraces the social, the cultural, the material and the affective.
Former MP Mhairi Black’s complaints about the sounding cultures of the HoC direct us to the collective performance of non-lexical sound (“they’ve got this weird noise they do”). I use Black’s observations on the regulation of sound in the HoC to filter the enquiry, formulating the hunch that the HoC is home to specific cultures of performative, collective sound-making, which some MPs find alienating, intimidatory or aggressive (“it actually sounds like a drunken mob”).
The study extends the work of communications scholars (e.g. Atkinson, 1984; Bull, 2003; Clayman, 1993; Heritage and Greatbatch, 1986) on non-lexical sound-making in the House of Commons, by demonstrating how their analyses overlook the visceral (Waitt et al, 2014), spatial (Revill, 2016) and affective (Kanngieser, 2012) dimensions of acoustic communication. Feminist scholars Puwar (2004), Childs (2016) and Shaw (2020) have shown that debating in the HoC is characterised by adversariality, aggression and heavily masculinised qualities. The study therefore investigates how the visceral, spatial and affective dimensions of acoustic communication might be employed to reproduce the aggressive, masculinised qualities of debate identified by these aforementioned scholars.
I propose a practice research methodology, which combines theory and techniques of contemporary art, spatial audio production and acoustic heritage. The methodology uses voice actors to recreate scenes from UK Parliament’s audiovisual archives as the basis for audio reconstructions (Murphy et al, 2017) of scenes from HoC debates, as a tool to better understand the spatial, the visceral and affective workings of sound in political communication
| Date of Award | Aug 2025 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Mel Jordan (Supervisor) & Charis Rice (Supervisor) |