“When I Listen, I Have to be Quiet” – Jacob Kirkegaard
I stumbled upon this short documentary of Jacob Kirkegaard, a sound recorder and artist. I found it interesting to hear him talk about how he has been working with sound since the age of 6. His fascination with sounds of the world that began at such a young age is the driving force behind his work. Working with sensors, instead of regular microphones, seems to be a big factor that contributes to what puts his work apart from others. He claims that the sensors allow a closer look into the sounds, to listen to them from within, picking up things a standard microphone would not, and therefore practicing to engage with the world, or in his words “find a deeper understanding”. I enjoyed stumbling across this, especially during a time that I’ve been looking into other methods of capturing sounds.
“What really interests me is the wordless voice of things. I think that words can say a lot of concrete things. You can also get lost in words and not understand each other at all, yet if you listen to a sound of something, of an object or of something happening in the world that you maybe don’t feel you understand, I think that can channel a deeper understanding. An understanding on another level.”