Looking and Listening

This morning I walked through the woods behind my house, as I usually do. I’ve taken to listening to music on these walks, today was Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Orphée. The Deutsche Grammophon release draws loosely on Jean Cocteau’s film of the same name. It sits somewhere between contemporary classical, minimalism, and ambient - slow, restrained, and circling rather than resolving.

I didn’t take any photographs on this occassion. I was out walking the dogs on a forest path I know well enough that I don’t need to think about where I’m going. Still, I tend to make photographic compositions as I walk - framing things loosely in my head, testing distances, edges, how forms sit together. It’s a habit that continues whether I have a camera or not (I’ve written about this previously here). Listening to music, what shifts isn’t just pace but also the way things feel organised. The music is unresolved, letting small changes accumulate without conclusion.

That seemed to carry over into how I was imagining images. I noticed I was framing more sparsely, allowing more negative space around things. Sometimes I stayed with a scene longer than usual, adjusting the frame mentally as if waiting for it to settle into something that worked, even though very little was physically changing. Other times I let potential subjects go, because they didn’t fit whatever internal rhythm the music had set in motion. That seems closer to the point than tempo. It wasn’t simply that things slowed down; the music’s character was shaping decisions in a way that’s harder to quantify.

There are studies in multisensory perception suggesting that the senses don’t operate independently; what you hear can affect how visual information is organised. In that sense, listening while thinking about photographs isn’t separate from seeing—it’s part of the same process. Alva Noë’s idea that perception is something we do, rather than something that happens to us, is useful here. If seeing is active, then it can be affected by conditions like sound and music.

When I am photographing, these shifts tend to show up in practical ways. I wait longer, or not long enough. I leave space, or crop tighter. Different kinds of music seem to redistribute those tendencies. Something like Orphée leans toward hesitation, toward images that feel less resolved at the point of capture. Whether any of that carries into the final image is harder to say. It may be that these influences exist only at the level of decision-making and disappear once the photograph is made, or that they persist in ways that are difficult to name but still present.

Attempts to map sound directly onto images, Wassily Kandinsky comes to mind, feel too rigid to be convincing. The relationship seems more open to chance than that, dependent on context and familiarity, on something as simple as how well you know the place you’re in. That familiarity probably mattered this morning. Because the woods are well known to me, there was space to notice these small shifts. The compositions I was imagining weren’t driven by discovery so much as by adjustment, what to include, what to leave, how long to stay before moving on.

I came back without images, but with a sense that I had become more aware the influence of music had affected the process of making work. Not improved - just different.

Tomorrow I’ll try the same walk with something very different, another genre, another kind of energy, to see how it alters the way I look at the same place. It seems like the only way to understand this is through repetition and variation rather than over-analysing it.

I’d be interested to hear how others experience this, across different practices. Whether you work in sound, writing, painting, or elsewhere. Does what you’re listening to, or looking for that matter, materially change your work, or just how you feel about the work? And is that distinction even useful?