RESEARCH : Audio Voyeurism

By audio voyeurism I am reffering to the aural form of voyeurism rather than the purely visual forms that I have documented so far.

We all overhear conversations or fragments of them as we go about our daily lives, we cant help it. You walk past some people that are chatting, you hear what they are saying and in an instatn your brain has processed this information into a form that you understand.

Conversation overheard.

This has been one of the avenues of thought that I wished to explore from the very start of this project as I feel that it is a slightly more socially acceptable form of voyeurism [perhaps because it is a more discrete form?]



I searched google for examples of other projects that are intersted in the concpet of audio voyeurism. I came across to such sites, Tube Gossip and Overheard in the UK.


Tube Gossip is a site run by TheManWhoFellAsleep aka Greg Stekelman.

The site contains a selection of conversation snippets, heard on the tube by Stekelman since January 2003. The conversation extracts are not presented in any particular order other than when they where heard. The texts range from intimate conversations and arguements to business calls and general comments.


Overheard in th UK

This site offers similar content to the previous one and it is displayed in a similar manner. The main plus point of this site is however that it allows visitors to add their own overheard conversation snippets. I think that this allows it to have more scope in terms of the sort of things said.

Stekelmans site is only updated by Stekleman himself, and the comments are only ones which he has overheard on the tube. He states that the tube as an enivronment is a strange one; "It puts people in a strange frame of mind. They're all crowded together but they behave as if they're on their own - they say the most bizzare and personal things, stuff you'd never hear on a bus or train journey".

This is something I wish to look at with my experimentation. What types of conversations are heard at different locations? How much does the atmosphere of the location affect the way in which people talk to each other both face-toface and over the phone?