On this episode of The Radio Art Hour, we hear Misophonia: Oral Oddities & Other Annoyances (2020), a radio collage by Carlo Patrão.

Carlo Patrão is a Portuguese sound artist and researcher based in New York with a background in clinical psychology and experimental radio. He uses collage, sampling, and found audio to explore how listening functions within social systems, grounding his work in humor and the tension between voice, power, and control. His radio work has been commissioned and featured on international radio stations and in audio festivals, including Radiophrenia, On Air Fest, and NAISA. He likes to write about sound studies, plant music, misophonia, and the poetics of balloon music and has shared his independent research at Harvard University and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver.

Petrão writes:

Misophonia: Oral Oddities & Other Annoyances is a radio collage that tackles the recently discovered and little-understood chronic condition known as misophonia. This disorder is characterized by highly negative emotional responses to auditory triggers such as chewing, breathing, sniffling, coughing, slurping, lip-smacking, and tapping.

Mixing a broad range of intrusive bodily sounds and discourses around it, this piece explores the spectrum between experiences of easy listening and extreme annoyance associated with misophonia.

Around 2011, following an article published in the New York Times, misophonia was the subject of many radio stories and TV reports that helped spread information and awareness about the condition. However, these reports were, in a way, a Trojan horse concealing many misophonic trigger sounds in their sound design, providing a challenging listening experience to those who needed the information the most. In the mainstream media, misophonia was approached as an overreaction of sensitive people.

As someone who suffers from misophonia, my initial concern for this piece was to reframe misophonic trigger sounds as misophonic music. Could exposure therapy be implemented by flooding the ears with trigger sounds? For me, the answer was no. After finishing this piece and listening to hours of trigger sounds, they are still strongly linked to heightened emotional responses.

Humor, communication, and the appreciation of sound artists whose performances use mouth sounds, chewing, coughing, throat, and breathing sounds turned out to be better allies in living with misophonia.

John Cage once said that his way of dealing with intrusive and annoying sounds was to include them in his compositions, thus transforming annoyance into music. Cage weakened the association between intrusion and displeasure by integrating the disruptive auditory experience into the personal sphere. This is a seductive view of the aural experience. However, I came to understand that this cavalier approach to sound is limited and not an option for people suffering from misophonia or other auditory conditions. Sound has a deeper connection to our body and mind that goes beyond our wishes of control.