Ways of Listening and Modes of Being: Electroacoustic Auditory Display
(2018)
author(s): Paul Vickers
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Auditory display is concerned with the use of non-speech sound to communicate information. If the term seems at first oxymoronic, then consider auditory display as an activity of perceptualization, that is, the process of making perceptible to humans aspects or features of a given data set or system. Most commonly this is done using visual representations (which process we call visualization) but it is not limited to the visual channel, and recent years have witnessed the increased use of auditory representations in the production of tools for exploring data. By way of semiotics and an aesthetic perspective shift, this article posits that auditory display may be considered a form of organized sound and explores the listening experience in this context.
Modes of Music Listening and Modes of Subjectivity in Everyday Life
(2018)
author(s): Ruth Herbert
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Technologically mediated solitary listening now constitutes the prevalent mode of musical engagement in the Industrialized West. Music is heard in a variety of real-world contexts, and qualities of subjective experience might similarly be expected to be wide-ranging. Yet though much is known about function (music as a behavioral resource) less research has focused on ways in which music mediates consciousness. This essay critiques conceptualizations of music listening in extant literature and explores how listening to music in daily life both informs and reflects subjectivity.
Psychological and musicological literature on music listening commonly distinguishes between autonomous and heteronomous ways of listening, associating the former with unusual and the latter with mundane, habitual listening scenarios. Empirical findings from my research, which used ethnographic methods to tap qualities of subjective experience, indicate that attentive and diffused listening do not map neatly onto 'special' and 'ordinary' contexts and that a distributed, fluctuating attentional awareness and multimodal focus are central to many experiences of hearing music.
The Production of Listening: on Biopolitical Sound and the Commonplaces of Aurality
(2018)
author(s): Huw Hallam
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Expression and listening imply a complex interface. Neither can be conceptualized without the movement of intention and receptivity implied by their conjunction. Yet nothing is less certain, since conjunction requires an intermediary space, where a relationship may be formed in common or else violently impelled. This space – of listening and making oneself heard – is fundamentally political, and this essay explores its key forms in the age of biopolitics and neoliberalism. It is examined via artistic evocations of sonic production and listening in works by André Kertész, Iannis Xenakis and Federico Fellini. Then it is analyzed through two major contemporary paradigms of listening: the institutional network where sound art continues to stake out territory; and the private auditory ‘bubble’ generated by the mobile personal audio-player. Finally, in work by Pedro Almodóvar, a revolutionary approach to expression is found that acknowledges the common space of listening on which it depends
Ethics of Listening
(2018)
author(s): Salomé Voegelin
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Recently, I was away, in another country. It looked and sounded not unlike this one, with streets, trees, houses, people and their dogs. The people had eyes, ears and mouths, just like us. They looked, listened and spoke. But since I could not recognize what I heard in the acoustic environment around me from the way they talked about it, I had to assume that they heard it all very differently.
Instead of considering the source or quality of a sound, its location and distance or even its reason, they spoke in terms of action only. Theirs was not a discussion of “what was being done,” but was a “being done,” doing, always now, without defining a doing subject nor arriving at a resulting object. They did not comment on what made a specific sound, but spoke making the sound. Their words phrased the particular and focused narration of doing heard, becoming another heard doing. The understanding reached did not substantiate nor position the heard, instead it beckoned movement; sonic gestures held momentarily and precariously in my ears as an idea of the heard, whose source had by that time become irrelevant, and whose destination was my own sound, which in turn did not translate the heard but became another sonic thing altogether - the semantic substance of doing conveyed to my listener.
Voice, Narrative, Place: Listening to Stories
(2018)
author(s): Isobel Anderson
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Sound art is rarely associated with storytelling. While it is widely recognised that sound is deeply connected to narrative and imagery (e.g. Emmerson 1986; Wishart 1996), it is sound’s relationship to physical space that is often referred to in order to define this medium [or: that often defines this connection]. While this aspect of sound is important, I argue that the combination of sound and oral storytelling engages the listener’s imagination with the unseen and indefinable qualities of sound through its invisible dialogue with our mind. In addition, when this combination is applied to specific locations or sites, this listening experience profoundly contributes to our construction of ‘place’.
Therefore, this article attempts to open up a discussion of the relationship between sound, stories and place, using examples of sound art pieces that explore the listening potentials of this combination within site-specific audio works. Through voice and sound, these works tell stories of and/or in place, referred to in this paper as site-specific stories. These stories require the listener to engage creatively with their narratives and, therefore, induce a productive listening state. Three main factors that affect this listening process are discussed; [1] the environment or listening place; [2] the storyteller or disembodied voice; and [3] the inner voice. Finally, this article concludes that further analysis and discussion of oral storytelling within sound art and its relationship to site is needed in order to understand the productive listening potentials of this combination, which shape our surrounding environments.
AFFECTIVE LISTENING: China’s Experimental Music and Sound Art Practice
(2018)
author(s): Adel Wang Jing
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
When we listen affectively, we listen with and to our bodies. The ear-becoming-body. When a sound does not carry any identifiable, decodable, or communicative message, it affects the listening body in the way touching does. Sound touches the listening body, causing concretely felt intensities before the mind knows. Affective listening is a commitment to forces, intensities and becoming. One listens to the Qi or “haecceities” of sound, which are only later reduced and signified as harmony, melody, or emotions (Cox 2011; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Massumi 2002). Affective listening resembles Buddhist meditation in that both emphasize the practice of Qi (of body-mind-soul) rather than the mind alone, and both lead to self-transforming rather than self-transcending. In the context of Chinese experimental music and sound art practice, affective listening functions as the cultivation of the self, aspiring to the state of selflessness. This paper presents the initial stage of a larger project to formulate the model of “affective listening” as a mode afforded by China’s free improvisation and experimental music practices.