Research Catalogue

an international database for artistic research

• 27. Issue 27 Issue 27

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  On Listening Keynote Speech at the 2011 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in Corfu, Greece (2018) author(s): R. Murray Schafer published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This is a video recording of the keynote speech R. Murray Schafer gave at the 2011 World Forum for Acoustic Ecology in Corfu, Greece. The recording is made by Kenya DuBois Williams.
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  SEVEN METAPHORS FOR (MUSIC) LISTENING: DRAMaTIC (2018) author(s): Joshua Banks Mailman published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
  This essay probes the nature of listening by refusing to pin it down to a single essence. The epistemological value of metaphor is explained in terms of the cognitive metaphor and embodied mind theories of Lakoff and Johnson as well as the philosophies of Rorty and Fiumara. Then the various natures of listening are explained via seven metaphors: (1) Digestion, (2) Recording, (3) Adaptation, (4) Meditation, (5) Transport, (6) Improvisation, and (7) Computation. As a positive example, this set of metaphors promotes recognition of the inherent plurality of listening by staking out distinct facets which cannot be reduced to one another. This irreducibility is made more vivid and conceptually manageable by associating each of these facets with more concrete activities that are literally irreducible, or indeed seemingly unrelated. Moreover, some of these metaphors suggest the complementary and sometimes interdependent nature of diverse aspects of listening.
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  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.
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  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.
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  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
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  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.
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