Shifting Listening Identities – Towards a Fluidity of Form in Digital Music
Franziska Schroeder · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2012
The discourse surrounding listening has received vast theoretical attention for decades, but there has been a particular trend towards a re-examination of listening over the last ten years, highlighting a shift that moves listening to a broader understanding of musical experience. Eminent writers such as Steven Connor (2001), Jean-Luc Nancy (2002), Jonathan Sterne (2003), Michael Bull and Les Back (2003), Veit Erlmann (2004), Eric Clarke (2005), Pauline Oliveros (2005, 2006), Marshall McLuhan (2006), Alex Ross (2008, 2010), Georgina Born (2010), and more recently Salomé Voegelin (2010), have all examined modes of listening from various angles and viewpoints. In her article ‘Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives’, Born (2010) suggests that listening be seen as an experience that results from, and engenders, mediation affected by social and cultural location and identities. She thus highlights questions of the ‘encultured, affective, corporeal and located nature of musical experience’ (2010: 89). Similarly, in 2007 the composer/improvisor George Lewis made the argument for listening as a mode essentially linked to the body and thus deeply tied listening to action when stating that listening is ‘a practice of active engagement with the world, where we sift, interpret, store and forget, in parallel with action and fundamentally linked with it’ (Lewis, 2007: 113). Listening is understood as a mode of exploration, a constantly changing mediation between subjects and objects, in which we actively seek, sift, select, rather than as a mode of simple reception. Salomé Voegelin’s recent book Listening to Noise and Silence: Toward a Philosophy of Sound Art (2010) supports this way of thinking. Several writers delineate the mode of listening from the mode of hearing (see Erlmann, 2004; or Nancy, 2002, for example), while others recall the ongoing ‘eye versus ear’ debate (the often assumed dominance of the visual over the aural), an argument that Don Ihde outlined in 1976, and which was revived in 1985 when in his work Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Jacques Attali stated: These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.