Listening as Understanding the World

Understanding our complex world through listening could be what we need right now

Music has enabled emotional expression for composers, performers and audiences alike. It has bought communities together, uniting them through common ideals and aspirations. It has also defined cultures and political movements. More recently, the interdisciplinary field of sound studies has focused on how sound functions in culture beyond music, turning attention toward how we listen. It has also examined the power dynamics of listening – emphasising questions such as who is listening, who gets to listen, when listening can be good thing (e.g. relaxing, guidance) and a bad thing (e.g sonic weaponry, distraction). Listening breaks traditional boundaries between observer and observed, creating a simultaneity not found in other senses and expressions (Voegelin, 2018).

Our increasingly complex world is saturated by a ‘visual litany’ of images (Stern, 2003), cascading over and through us, shaping and controlling our society more than we would like to think (Steyerl, 2012). Language struggles to conceptualise the modern experience characterised by digitalisation, which produces multiple, instantaneous layers of data. The digital processes of making and doing are hidden away in algorithms, stored in privately owned server farms in unknown locations. The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence tools configure information, images and music that leave us questioning our versions of reality. Many of us feel overwhelmed with the speed of change, the complications it brings and how we can live with it every day (Virillio, 1994). It is becoming increasingly clear that we need new ways of grappling with complex data, ethical conundrums and basic authenticity.

Listening has been privileged in first nation cultures as a mode of understanding, knowledge and leadership (Robinson, 2020; Brearly, 2015). We can curate listening environments where a different lens is turned on key elements of the contemporary experience, providing fresh avenues of understanding and comprehension when visual stimulus is unreliable or unable to process what we need clearly or quickly enough. The nuance listening provides insights into evolving patterns, structures and dynamics that may not be found in visualisations. The temporal parameters of listening offer a radically different ‘frame’ of focus, which is multilayered and unfolding.  What if relationships were understood through sound, and the temporal nature of listening could enable an understanding of multiple connections and hierarchies in a way that looking cannot?

This already happens in some fields: biologists understand bird behaviour by listening to their calls, astronomers listen to the universe’s cosmic radio noise, doctors have listened to our hearts through stethoscopes for generations.  Sonification organises data as sounds arranged into human hearing ranges to provide clarity – think of geologists listening for seismic activity, occurring at much lower frequencies than the human hearing can allow. Sound often provides more immediate access to information, for example, when listening for a faulty machine.

Sound offers a processing of multidimensional data streams by mapping onto a range of variables such as time, pitch, volume, timbre, structure and distribution though space. Listening can help us identify patterns in noise and other messy systems much quicker than visual searching. It can reveal subtle variations in change over time, providing more nuanced observation and involvement.

What if sound could replace vision as the primary mediator of experience?  A useful thought experiment could be to replace looking with listening in a variety of scenarios.  What if meteorologists could listen to evolving data when predicting the size an approaching storm? Or if a doctor listened to cells changing in the body, or the temporal patterns of psychological cycles? Or if an entomologist listened to insect activity to measure biodiversity?  Some of these are already taking place.

Listening as a way of understanding is more collaborative, connected and open ended. It is a skill that can be learned and practiced, applied to sounds beyond our realm of audibility, the sonification of data and enable different understandings of how we relate to the rest of the world. That it takes time is arguably one of its strongest merits. Machines are already listening to us - via speech recognition, audio surveillance, home assistants and streaming platforms (Dockery et al, 2022). We have to ensure we listen better.

References

Brearley, Laura. Deep listening and leadership: An Indigenous model of leadership and community development in Australia. In Restorying Indigenous leadership: Wise practices in community development, Banff. 2015.91-127.

Berardi, Franco. After the future. AK press, 2011

Dockray, Sean, James Parker, and Joel Stern. "(Against) the coming world of listening machines." In Acoustic Intelligence, no. 1, pp. 39-46. Dusseldorf University Press, 2022.

Robinson, Dylan.  Hungry listening: Resonant theory for Indigenous sound studies. University of Minnesota Press. 2020

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Steyerl, Hito. The wretched of the screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016.

Virilio, Paul. The vision machine. Indiana University Press, 1994.

Voegelin, Salomé. The political possibility of sound: Fragments of listening. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2018.