Via GIPHY by RetroCollage

Listening to a sound is apparently a simple matter of capturing air vibrations through our ears and turning them into meaningful information by mapping the signals to the catalogue of sounds stored in our memory. It is only when we ask different people to interpret the same sound signal that the heterogeneity of levels of hearing becomes apparent. This has given cause to theorize about the character of knowledge that can be derived from attentively listening to sounds through our ears: aural literacy.

The French composer Pierre Schaeffer was the first to present a phenomenology of listening in the late 1960s, which identified three types of listening: ordinary, acousmatic, and reduced listening. Ordinary listening takes subjective and objective qualities of the perceived sound into account. For example, you hear a song being performed, you can see who is performing it and have an opinion about it. Acousmatic listening only considers the acoustic signal and ignores the context in which it is produced. You only hear the song without information about its provenance. Reduced listening refers to sound that is cut off from its source. You edit a recording and copy a fragment that becomes a new sonic object (Nilson, 2021).

Michel Chion, a fellow French composer, further developed Schaeffer’s ideas in his book Audio Vision; Sound on Screen (1994) by including the notion of the process of attributing meaning to a sound. He distinguishes causal listening, in which information is gathered about the cause of the sound, from semantic listening in which one tries to understand the underlying meaning of a signal, in the sense that it is part of a broader structure, like a system of codes or a language. He further distinguishes these modes of listening from reduced listening, when both the cause and the meaning of the sound are cancelled out, and the focus is only on the sound’s physical properties (Chion, 1994).

Another way of characterizing ways of listening is by considering the psychological, social, cultural, spatial, and temporal dimension of the practice. In the following TED talk, sound and communication expert Julian Treasure expands on these elements and on the techniques that we unconsciously apply to focus on what is most relevant for us. According to Treasure, we use filters to distinguish noise, such as the voice of a crowd of children, from signal - the voice of our own child. These filters are inextricably linked to the cultures, views, beliefs, and languages we are brought up with. Being educated in a tonal language, working at a farm in the countryside, or being a musician, will make a significant difference to how a person develops and applies listening filters.

Video Lecture by Julian Treasure

Treasure is concerned about the decrease in ability for attentive listening and at the end of his talk proposes five simple exercises to his audience to improve their listening skills. To encourage you to try them out, they are summarized below:

1. Make sure you experience three minutes of complete silence a day;
2. If you are in a noisy environment, spend a few minutes trying to distinguish the various channels of sound that you are hearing;
3. Try to find a mundane sound that you enjoy and listen to it regularly;
4. Try to be conscious of your filters and change your listening position;
5. Try to apply the principles of RASA in listening and communication. The acronym stands for:
   Receive - pay attention to a person,
   Appreciate - make little noises like ‘hmm’, ‘oh’, ‘ok,’
   Summarize - repeat the word ‘so’ now and then,
   Ask - ask questions afterwards.

References

• Chion, M. (1994). Audio-Vision; Sound on Screen. Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.7312/chio18588
• Nilsson, P. A. (2021). Field Recording Project with ECC students. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/997386/997387/0/0 international database for artistic research, https://Www.Researchcatalogue.net.
• Treasure, J. (2011, July 1). 5 ways to listen better [Video]. www.Ted.Com. https://www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_5_ways_to_listen_better?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare