[iDC] The Nature of Listening

[Pauline Oliveros]

Well it may not be too long before we will incorporate our bionic ears into
our post human bodies. There is so much more out there for listening. By
there I mean outer and inner space/time. What are bionic ears? (
http://www.bionicear.org/bei/AboutHistory.html) Bionic ears on board or not
are any transducers that we can use to amplify the range of our own limited,
damaged or non-existent  hearing through air, earth, fire, water and
virtuality.

Data gathering by scientists is more than ever including listening. There
are all those waves waving throughout the universe and beyond and there is
the memory of the big bang in the microcosm. I wonder how broadly we could
extend our ranges individually? We are protected from hearing all the
wavings of waves in our own bodies - otherwise we might be overwhelmed by
the din if we could hear our heart beating all the time, or blood rushing
through arteries, cells dividing, intestinal motions to mention very few of
mostly unheard sounding body functions. We do certainly listen to the
wavings of our own minds. How though could we go beyond the onslaught of
mental obsessions to the substrate of quiet where phonons might play another
kind of tune? – a sub atomic music?

What is the nature of listening?

There is primary or initiatory listening as one enters the world for the
first time.  What a rush that must be as the ears unplug and air rushes in.
Primary listening gives us relationship to place and continues to unfold
through one's lifetime literally and figuratively with more or less
intensity depending on the individual and culture.

There is secondary listening or remembered listening. If we remember we are
conscious. There is short term and long term consciousness. In any case
consciousness is latent and without memory however late it might be in
manifesting there is no consciousness.

There is focused listening where attention is directed to communication and
learning to listen for specific sounds and to repeat them.

There is global listening as attention is open to the field of
undifferentiated fluctuating sounds.

As focal listening gains in importance global or primary listening loses the
foreground and only returns in initiatory or unfamiliar situations such as
entering a room full of people speaking a foreign language.
As sounds are reified as language and communication intensifies primary
listening recedes. We learn reading, 'riting and 'rithmitic (taught to the
tune of a hickory stick).

So what?

Well we have lost that initial rush as we entered the world and made our
first cry. Can you remember that? How like the big bang might that be?

I remind myself to listen so that I may be here now even though now has
already gone.

Why does listening matter to me? I am a musician – a composer/improviser
engaging with sound, form and technology. Technology is enabling us to hear
more and do more. I am interested because I might want to use the sounds
that may be discovered out there and in there. We are absorbing technology
back into the body and may find ourselves distant or even close cousins to
intelligent robotic forms in the future. I am interested in how robots will
hear and listen and make music. Will I be able to engage with them? Play
with them? Hear and understand the music? Feel something?

Listening is an active engagement with other and simultaneously is memory.
Will I remember to remember? Is listening ever direct? Or is listening
always a reflection reminding us that we are human?
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