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For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on "Hearing and Listening." While
these topics may have been addressed in the past through perceptual or
phenomenological methods, the questions by Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest
and Salomé Voegelin hint at the affective, bodily and political forces
implicitly at work during this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing
or listening merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear
were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear is subject
to socialization and bias, training and discipline, personal idiosyncracies,
and influence by the surrounding environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek
to reflect upon the effects of such influences when attending to audio art:
1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance and affect
when listening to sound art? How do hearing and proprioception combine in
formations of resonance? How might the resonances of ambient space -- whether
a museum, concert hall or other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound
art? My sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from vibration:
if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a discrete object (or its
emission from a particular point in space), might resonance afford more
delocalized, contextual, intensification of hearing and proprioception?
2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the ears are never
closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely posit audition as form of
“exposure,” a veritable faculty that lays us open and vulnerable to the world.
But as Steven Connor notes, the ear is not submissive; it "actively connives to
make what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that the ear
not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but its operations seem
to entail "a kind of deterrence of sound” such that to hear is always to
mishear. But if all hearing is mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental
hallucination that works for the powers of the false. From this premise we
might ask whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the
term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do, then, for sound
studies—specifically sound studies in its humanistic phase -- that its organ of
concern (l’oreille) is steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound
mean studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition is
always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would say, with “whom”
is it complicit?
3) Salomé Voegelin: What is the relationship between listening and sound art?
Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further elaborate or extend
your initial thoughts!
Best,
Jim
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