on listening
Listening is not only about the normative ability to hear. It is a transformative and revolutionary resource that requires quieting down and tuning in. - Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals
In the field of the unconscious, the ears are the only orifice that cannot be closed. The promiscuous openness of the ear, a hole that takes all comers, means that we as living systems are open to and invaded by the world. Sound queers the self/world boundary, all day, every day. It blurs the edges of any self that the subject-machine cares to hail - Lacan
By contrast to vision, sound queers identity and in the process offers a way out of the hailing game… Could a new art and a new politics instruct us to listen harder and better? ... might that listening require us to listen more,yet, perversely, to know less about what we encounter? Conversely, might listening to and for this universally available yet elusive sound the world occasion a redistribution of the sensible, and, with it, a differently oriented art practice and a keener sense of political hearing? - Drew Daniels, All Sound is Queer
She say, Miss Celie, You better hush. God might hear you. Let ‘im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.
Alice Walker, The Color Purple.
When we analyze the role of vision as it relates to the mechanisms of racism, sound emerges as a space where black subjectivity is not fixed by the look of white subjects, but is instead articulated dynamically by black subjects. - Alexander Weheliye, In the Mix: Hearing the Souls of Black Folk
When we speak of sound, we are speaking of touch. So when we speak of listening, we are also speaking of being touched and of feeling. A basic physical characteristic of sound is that it behaves differently depending on the material body through which it is traveling. Sound registers in ways that are unique to the materials that it touches. While an audience is commonly understood as a passive body that absorbs and receives, it is also a material and a site in which sounds, signals, and pressure are circulated and altered. An audience can amplify or silence and much of its ability to do so is a function of its shape and the infrastructures that support it. - Nikita Gale
I theorize sound as an inherently embodied process that registers at multiple levels of the human sensorium. To invoke another counterintui- tion that serves as a second point of theoretical departure, while it may seem an inherent contradiction in terms, sound need not be heard to be perceived. Sound can be listened to, and, in equally powerful ways, sound can be felt; it both touches and moves people. In this way, sound must therefore be theorized and understood as a profoundly haptic form of sensory contact… To a physicist, audiologist, or musicologist, sound consists of more than what we hear. It is constituted primarily by vibration and contact and is defined as a wave resulting from the back-and-forth vibration of particles in the medium through which it travels… While the ear is the primary organ for perceiving sound, at lower frequencies, infrasound is often only felt in the form of vibrations through contact with parts of the body. Yet all sound consists of more than what we hear. It is an inherently embodied modality constituted by vibration and contact. - Tina Campt, Listening to images
i relate sound to the un-mediated socio-political experience that is for the most part aural while sustaining a greater political and alternative dimension that could potentially be concealed/lost/attenuated with design for entertainment, radio of musical consumption. Sound as a way of thinking cannot be separated from listening as a philosophy. in Zezuru sonic thinking all matter has/is was/can-be an ear (plural/singular) - Masimba Hwati
Sound as object or sound as something physical or material is nothing new you see, it’s really the property of sound. Sound is vibration, it can be through air or through wood through metal through water through anything you want. Sound is physical phenomena… that’s how I started to understand sound art, as compositions, that take into consideration spatial, durational and collaborative parameters in a totally different way than how things used to happen in other genres of music. There is an abstractness in sound that everyone’s grasping in a way and everybody’s like finding it liberating, the abstraction that sound carries is pulling us away from maybe the weight of image in a world that is saturated with images. - Tarek Atoui Sound Is a Physical Phenomenon
“… the word “audience,” that comes from the Latin word meaning “to listen.” So does “audit.” And there’s power and there’s politics in the question of audience, but then there’s also self-care and self-reflection and self-challenge in the experience of listening to yourself.” - Pádraig Ó Tuama On Being
We do not yet know what a sonic body can do. - Spinoza & Deleuze
If we experience sound, it is because we are subject. - Descartes