Listening to listening

In her book Deep Listening Pauline Oliveros provides a simple and useful distinction with which to begin thinking about listening:



"To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically."



Here, rather than being synonymous terms, hearing and listening differ markedly. The first describes an automatic response to external stimuli: the conversion of physical sound waves into the neural signals that result in raw sensation. As such it's continuous, unconscious and occurrs whether awake, drowsy or in deep slumber. The second involves actively directing conscious attention towards sound, its acoustic properties, and the meanings, ideas and emotions embedded there-in.



This distinction finds a metaphysics in Bergson's subtractive model of perception, which is expertly elucidated by Meillassoux during the course of his essay on Deleuze for Collapse III. Here matter is thought as a vast collection of images whose interaction is governed by the constant laws of nature. Accordingly perception is the relation between an image or set of images and the unusual image that is the human body. The relation is one of impoverishment, as Meillassoux puts it:


"The living is not primarily the emergence of the power of interested choice, but the emergence of the power of a massive disinterest in the real to the profit of certain rare segments of the latter, which constitutes the whole of perception."



Perception reduces the infinite complexity of the material world to a few 'rare segments' via two radically discriminatory selections, the first made by the body, the second by the mind. In audition, the body effectively 'chooses' to hear certain sounds - those of a particular amplitude and frequency, and not others - those that fall outside the perceptible ranges. The 'physical means' that comprise hearing for Oliveros omit more sounds than they permit.


But what happens to those sounds we do hear? Heard sound provides the material for a second subtractive selection. This choice is made by consciously attending to a specific sound or group of sounds, again at the cost of others. The 'Cocktail Party Effect' theorised by researchers organised around CRESSON is an everyday example of these choices. A soiree attendee's attention is drawn to a voluble exchange occurring on the room's other side; they actively choose this conversation as the object of listening and the general clamour remains just heard. The example speaks of the localising power of concentrated listening, the observable fact that it can ignore so much sound.


The 'Profit' accrued by the diminutive bit of reality listened to is, for Bergson, generated by the labour of memory. It's memory that guides our decision on what to listen to. Let's say for example that the conversation our lonely socialite tunes-in to involves his ex-girlfriend. She's openly expounding her theory of 'where it all went wrong'. Here it is the listener's personal history that has drawn him to these sounds in the first place and furthermore it is his memory that enables him to understand the language of what is being said. So where the first choice, that of hearing, is biologically determined and as equally distributed as the human body, the second, that of listening, is socio-culturally determined and as diverse as world cultures are. Cross-cultural Listening practices differ in two ways: firstly, by the listened to sounds: different peoples consider different sounds significant; and secondly by the meanings attributed to those sounds.