A Place for Listening

To be a listener is to be more than simply a hearing body being in or moving through space, though that is part of it. A building that is designed and built to immerse a visitor in resonant space interpolates its visitors explicitly as listening subjects. It works as an invitation to experience the built environment anew while revealing what is always already the case: that even in a world dominated by the image and the spectacle, we are immersed in sounds that work on and with our bodies. Such a building is also a provocation to listen: to listen actively, to listen differently, to listen with body and mind. Being in sound—sensing and hearing sound—is not yet listening. Listening is something we do to sound. It is the action through which sound and signal take on meaning. However instinctual it seems to be, listening is a cultural practice. It is therefore, by definition, practiced differently in different times and places, contingent on context, experience, and material conditions. This means it is also shot through with relations of power. There is a politics as well as a poetics of listening.

It is hard enough to write about sound in a language and culture that is freighted with visual metaphors and markers, though architects do have the advantage of speaking the scientific language of acoustics. It is harder still, perhaps, to write about listening. Listening is hard to picture. It is the indiscernible, intangible process by which we interiorize and translate an invisible world of sound. It is something we do all the time, wherever we are, unobtrusively, unremarkably, whether in isolation or in congregation with others, in intimate contact as well as at a distance. It is therefore all too easy to take for granted, to mistake it for a bodily reflex, to mistake it for mere passivity. Artists who work with sound rightly insist that listening is distinct from hearing; that it is, in fact, a deliberate action, an interpretive and critical skill that can be honed and tested; indeed, that listening can be an art in itself. It is striking just how persistent have been the calls to confront the specter of listeners’ passivity in the art world and beyond, contrasting “ordinary” with “specialist” or “reduced” listening,1 “serious” or “concentrated” listening,2 “deep listening,”3 “virtuoso listening,”4 “directed listening,”5 and so on. Certainly, listening is not always easy or second nature; it can be laborious, difficult, and challenging, even as it offers up its pleasures and rewards.

But it is a mistake to think that “ordinary” listening is not also already active, or that the listening ear is not already shaped and trained by the changing soundscapes which we inhabit. It is easy to forget just how recent, in the great scheme of things, is the technological innovation of recorded and transmitted sound. It is easy to forget because we have long since stopped perceiving the uncanniness of dislocated sounds and disembodied voices; and because we no longer recognize the relative novelty of being able, habitually, if not quite seamlessly, to control and manipulate our sonic worlds as individual listeners and as listening publics. The astonishing succession of new audio technologies around the turn of the twentieth century—the telegraph and telephone, the microphone, phonograph, and radio—not only saw a revolution in representational practice, but brought about “perhaps the most radical of all sensory reorganizations in modernity.”6 It was a reorganization that also left its mark on modern architectural design, incorporating techniques to control reverberant space through new materials and technologies that would break and reform the inevitable relationship between sound and space.7 The modern ear is a mediatized one, and any modern listener encountering the orchestrations of sound art or sonic architectures will, over time, already have accumulated a complex store of “auditory capital” on which to draw.8 In other words, every member of a listening public in the media age brings with them a particular “habitus of listening” that includes a degree of auditory expertise and a wealth of experience in “organized sound.”9 So, if it is already the case that listeners are by definition already active in their apprehension of sound, what are we to make of this persistent, insistent call on the part of sound artists and soundscape architects to listen actively?

First of all, it should remind us that there is something obstinately unchanging about the association of listening with passivity, at least in the dominant discourses of Western modernity. Simply put, listening never seems to escape its troublesome comparison with the evident agency of speaking, of sounding out. More specifically, once the pre-modern form of copyright as a means of suppressing seditious opinion had become infused with Enlightenment values of free speech, the idea of self-expression could be conceptualized as a form of private property, a product that could be circulated and exchanged in the marketplace of ideas.10 Having a voice, speaking up, took on a newly valued status, literally, figuratively and politically. Listening, however, did not lend itself to being conceptualized and commodified as a property in the same way. Historically, listening has proven difficult to measure, to record, to fix down. It could not belong to anyone. Moreover, because sounds in public space, whether speech, music, or noise, can be apprehended simultaneously by multiple listeners, it has been all too easy to assume that listeners simply take messages on board in a uniform or predictable way. Anxieties about passive listening were only compounded in the era of mass communication when audiences became dispersed and obscured from view.

To recognize listening as active, then, is to recognize that individual listeners might take or make their own meaning, even while listening in concert. In this way, sounds in public occupy a liminal space between the public and the private, body and mind—a potential space of intersubjectivity. The call to active listening can be understood as a call to listen differently, to listen against the grain, to understand listening potentially as an action of critique and of resistance. But the politics of listening extend beyond the level of explicit information-gathering or meaning-making. Sounds, from the startling to the soothing, also have personal and unpredictable effects, triggering memories and associations, acting to transport listeners to different times and places. Sounds enter the body, and they merge with the body politic.

Sound, particularly in the form of music and song, has always been used to bind people together effectively and affectively in public space, coordinating them in mood, motion, and emotion, for good or ill, for pleasure, pacification, punishment, or propaganda. But the last century and more has also seen a countervailing trend to use sound technologies to domesticate and privatize the act of listening, from gramophones and wirelesses, through transistor radios, Walkmans and iPods.11 Nowadays, earbuds and headphones can encase the listener in an individuated sonic environment, albeit one most likely connected to the world of commercialized sound. Many of these sounds, in the form of music, podcasts, or other soundbites, might be inconspicuously arranged by impersonal corporate algorithms that push “personalized” selections based on tracking the automated archiving of previous preferences and online tastes.12 Moreover, these highly engineered sounds tend to be idealized sounds, neither distorted by the reverberations and resonances of random surroundings, nor contaminated by competing ambient noise.

So, the invocation to listen actively in relation to sound art or architectural space also makes a critical intervention into the contemporary politics of listening. In a space more commonly associated with the hush of a gallery, it is surely also a call to free listeners from, or invite them to reflect on, the constraints imposed by the contemporary soundscape, particularly the soundscapes produced and permeated by media technologies and the market. Site-specific sound art brings the embodied listener into a specific shared location, a specific time and place. It celebrates and complicates the materiality of immaterial sound and its reception, and makes present in visceral ways sounds that might have their origins in times and places elsewhere. Curated listening spaces—that is, spaces designed to engage visitors with site-specific sound, sonic installations, and listening encounters—interpolate visitors explicitly as listeners, inviting them to experience sounds alongside others, sounds that might be produced for or by them, but not targeted at them. Such spaces remind listeners of the art and artifice of curated sound, a wide horizon of sounds that have not been pre-digested according to taste.

In moving through sounds in curated listening spaces, and in making those sounds change through movement, the listener traverses the entangled borderlines between the production and consumption of sound. These are sounds that open out in real time, that are experienced in the moment, but are deeply connected with the imprinted echoes of silent traditions and techniques. They are sounds that don’t necessarily give themselves up easily to the apparently personal mechanisms of control learned in the digital media world, where sounds are selectable, adaptable, likeable, sharable, recordable, reversible, and repeatable. Such mechanisms feed off the fear of passive listening, positioning listeners as co-producers of sound. Immersive curated sound (as distinct from immersive ambient sound) challenges visitors to engage with the surrounding sounds as active listeners while at the same time giving up to the constraints and contours of the space.

Whatever its multiple histories, antecedents, and sites of genesis, the curation of site-specific sound commonly understands active listening to be first and foremost about “listening in” to the immediate environment with close attention and discernment. But there is more to listening than mere responsiveness. There is a listening that precedes and produces the encounter with sound itself. The call to listen actively is by the same token a call to “listen out”; to listen out, that is, beyond the echo chamber and be open to hearing sounds—or their absence—that might disturb convention, unsettle expectations, or create disquiet as much as they might inspire or move. This is where the aesthetics of sound meet an ethics of listening, and where a call to actively listen out for difference and particularity, might yet find its echo as a civic action in the body politic.13  

Listening out in this way is hard work that takes effort and courage. It is perhaps no surprise then that in a world of risk and times of trouble we inhabit infrastructures—social, physical, and digital—that privilege and reward repetition, personalization, and familiarity.14 The invocation to listen out for stories and voices beyond our individualized echo chambers goes beyond the question of acoustics in the moment. It extends to being alive to the silent cacophony of histories and memories, power relations and interactions that come together to produce that experience in that particular time and space. It extends to listening out for the absences and exclusions, the paths not taken, the designs not realized. It might extend to listening out into the deep ecological time of the materials around us, or for the faint echoes of earlier structures in that same location. In public space it involves listening out for the immediate and intersubjective responses of those listening around us.

Listening out in this sense is a never-ending and inexhaustible project. It is an ethical practice of a condition of permanent openness. To this extent, it is a metaphor for a critical disposition grounded in a recognition of alterity. But adopting the language of listening rather than literacy shifts the discussion into a different register and allows for connections to be more easily drawn with embodied, vernacular, and intersubjective experience.15 Beginning with the listener rather than the thing listened to opens up a space to think about cultural productions in terms beyond the dominant politics of voice. In recognizing the challenges of listening as determined and considerate receptivity, it opens up a recognition of what Michael C. Heller calls, “the dense network of affective relationships that we can form with sound in a particular moment,” whether that involves sensory stimuli, personal histories, or cultural norms.16

Listening out is a precondition for the encounter of the listener with the resonant space, or the myriad ways in which a building might speak to them.17 But it is also a responsibility equally shared between those who listen and those who call others to listen in and through their art or architecture. To build a space in which people might come to listen—to each other, to a performance, to an installation, to a particular silence, or to the echoes of the past (whether through imaginative reconstruction or acoustic modeling technology)—is already a labor of listening out for what will resonate with a listening public; and the idea of a listening public rests on the potential of people listening out for something to listen to. In other words, listening out is an integral part of the architectural design process as much as it is the anticipated disposition of the public entering the space and encountering the sonic design.

There is a tension in all this between the descriptive and the normative, between what is and what ought to be. Though a thoroughly naturalized activity, listening remains a cultural practice and is thus historically contingent, context-specific, and subject to entrainment. There is a place for reflecting on the many axes of listening that already feed into the art and experience of construction, just as there is a place for considering whether it is possible or necessary to listen better. Listening better might both demand and generate material and communicative spaces that enable, encourage, and entrain the ethical practice of listening out beyond our usual echo chambers. There is, then, in other words, a place to build places of listening.