Auditory attention: listening to the soundscape of Between the Acts as a literary cocktail party

Abstract

ABSTRACT The cocktail party problem refers to people’s auditory scene analysis in the complex auditory scene of everyday life in acoustics, which has also been addressed in modern literature. In this article, I define the literary cocktail party as a literary soundscape characterised by noise, with the dynamics of attention motivating its sound events and overall material relationality. Taking Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts as an example, this article analyses how the interaction of words and sounds works with the dynamics of passive and active attention – two types of attention working in the bottom-up and top-down neural processes of the brain respectively. In different stages of the literary cocktail party, the development of sound events incorporates sonic materiality into the understanding of literary form, promotes the literary effect of defamiliarisation and creates relations in the soundscape. In the end, the article proposes ‘dip listening’ as a productive listening method for modern literary soundscape that is capable of not only generating an embodied sense of epiphany in daily experience but also creates the betweenness among various agencies in a shared tiredness.