Practice Of Listening Research Articles

A politics of listening in Isabel Coixet’s Escuchando al juez Garzón (2011)

Abstract The coincidence of Baltasar Garzón’s recent trial, which evaluated the legality of certain investigations he conducted as Audiencia Nacional judge, and the bicentennial of La Pepa, Spain’s first though brief experiment in democratic constitutionalism, invite reflection on the state of democracy in Spain. This article on Catalonian director Isabel Coixet’s documentary primarily explores the practice of listening in the filmed interview of Garzón, Escuchando al juez Garzón (Coixet, 2011), and the relationship between listening and democracy that comes to light within the context of the commemoration of La Pepa concurrent to the trials that suspended Garzón from the bench for eleven years. This piece begins by drawing from the work of documentary scholar Bill Nichols and political scientist Susan Bickford, respectively, for its analysis of the voice of the documentary and the practice and promotion of democratic listening.

Mobile Music Listening: The Users and their Art of Making Do Lionel Detry

Research on mobile music listening lacks empirical data to provide a good understanding of the practice. My ethnography of mobile listeners aims at investigating the act of listening by taking into account situational and technical dimensions of the practice. In this paper, I support a theoretical position to consider the listening environment when investigating the practice of mobile music listening. By looking closely at the affordances and constraints of the situation of use and of the technical device, it is possible to determine how these aspects configure the practice. My interpretations, based on Antoine Hennion’s (2002) concept of ‘performance’ of listening, confirm the idea of listening as a product of the ecology in which it takes place. Further interpretations can lead to detail the more creative practices of the listeners and develop a typology of users.

“Where there’s music there is”...: Manipulating Sonic Expectations in Don Quijote

THE refrain, Where there's music, there can be no evil, has become so engrained in contemporary society that it is used as a mantra for music festivals, has several conversation threads on twitter and is referenced in countless novels and books. However, for the character that spoke these memorable words, it would seem that the opposite is true. During their stay as guests of the Duke and Duchess, Sancho Panza and Don Quijote have quite the adventure one evening in the forest that lies just outside the palace. First, the pair is terror-stricken and immobilized by the overwhelming sounds of battle cries, metal clashing and war instruments. When those awful noises finally end, Sancho rejoices at the sound of music, proclaiming that it can only mean something good awaits them. And yet, what follows is the apparition of fantastical, though ugly, figures followed by a sentence of voluntary lashings for the faithful escudero. This example is just one of the many instances in the novel, Don Quijote, (1) in which the pair is accompanied and directed by auditory experiences. Throughout their travels, sonic stimuli (encompassing noise, sound and music) is an important factor in orienting the duo within their geographical surroundings, establishing social relationships and eliciting emotional responses. What makes this particular adventure notable is precisely the separation between the protagonists' beliefs about what sounds should mean and what actually happens to them. This has direct implications for appreciating aural expressions as sites of meaning and knowledge that extend beyond the written word. Hence, the detailed accounts of sounds and their use in manipulating expectations point to how Miguel de Cervantes uses his writing to become the purposeful creator of aural environments, and as such, is not just an author, but also a sound designer. CERVANTES: FROM EARWITNESS TO SOUND DESIGNER The scholarship on the topic of sonic references in Cervantes's writing is not only a fairly recent phenomenon of the twentieth century, but also struggles with the lack of historical evidence to substantiate claims regarding the novelist's past. While some historians believe that during his military service, Cervantes became acquainted with a variety of music and instruments as well as met some of the most esteemed musicians and composers of his time, there is no concrete evidence to support these claims. Hence, the specific case of Cervantes poses difficulties in ascertaining the author's experience and knowledge of music. According to Chad Gasta, if the author acquired training, there is no way to know how advanced it was. In short, nothing in the biographical record sheds light on Cervantes's attraction to particular forms; nor do these sources explain his insightful and vast knowledge of music as evidence in the novel (Senora 357). Yet, many scholars suggest that, in spite of non-existent records, the author possessed remarkable insight (Haywood 2) or even that he had ideas claras de lo que hoy dia llamamos principios generales de teoria musical (Querol Galvada 37). It is not my intention to enter into the conversation about the extent of Cervantes's training and knowledge, but rather, to suggest that the way he weaves sounds into his writing may be more broadly reflective of his personal listening practices. In his exhaustive study of the author's references, Juan Jose Pastor states that the author possessed an oido excepcional para las manifestaciones musicales de su tiempo and that the attention Cervantes gives to describing the sound of characters' voices, the music used for dance numbers and naming instruments suggests that the author absorbed the aural world around him (Por asperos caminos 8). Hence, I propose that more than just having a good ear, the novelist experienced his surroundings by becoming what environmental music scholar R. Murray schafer calls an earwitness. …

Preparing for Worship

This article uses insights from an empirical study of music-users to explore the assumptions and expectations which everyday music is likely to create within a Western Christian congregation. It identifies the desire to be happy, the search for a safe space, a concern about personal identity and a willingness to use music to acknowledge negative emotions as four key emphases of the practice of contemporary listening. These four emphases are explored in relation to the practice of contemporary worship. It is shown that whilst it could be argued that everyday music dulls the expectations of the non-musical – for the musical may gain much through performance and participation in music-making – it is nevertheless vital that theological attention is paid to what is happening to congregation-members. The potentially salvific work to which music contributes is in need of further exploration and articulation in contemporary theology.

Records ruin the landscape: John Cage, the sixties, and sound recording

John Cage's disdain for records was legendary. He repeatedly spoke of the ways in which recorded music was antithetical to his work. In Records Ruin the Landscape , David Grubbs argues that, following Cage, new genres in experimental and avant-garde music in the 1960s were particularly ill suited to be represented in the form of a recording. These activities include indeterminate music, long-duration minimalism, text scores, happenings, live electronic music, free jazz, and free improvisation. How could these proudly evanescent performance practices have been adequately represented on an LP? In their day, few of these works circulated in recorded form. By contrast, contemporary listeners can encounter this music not only through a flood of LP and CD releases of archival recordings but also in even greater volume through Internet file sharing and online resources. Present-day listeners are coming to know that era's experimental music through the recorded artifacts of composers and musicians who largely disavowed recordings. In Records Ruin the Landscape , Grubbs surveys a musical landscape marked by altered listening practices.

Monastic Practices Countering a Culture of Consumption

Monastic Practices Countering a Culture of Consumption

Extensive listening 2.0 with foreign language podcasts

This article investigates the use of podcasts for out-of-class listening practice. Drawing on Vandergrift and Goh's metacognitive approach to extensive listening, it discusses their principles for listening projects in the context of podcast-based listening. The study describes a class of 28 intermediate German students, who listened to self-selected podcasts for one semester. Participants kept personal blogs in which they documented their podcast use, each wrote a podcast review and completed a survey on their use of podcasts, their blog and listening strategies. They also participated in focus group interviews (n=15) about their podcast experiences. Study findings suggest that the blogging activity provided language learners with the guidance and structure needed for varied and regular listening practice. Participants enjoyed the ability to choose their own listening materials and were able to align them with personal listening practices and individual listening goals. This impacted positively on the use of listening strategies.

Listening to the Voice on the Page: Joshua Steele and Technologies of Recording

Joshua Steele’s Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (1775) put forth a system for recording the voice in print that used a modified musical staff with additional markings to indicate emphasis and force. Steele’s method may have failed to become the established practice that he hoped it would, but his technology for recording has the potential to transform how scholars approach eighteenth-century practices of reading and listening.

Sound Objects and Sound Products: Standardizing a New Culture of Listening in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

In this chapter I develop the psychological underpinnings of environmental music towards an understanding of how the goals of cognitive and behavioral psychologists contributed to a new kind of listening at the beginning of the twentieth century. I begin with an examination of nineteenth-century concerns about both the physical and psychological effects of music and fraught debate among experimental psychologists of the role of musical expertise in the laboratory. These concerns were, I argue, rooted in the assumption of a direct, corporeal connection between the generation and reception of music, usually bound within a single, individual body. In the twentieth century, new technology liberated the listener from a temporally- and geographically-bound experience of music. The Tone Tests, Re-Creation Recitals, and Mood Change “parties” of Thomas Edison and the psychologist Walter Bingham show that recording technology allowed for a normalization and standardization of listening not previously possible in the music halls and laboratories of the nineteenth century. Rather paradoxically, since it also made music more accessible to the individual listener, recorded music, mobilized by industrial psychologists and record companies alike, created a new sound experience actively designed for the lowest common denominator of mass listening. It also contributed to the cultivation of a new practice of mass listening. The new mass listening practice presents broader questions about the definition of music and its functional role – If the function of music is to be ignored, is it still music?

Picturebooks, pedagogy and philosophy

Introduction: Censorship and Controversy in the Classroom Part One: Provocative Picturebooks 1. Playing with Dangerous Picturebooks 2. Not So Innocent Picturebooks 3. From Philosophical Novels to Picturebooks 4. Picturebooks as Philosophical Texts 5. Emotions and Picturebooks 6. Literary and Philosophical Responses to Picturebooks Part Two: Being Child 7. Slippage Between Realms 8. Talking Dogs and Moving Bears: The Realm of Meaning 9. Philosophy, Adult and Child 10. Authenticity of Knowledge and Understanding Part Three: Philosophical Listening 11. Listening and Juggling in Philosophical Space 12. Listening and Not Listening in Schools 13. Towards a Critical Practice of Philosophical Listening. Appendix A: List of Picturebooks Discussed in the Book

Mindful Music Listening as a Potential Treatment for Depression

This column is designed to underscore relationally based creative interventions used by counselors and psychotherapists in their practices. Our intention is to provide examples of novel, innovative ways of working with clients in their efforts to deepen self-awareness and their connections with others. Although the interventions within this column will be presented in a linear “how-to” manner, an essential premise of this column is that interventions submitted for publication have a contextual and relational basis. Basic to this column is the therapeutic focus of working through latent hurts and impediments to our clients' health and happiness. Client goals generally involve creating the requisite emotional space needed for genuine relational choice for connection to manifest. If you have created a useful therapy tool or if you have adapted an existing creative tool that you would like to share with readers, please follow submission guidelines in the author information packet available at http://www.creativecounselor.org/Journal.html Depression is one of the most common mental health issues. Although drug therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy remain popular and effective treatments, alternative interventions such as the use of music listening and mindfulness practice as interventions during therapy have gained ground. Research on the use of music listening and mindfulness practice shows each to be effective in treating depression. The authors propose a combined intervention called Mindful Music Listening, during which clients with depression use mindfulness skills while listening to music to notice, label, discuss, and learn to manage their emotions. Possible advantages include greater client self-awareness and emotional regulation as well as a strengthened counselor–client relationship.

Sándor Ferenczi: From Clinical Turmoil to Theoretical Articulations

The article deals with concepts proposed by Sándor Ferenczi: confusion of tongues, disavowal and progressive trauma, illustrated by a clinical example, in which excessive life experiences deeply determined the psychic construction, compromising the integrity of the self-image and the potentiality of egoic capacities. We attempt to understand the uniqueness of the patient's history, and the ethical practice of deep analytic listening.

Open Listening: Creative Evolution in Early Childhood Settings

This article sketches out a philosophy and practice of open listening, linking open listening to Bergson’s (1998) concept of creative evolution. I draw on examples of small children at play from a variety of sources, including Reggio-Emilia-inspired preschools in Sweden. The article offers a challenge to early childhood educators to listen and to think and act beyond the status quo.

Listening to Faith: An Interview with Krista Tippett of “Speaking of Faith”

Mulder’s interview of Krista Tippett, host and producer of popular radio program “Speaking of Faith,” brings to light the importance of the spiritual practice of listening. Tippett observes that, “Before we can become good listeners we have to become attentive to the fear in ourselves, whatever fear we have of listening. Before you can become a good listener, you have to be present … The quality of an answer is correlated with the quality of the question. If there is a true generosity of spirit and a true curiosity in the question, then you will get a bigger answer, a more real answer … We don’t just respond to the question in a conversation. We respond to the presence of the person asking the question as well.”

The Revised Listening Concepts Inventory (LCI-R): Assessing Individual and Situational Differences in the Conceptualization of Listening

Although research at the crossroads of communication and social cognition recognizes the importance of thought to the message reception process, none to date has systematically tested how “thinking for listening” might influence the listening process. One reason for this lacuna is the lack of a valid scale capable of measuring the many conceptualizations people have about listening. Consequently, this article sets out to develop and provide validity evidence for a measure to assess individual conceptualizations of listening. In Studies 1 through 3, evidence is gathered for the construct and nomological validity of the Revised Listening Concepts Inventory (LCI-R), whereas Study 4 provides evidence that listening conceptualizations vary across four listening situations. The general discussion argues for the importance of studying message reception processes as they occur in interaction and the role the LCI-R can play in helping to advance the theory building and practice of listening.

Listening to Kamagasaki

Keywords: commentary, Japan, soundscape, urban, music, labor, homeless

After the Blackbird Whistles: Listening to Silence in Classrooms

Background/ContextStudents spend a large part of their time in schools in silence. However, teachers tend to spend most of their time attending to student talk. Anthropological and linguistic research has contributed to an understanding of silence in particular communities, offering explanations for students’ silence in school. This research raised questions about the silence of marginalized groups of students in classrooms, highlighting teachers’ role in this silencing and drawing on limited meanings of silence. More recently, research on silence has conceptualized silence as a part of a continuum.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThe purpose of this project was to review existing literature and draw on two longitudinal research studies to understand the functions and uses of silence in everyday classroom practice. I explore the question, How might paying attention to the productivity of student silence and the possibilities it contains add to our understanding of student silence in educational settings? Silence holds multiple meanings for individuals within and across racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. However, in schools, silence is often assigned a limited number of meanings. This article seeks to add to educators’ and researchers’ tools for interpreting classroom silence.Research DesignThe article is based on two longitudinal qualitative studies. The first was an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of high school students in a multiracial high school on the West Coast. This study was designed with the goal of learning about adolescents’ literacy practices in and out of school during their final year of high school and in their first few years as high school graduates. The second study documents discourses of race and race relations in a postdesegregated middle school. The goal of this 3-year study was to gather the missing student perspectives on their racialized experiences in school during the desegregation time period.Conclusions/RecommendationsUnderstanding the role of silence for the individual and the class as a whole is a complex process that may require new ways of conceptualizing listening. I conclude that an understanding of the meanings of silence through the practice of careful listening and inquiry shifts a teacher's practice and changes a teacher's understanding of students’ participation. I suggest that teachers redefine participation in classrooms to include silence.

Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice (review)

Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. By Pauline Oliveros. New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2005. [128 p. ISBN 0595343651. $13.95.] Before you read beyond this first paragraph, take four or five minutes to do this simple exercise: stop and listen. What do you hear? What is the most distant sound you can hear? The closest? The most vivid and the most subtle? Can you relax and just take in the whole soundscape? How do you feel after doing this? Has anything changed? You will not be able to understand the power of Pauline Oliveros's important new book, unless you take time to experience and practice different ways of listening, for this book contains series of invitations to explore the world and ourselves through sound and silence. It is also an initiation in the practice Oliveros calls Deep One should enter this book with caution, because, if you are willing to explore experientially what it offers, it could well change your life. If one's hearing is healthy, seems as natural as breathing, since we are embedded in sonorous world, with sound waves washing over and through us constantly. Yet listening is very different from merely hearing. If you need proof of this assertion, just stop reading again and listen. (You may wonder who turned up the volume!) Directing attention toward auditory perception can transform an ordinary din into an aesthetic experience, as John Cage's 4'33'' invites us to do. Awakening to the transformative power of perception takes practice, and as we practice, our and the quality of our experience seems to deepen, and with it the quality of our lives. For Pauline Oliveros, has been her life-long practice, and her new book offers culmination of her experience and teaching in this realm. That Oliveros has been major figure in the field of experimental music as composer, performer, teacher, and writer hardly needs mention. She has to her credit an impressive catalogue of scores and recordings, as well as wealth of articles, most of which have been drawn together and published in two collections: Software for People: Collected Writings 1963-1980 (Baltimore: Smith Publications, 1984) and The Roots of the Moment (New York: Drogue Press, 1998). A defining moment in her life came in 1953 when she placed her new tape recorder on the window sill of her San Francisco apartment and recorded the sounds of the street outside. When she played back the tape, she realized she was hearing sounds she had not heard while taping, even though she thought she was Surprised at the discovery of what she had missed, she gave herself meditation: Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening. She has been doing this meditation as core practice now for over fifty years. It is fascinating to trace in her work over the years her journey of practicing being present to sound and silence. Oliveros's exploration around the year 1970 of group improvisational practice called Sonic Meditation proved major development in her career. Influenced by her study of Asian contemplative practices, including Buddhist meditation, she created strategies for improvisation that allowed musicians and those without musical training alike to explore modes of and responding in sound. The first collection of Sonic Meditations was published in 1971 as series of verbal descriptions of how to listen and create sound fabrics in groups. In these pieces everyone is participant and there are no separate spectators. Active participation helps develop individual awareness and sensitivity, as well as sense of group bonding and healing, where music is considered a welcome by-product. Sonic Meditations laid the foundation lor the practice of Listening. Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening in 1989 after making recording in remarkable acoustical space: an abandoned cistern at Washington State University with forty-five second reverberation time. …

Colombia: Speaking up

Adam Kahane has pioneered the use of scenarios as a tool for multi-stakeholder problem solving – as a way for leaders to talk and think together, in order to reach a shared understanding of their shared problem situation and of what they must do to address it. In 1991, Kahane was head of Social, Political, Economic and Technological Scenarios for Royal Dutch/Shell in London, when he was unexpectedly asked to facilitate the scenario conversation in South Africa among politicians, community leaders, businessmen and trade unionists – black and white, left and right – that became known as the Mont Fleur Scenario Project. This project played an important role in the shaping of the post-apartheid political and economic landscape. Inspired by this experience, Kahane ended up leaving Shell and throwing himself into the development of this dialogic approach to peacefully addressing highly complex, stuck problem situations. Since then he has led many Mont Fleur-type multi-stakeholder dialogue-and-action processes, throughout Africa, Europe, and North, Central and South America. Kahane has just published a book about what he has learned from this work, entitled Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities (San Francisco: Berrett–Koehler, 2004). The thesis of the book is that our most common way of solving problems is to use our expertise and authority to apply piece-by-piece, tried-and-true ‘best practices’. This works for simple, familiar, uncontentious problems, but does not work for the complex, unfamiliar, conflictual problems that we all increasingly face. When we try to solve these complex problems using our common way, the problems end up either being stuck or becoming unstuck only by force. We therefore need to learn another, uncommon way. The essence of this other, open way, Kahane suggests, is the practice of open-minded, open-hearted, open-willed talking and listening. Below we have excerpted a chapter from Kahane's book, about his experience in and around a landmark scenario project in Colombia. The chapter deals with one of the key transitions in moving from closed talking and listening, which merely re-enacts the current reality, to open talking and listening, through which new and better realities are born: speaking up.

Moving Democracy

Practices of listening, receptive corporeal traveling, and moving the democratic table among different constituencies and locations are vital to democratic struggles in a heterogeneous world. Marginalizing these practices weakens ethical-political vision and the strategic capacities of radical democracy. First, this article discusses the importance of moving beyond the accent on voice in a lot of democratic theory, to focus more on practices of listening. Second, it discusses the limits of listening and theorizes the need for practices of receptive corporeal traveling beyond the power-saturated borders and scripted flows of human bodies that characterize most cities. Third, it suggests these insights might alter a fundamental metaphor underpinning many democratic theories, through a critical discussion of the imaginary of the solid democratic “table.” It is better to construe democracy as “tabling”: an activity in which the tables of engagement must be repeatedly altered by being moved and multiplied.