Ways Of Listening Research Articles

Sound, dispositif and power: sound formations in pop music

ABSTRACT Sound as a medium of music is pre-structured in the social context in which it circulates, representing an aesthetic meta-level of the musical. As a socially pertinent concept, “sound” implies different references to the sonic material, including different ways of listening. The result of a cultural formatting process, sound manifests in formations that audibly and conceptually correspond to the processes through which societies in which they are anchored organise themselves. Although this has been present in all societies and cultures at all times, it is particularly evident in the technical shaping of sound in recording studios. Every recording is based on a sound design determined by the technical setup prior to the recording process. The concept of the dispositif developed by Michel Foucault offers a way of relating the meta-aesthetic, cultural pre-structuring of sonic material within the dominant sound formation and the resulting sound design to fundamental processes of social reproduction, cultural power relations, modes of subjectivation and subject forms. The productivity dispositif, the identity dispositif and the creativity dispositif describe three fundamental constellations within the framework of modern capitalism. The corresponding sound design is analysed on the basis of pop music productions from the 1950s to the 1980s.

The Sonic Meanings of the Life and Death of My Disabled Brother: Listening as a Method for Qualitative Research.

Long neglected listening is an underdeveloped element in western epistemology in general and in qualitative research in particular. However, recent developments in philosophy, sound art, anthropology, and qualitative research open promising pathways for mastering listening as a method and metaphor of inquiry also in health research, where understanding multiple layers of emotionally challenging experiences is crucial, yet often elusive. Through a sonic analysis of autobiographical data about life, death, and my disabled brother, I will try to demonstrate how paying attention to listening and sounds in research can add evolving layers of meaning to the data gathering and analyzing processes. Ultimately, such an analysis provides insights into a sibling's role as a caregiver by revealing mechanisms of nonconscious emotional coping and also into the acts of a disabled sibling as a teacher of subtle ways of listening.

What can listening do?

Documentary has traditionally been used and understood as a communicative tool to frame and impart knowledge about a subject matter. For Paula Rabinowitz, documentary’s “purpose is to speak and confer value on the objects it speaks about” (1994). But what other functions might documentary have if it were to draw attention to how we can also listen? Over the past twenty-five year, listening scholarship has focused on a number of domains including the public sphere (Lacey 2013), participatory democracy (Bickford 1996; Couldry 2010), and media practices (Dreher 2009). Yet, while ‘voice’ as authorship and social participation has been well theorised in documentary, there has been little scholarly attention given to how audiences listen, and what strategies creators can use to evoke different ways of listening. The possibilities for listening as an active role in documentary have further been enhanced through interactive technologies. In this presentation, I draw on my current research and practice around the possibilities for interactive and expanded documentary to promote listening as a way to attend to ethical and political questions. Listening is not a singular action, rather, it can fulfill multiple functions. I propose that practices of listening can reframe the self as collective, reveal multiple co-existing narratives, counter erasure, promote engagement with difference and destabilise a anthropocentric perspective. Drawing on frameworks which include political, non-representational and sound theory, I ground my propositions through a range of interactive and immersive documentaries from the past ten years, each of which attempts to implicate the audience in new and responsible relationships to the historical and phenomenological world.

Leading Culture Change: Moving from Transformational Initiatives to a Transformational Institution

ABSTRACT In Short Fundamental of Higher Education are broken. Changing higher education, and any organization, requires a new way of listening (and from whom to listen). A clear theory of change, with values that matter at its center, should drive decision making, budgeting, and even organizational structures. Through data summits, an organization can identify initiatives that work and then must scale them for impact. Organizational charts should not be confused with a communication plan. Intentional conversations between leadership, employees, students, and community created a foundation for trust and transformation. A culture that is focused on loving students to success leads to a culture that transforms an organization’s culture, impact, and communication.

Introduction

Introduction

The experience of workplace gender discrimination for women registered nurses: A qualitative study.

To explore the experiences of female registered nurses (RNs), who encounter workplace gender discrimination in nursing. This study used a qualitative exploratory design informed by feminist perspectives and was underpinned by social constructionism. Women who were RNs (N=10) and employed in New South Wales (NSW) were purposively selected to convey their experiences of workplace gender discrimination. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, between April and July 2020. Analysis was guided by the work of Anderson and Jack (Women's words; 1991) who recommend three ways of listening. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and Braun and Clarke's (Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3, 77-101; 2006) six-step guide was used to develop themes. Thematic analysis revealed five overarching themes: It's a man's world; Gender stereotypes; Being a woman and nurse; Reluctance to call out gender discrimination and The status quo. Findings from this study highlighted that participants believed men's career progression in nursing were favoured over women. Findings from this research highlight that socially constructed gendered norms continue to form the basis of inequality for women in the workplace. Fostering and sustaining workplace cultures that support family and work life balance, and that do not discriminate against women, is fundamental to ensuring equality for women. There is limited qualitative research into women's experiences of workplace gender discrimination in nursing. This research highlights the need for workplace strategies to be implemented to ensure women are better supported and equally represented in leadership positions and advanced practice roles in nursing. All nurses should be given equal consideration based on experience and qualifications. Career development and progression opportunities should be fair, equitable and transparent with clearly documented criteria.

Review: Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, by Dylan Robinson

Review: <i>Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies</i>, by Dylan Robinson

Indymedia Cancún, Radio Hurakán, and the Sounding of Altermundos Sonoros

This paper explores the sonic engagements and possibilities brought forward at Radio Hurakán and the Indymedia Cancún audio space, temporarily set up in 2003 during the mobilizations against the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) fifth Ministerial Meeting in Cancún, Mexico, where close to 300 media activists from Latin America, the United States, and Europe converged to provide independent coverage of alternative actions, forums, and events. It reconstructs and (re)sounds this experience by examining a variety of Indymedia Cancún and Radio Hurakán artifacts and materials, including Indymedia Cancún audio productions found in online audio archives and websites, and interviews highlighting the audio and radio collectives from the Global South that participated in Radio Hurakán, particularly focusing on community radio activists from Mexico. In this way, this paper poses that audio and radio activists were engaged in the making of altermundos sonoros, or sonic alterworlds, through skill-sharing efforts, collaborative organizing and production practices, and autonomously developed tech, generating a bottom-up sonic infrastructure to make audible a variety of sounds, textures, tonalities, and stories that resonated near and far, making possible the sounding of radical imaginaries and the opening of pathways for different ways of listening.

Groove

Groove

A FIELD GUIDE TO SONIC BOTANY: THOUGHTS ABOUT ECO-COMPOSITION

AbstractSonic botany is an ongoing project that I have been developing over the past few years. It incorporates natural artefacts: dry leaves, pods, flowers, branches, rocks, bones and other organic findings. These are used as musical instruments that are played on with a scientific/musical tool: tuning forks in various frequencies. The vibration from the tuning forks resonates through the natural artefacts which amplify the vibration and – via sound – reveal the texture, size, material and condition of the organic matter. This process generates new sonic material, new context and new forms of musical composition. The practice developed into several compositions and projects, a performance practice, a notation system and a way of listening. Here I share some of the insights I gained through this process, the tools and the compositional framework.

A critique of the racialised and neo-colonial politics of listening: Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de … (1966)

ABSTRACT This article considers one of the most canonical films in Francophone African cinema, Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de… (1966), through the lens of listening to reveal new dimensions of the film’s neo-colonial critique. Applying concepts developed in inquiries into racialised politics of listening in the United States context, this article shows how the film both exposes and critiques Diouana’s employers’ privilege to selectively decide what sound matters. Reading the film through the lens of listening also adds new resonance to the mask, and, in turn, the sequences in which it plays a major role. Namely, exploring the mask’s larger cultural significance – it is an initiation mask associated with the sulaw class of the Bamana korè society – recasts, in part, Diouana’s employment as her own initiation into global political orders, whose politics of listening do not match her expectations. Through her suicide, Diouana begins to dismantle the racialised politics to which she is subjected in France and forces, if only temporarily, Monsieur to experience life outside his own comfortable ways of listening. Ultimately, the article contends that the film challenges its audience to consider its own ways of listening and, perhaps, the politics of listening surrounding the film itself.

Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson

Reviewed by: Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson Alexa Woloshyn (bio) Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies by Dylan Robinson University of Minnesota Press, 2020 Hungry Listening is a disciplinary reckoning. The book argues that settlers listen to Indigenous music and sounds through settler colonial musical logics. This book has two primary audiences: Indigenous and non-Indigenous. Some of the moments directed to Indigenous readers are open to non-Indigenous readers like myself to witness and learn. Others contain unexplained knowledge or exist in spaces where I am not invited. Robinson also directly asks non-Indigenous readers to name and reject settler logics of listening, composing, performing, and writing. Robinson hopes for transformative intersectional work between Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. He models this intersectional work in Hungry Listening by drawing on multiple disciplines and speaking to multiple positionalities. The book title is a concept developed by Robinson, which he explains in the introduction. It is an English translation of two Halq'eméylem words: (1) shxwelítemelh ("the adjective for settler or white person's methods/things" [p. 2]), which is based on the word Stó:lō people (xwélmexw) used for starving White settlers in the mid-nineteenth-century gold rush; and (2) xwélalà:m (listening). Robinson also provides an overview of his critique of "inclusionary music" and "inclusionary performance" as musical contexts in which Indigenous content is mined for aesthetic interest and "fit"—or assimilated—into [End Page 119] Euro-American classical compositions and performances. Robinson offers an alternative model, "Indigenous + art music," which rejects assimilation and embraces incommensurability. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of a "tin ear," which reflects the settler listener's ability to perceive only Western ontologies of music. Thus, a "hungry listener" not only desires to consume but also to fit Indigenous content into something knowable and recognizable. Throughout the chapter, Robinson illustrates Indigenous and settler logics of listening. He argues for an unsettling of listening that embraces multisensory, flexible, non-teleological listening and does not appropriate Indigenous ways of listening. Read the introduction and chapter 1 before reading any subsequent chapters, including assigning any later chapters to students. Chapter 2 models an intersectional citational practice that emphasizes decolonial alliances among Indigenous, Black, Asian, Latinx, settler, and LBGTQ2 scholars. Robinson discusses examples of "performance writing," which he praises for challenging "the unmarked normatively of listening through explicitly marking listening positionality" (p. 81). This chapter challenges music scholars to explore sensory and affective writing approaches that can engage more deeply with our listening experiences. Robinson revisits some familiar musicology texts, asking us to embrace their nonnormative possibilities instead of merely citing them within normative structures. In chapter 3, Robinson positions his examples—colonial and contemporary—within a four-model taxonomy: integration, nation-to-nation music trading and reciprocal presentation, a combination of the first two, and coexistence without integration. This taxonomy will help analyze case studies beyond those included in Hungry Listening. Robinson presents case studies by non-Indigenous composers, in which Indigenous music and stories are forced awkwardly and violently into Western musical structures. In contrast, Mohawk composer Dawn Avery's piece "Sarabande" demonstrates "a sharpness of difference" (p. 143). Chapter 4 explains how the histories of Indigenous song collection enabled and justified Canadian composers' extraction of Indigenous songs as a resource to create so-called Canadian music. Robinson directs much of this chapter to Indigenous readers with the hopes that they together can find "different means by which [they] . . . might address this misuse of our songs" (p. 151). The chapter ends with a pointed critique of settler imaginings of the Inuit dogsled through an extensive event score for Alexina Louie's Take the Dog Sled. Chapter 5 critiques what Robinson calls "inclusionary performances" for trying to evoke feelings of reconciliation rather than take substantive actions toward nonrepresentational reconciliation. Robinson underlines what is at stake when settler audiences embrace [End Page 120] these feelings of reconciliation and do not push deeper: "For settler audience members, it may be a much easier task to embrace the mystery of Indigenous stories and aesthetics than to play a leading role in the eradication of another kind of mystery...

Traces left by Herbert Brün that orient my cybernetics (Maybe)

PurposeHerbert Brün was a composer of many things including electronic and computer music. His compositions were, by design, nested in his passions for designing a new society – without violence. In this article, the author attempts to address several of Brün’s concepts relevant to his desire for social change. This paper was stimulated by a panel discussion about Brün at the 2018 American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) conference “Framing a Reality and How It Matters in a Shared World.”Design/methodology/approachHerbert Brün nested his communication in what he labeled “anticommunication,” which requires a listener to generate new ways of listening. As a video ethnographer, the author had many opportunities to videotape Brün, beginning with our first encounter at the 1992 ASC Conference in Washington State. During the past several decades, the author has composed a variety of movies in which the video footage of Brün and others that the author associates with cybernetics is used. Excerpts from many of these movies are embedded in the links located in the references section of this paper.FindingsBrün’s cybernetic formulations for designing social transformations explored in this paper include his ideas on floating hierarchies, anticommunication, his notions on a circularity of needs, peace as a need, articulating desires, composing as an element of daily life, and the retardation of decay.Originality/valueIt is the author’s desire that this paper encourages the reader to explore some of Herbert Brün’s formulations for designing social change and transformations.

Activating Audiences: How spatial music can help us to listen

This article discusses the importance of active listening when engaging new audiences with experimental and unfamiliar musical formats. Spatial music is examined as a physically immersive medium in which the audience is implicated as an active component in the execution of its performance. A brief account of the historic context of spatial music will be presented alongside speculation for the trajectory of its future; particularly its potential as a model for audience engagement. This article will first consider how spatially immersive performances have the capacity to activate listeners and how can this help to engage new audiences with new ways of listening. It will also question the notion of inhabiting spatial music, with an investigation of the multiple ways in which spatial music relates to physical space and the terms of its inhabitation. The concept of virtual listening will be discussed in response to trends towards passive hearing, as driven by recent technological developments in acoustic software and hardware, and the resultant abstraction of the spatial and social dynamics of sound in virtual space. The physiological and psychological differences between listening and hearing will also be examined as a means of establishing fundamental differences in the ways that we interact with music, and questioning what our listening habits tell us about audience engagement in the context of experimental music performance. This article will also question the individual roles of the musician, composer, architect/designer and audience in the ongoing responsibility to improve audience engagement in new, or unfamiliar musical works. Importantly, this article will also explicitly examine who we are referring to when we use the term ‘new audiences’. Major developments in acoustic technology during the last few decades have somewhat confused the diagram between music, space and listener. The understanding of which elements are active and which are passive is especially ambiguous at a time when ambisonic and binaural technologies have become developed enough to provide accurate simulations of the abstract, acoustic qualities of spaces, but on virtual terms. Architects, composers, musicians, engineers and audiences are at a crossroads in the development of new music and experimental, spatiosonic practice. ‘Spatiosonic’ is a hybrid term which is used throughout this article to describe work and phenomena which regard space (spatio) and sound (sonic) as equal, interactive partners. This article considers some of the opportunities and limitations at stake in current techniques of composition, performance and listening.

The Echo Listening Profile: Initial Validity Evidence for a Measure of Four Listening Habits

This article contributes to the larger literature on meaning construction and misunderstanding by developing a typology of listening habits and a corresponding scale to measure individual differences in typical ways of listening. Our typology includes four habits of listening grounded in two underlying aspects of meaning, content and relational, found in any spoken message. Analytical Listening (AL) involves filtering information through an interest in results and facts, while Conceptual Listening (CL) involves filtering information through an interest in concepts and possibilities. Connective Listening (CV) involves filtering information through interests in others (people, groups, processes, or audiences), while Reflective Listening (RV) involves filtering information through one’s own interests and purposes. Results from two studies provide construct, convergent, and discriminant validity evidence for the resulting ECHO Listening Profile. In particular, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to create a 40-item version of the ECHO Listening Profile (ECHO) that was shown to map onto a conceptually similar measure of listening habits, the Listening Style Profile; ECHO did not, however, fully duplicate that scale and thus adds to our knowledge of how all listening is biased. Moreover, through use of comparative forced-choice scaling, ECHO reduces concerns found with self-reporting of listening, including response bias. Future work investigating the impact of Connective, Reflective, Analytical, and Conceptual Listening on how people navigate their personal and professional lives is warranted.

Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio by Daniel R. Melamed

Reviewed by: Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio by Daniel R. Melamed Mark A. Peters (bio) Daniel R. Melamed. Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). xx, 149 pp. What do you need to know before listening to Bach? Quite simply, nothing. In our age of an overabundance of information, however, many listeners clearly do not agree and seek guidance in the form of program notes, pre-concert talks, and CD liner notes that they (presumably) hope will help them listen to Bach "the right way." But as Daniel R. Melamed reminds us in the Epilogue to Listening to Bach: The Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio, "There is, of course, no one way to listen to Bach. People listen in every conceivable manner, and there is no basis for saying that one way is better than any other" (125). So why a book like this one, written for precisely those non-specialist listeners likely to be reading program and liner notes and attending pre-concert lectures with the goal of orienting their listening to Bach's Mass in B Minor and Christmas Oratorio? Because while it is true—and, I think, a good reminder to Bach specialists and non-specialists alike—that one does not need to know anything before listening to Bach, it is also true that a book like this one can orient our listening in particularly valuable ways. Melamed continues: But there are ways of listening to Bach that might not have occurred to you, including those that take eighteenth-century musical sensibilities into account or that recognize the consequences of our place as listeners in the twenty-first century and as inheritors of a long performing tradition. The aim of this book has been to suggest and encourage those ways of listening. (125) In artfully and insightfully communicating such ways of listening to the Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio, Melamed has created a fitting companion volume to his Hearing Bach's Passions.1 Like that work, Listening to Bach focuses on "the musical substance of the works and the experience of listening to them" (xix). Melamed characterizes this focus and its benefits in the Epilogue, arguing that "an awareness of musical style as it was understood in the eighteenth century might be the most important tool" for our own role as listeners in the twenty-first century (125). He notes that such knowledge of musical style equips the listener to listen thoughtfully to "almost any piece of sacred or liturgical music of the time and recognize where it stands on the spectrum of old and [End Page 314] new styles," understand particular compositional choices and musical characteristics in eighteenth-century terms, think differently about music that is often first discussed in terms of parody, and thoughtfully consider one's own position as a listener or performer in the twenty-first century (125–26). In taking the musical substance and our experience of it as listeners as a starting point, Melamed clearly aims to shift discussion of the Mass in B Minor and the Christmas Oratorio away from parody. Melamed rightly notes that parody dominates the discussions of these works, not only in program notes, pre-concert talks, and CD liner notes, but even more so in Bach scholarship. Just think of how often you have seen, and perhaps studied with students, a chart of sources for the parody movements of the Mass in B Minor or the Christmas Oratorio. Melamed includes such charts himself in the appendix to Listening to Bach (128, 130), but he also de-centers the topic of parody from its privileged place in the discussion of these two major Bach vocal works. And Melamed's fundamental reason for arguing against parody as a central topic is both simple and utterly convincing based on his approach in this book: you can't hear parody. When Bach's Leipzig congregation heard the opening chorus, "Fallt mit Danken, fallt mit Loben," from part 4 of the Christmas Oratorio on 1 January 1735, for example, they would not have known, nor likely cared...

Music Listening Is Creative

Active music listening is a creative activity in that the listener constructs a uniquely personal musical experience. Most approaches to teaching music listening emphasize a conceptual approach in which students learn to identify various characteristics of musical sound. Unfortunately, this type of listening is rarely done outside of schools. This article establishes a framework for teaching music listening as creative by maximizing students’ individual and diverse ways of listening.

Lay knowledge, social movements and the use of medicines: Personal reflections.

This article consists of two personal reflections about the changing status of lay knowledge over the last 20 years. The first reflection is by Nicky Britten from the perspective of a sociologist working in medical schools whose interest in this topic was motivated by my own personal experience of health care and of teaching general practitioners. Starting with the problematic deficit model of 'ignorant patients', I trace the literature on patient-centredness, shared decision-making, lay knowledge, public involvement in research and social movements. Looking at medicines use in particular, I deplore the continued hegemony of the concept of compliance in the face of extensively documented problems with the licensing, regulation, prescribing and monitoring of medicines. I argue that lay knowledge is now taken more seriously, not so much because of advocacy by clinicians and academics, but because of social movements and social action. We may have moved from 'anecdotes' to 'lived experience' but there is still a way to go, particularly when it comes to medicines use. I end with a possible future scenario. The second reflection is by Kath Maguire and is a response from the perspective of someone who came to work in this field with the express purpose of improving engagement with lay knowledge. It questions my own 'layness' and explores the issues raised by Nicky Britten using the lens of lived experience. Finally, it questions the paradigm of social movements and highlights the importance of developing different ways of listening.

Review of Eric Clarke,Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning(Oxford University Press, 2005; paperback, 2011)

[1] Ten years have passed since the first publication of Ways of Listening. As with all anniversaries, this one presents us with an opportunity for reflection: to consider the ingenuity of Eric Clarke's project, to be sure, as well as its enduring relevance. Now, as it did then, Ways of Listening appeals to a wide audience in its content and tone. At the time, it offered the most extensive application of ecological psychology to music perception and analysis. And as a study of musical meaning from the standpoint of listening, it complements and challenges influential approaches that employ different frameworks, for instance those of semiotics, hermeneutics, and multimedia.(1) More broadly, Ways of Listening presents a significant attempt to integrate the perspectives of psychology and musicology. While Clarke notes in 2005 that only "partial convergence" between the two fields had taken place, in 2015, such a union is hardly uncommon. In the past decade alone, music scholars have celebrated several new books that deftly handle their interdisciplinary subject matter and tackle some rather weighty issues, including but not limited to: the way music evokes emotion; how listener expectations are formed; and the roles of metaphor, physical motion, and repetition in everyday musical experiences.(2) Against the current landscape, Clarke's central concern--how it is that listeners perceive musical meaning--is as relevant as ever. And remarkably, his discussion incorporates ideas that have gained currency over the years (no doubt contributing to the paperback reissue), most notably musical listening as an embodied experience. Clarke's writing style is straightforward and engaging, aimed at a readership both with and without formal psychological and music-theoretical training. Moreover, numerous lengthy and diverse music examples feature prominently.[2] Clarke concisely sets forth the following premises in his Introduction. Auditory perception works to discover "what sounds are the sounds of, and what to do about them" (3), that is, what actions to take. In turn, hearing sounds as "sounds of" contributes to an understanding of what sounds mean--where they are located, who or what produced them, and so forth. And musical sounds, Clarke underscores, inhabit the same world as everyday sounds. The perception of musical meaning, then, is the "awareness of meaning in music while listening to it" (4-5). The temporal aspect of this conception is key. Clarke distinguishes the online awareness of meaning from that arising upon reflection or in one's imagination in the absence of sound. Further, the relationship between an individual perceiver and the musical environment--what he calls "mutualism"--is a principal consideration in his approach, since, as Clarke notes, "sounds are often the sounds of all kinds of things at the same time" (3). To that end, he aims to consider musical materials in relation to the perceptual capacities of twenty-first-century listeners, using his own experiences as the starting point.[3] Ecological perceptual theory serves as the framework for Clarke's project (more on this in a moment); the "information-processing" view of music perception serves as a foil. In the latter perspective, listeners confront an environment that is inherently messy and unstructured, and to make sense of this, they abstract various features from the stimulus material to organize and interpret the data. This view is hierarchical, whereby processing starts with (raw) environmental data at one end ("bottom-up" processing), and prior experiences and conceptions guide interpretations at the other end ("top-down" processing). Clarke portrays the information-processing view as the "standard cognitive approach" (41) to perception and the dominant outlook in music psychology--a characterization that may strike some as overstated today.(3) Nevertheless, his summary works well to set in relief the view he subsequently details: that the world is in fact a "highly structured environment subject to both the forces of nature. …

Lost: Thomas Edison's Mood MusicFound: New Ways of Listening

Lost: Thomas Edison's Mood MusicFound: New Ways of Listening