As écoutant I am listening, I am a participle, a verb, like the sounds I hear. I meet the sound as a verb and we are both doing…The écoutant listens with unashamed fervour, hearing what he thinks, as an act of his unimpeded imagination. (Voegelin, 2010, p. 96)

The écoutant Salomé Voegelin describes is a derivation of Roland Barthes’ écrivant. This is the term he uses to describe someone who is a writer in the act of writing, in contrast to an écrivain, an author of the finished work (Barthes, 1972). Adapting the écrivant, who writes “without hesitation what he thinks” (Voegelin, 2010, p. 96), to an écoutant allows for a dual role in which a listener is in the act of listening, as well as a listener who is in the act of listening to thoughts about listening.

This latter position perfectly describes the entanglement of listening, thought and language that I experience. When I listen, I hear the sound and my thoughts simultaneously and clearly. I draw on this to write about sound creatively and critically. I also use texts to inspire my sounds, not to create narratives but atmospheres and worlds. I don’t expect my writing to fully express the sound, or my sound to fully express the writing. Instead, I am interested in how one form under- or overdetermines another and how this incomplete translation creates something else.

But that’s just me. Which is the point. Listening to sounds is a subjective experience. There are elements of shared subjectivity, but no two cochleae are identically shaped, and no two brains are wired, via nature and nurture, to make the same connections. So, the intention of Listening Lingua is to ask other people to describe what they are hearing—to delve into other people’s ways of being an écoutant. From this I hope to explore a range of “languages”, modes, and understandings of listening with the possibility that it may encourage me to expand the way I experience and express listening.

In this introductory essay, I will describe the Listening Lingua interview project, its methodology and its execution. (For more, see theory analysis: chapter 4, “Ficto-criticism as Performative Research”.) The main content of Listening Lingua is a collection of responses from the participants, provided to illustrate the multiple ways listening manifests, presented under the different listening intentions that guided the process. It is not necessary to read all the responses, but even grazing through a few from each section will offer the breadth of responses and insight into the different ways in which people listen. This essay is complemented by the Reflection essay, where I analyse the content of the interviews.

In Defence of Language

The main tool we have to express our listening experience is language, yet language is frequently criticised as unfit for purpose—simultaneously too slippery and too signifying. One of the most cited criticisms of language in relation to music is Roland Barthes’ dismissal of music writing that “inevitably” employs the adjective:

No doubt the moment we turn art into a subject (for an article, for a conversation) there is nothing left but to give it predicates (1)The predicate is the part of a sentence that contains the verb and relates to the subject. For example in the sentence “She listens well”, listens is the verb and well is an adjective pertaining to the subject she. Thus “listens well” is the predicate. In some areas of linguistics the verb alone is considered the predicate but Barthes is working with the former definition (as am I).; in the case of music, however, such predication unfailingly takes the most facile and trivial form, that of the epithet. Naturally this epithet, to which we are constantly led by weakness or fascination (little parlour game: talk about a piece of music without using a single adjective), has an economic function: the predicate is always the bulwark with which the subject’s imaginary protects itself from the loss which threatens it. The man who provides himself or is provided with an adjective is now hurt, now pleased, but always constituted. (Barthes, 1977, p. 179)

I do not possess the philosophical training to take on the intricacies of Barthes’ theory, however I would suggest that the predicate adjective (that which describes something about the subject) cannot live alone, rather only in a relation to its linking verb—the is this, is that. Equally, the predicate of a sentence equally has little purpose or context without its subject. As I explain in more detail in my Reflection essay, grammatical items serve no purpose in isolation, but when combined express a set of relations between subjects and objects brought about by actions. It should be noted here that my interest in grammar is not that of a linguist attempting to understand and/or construct a system; rather, I am interested in grammar as a metaphorical and interpretive tool to assist in understanding our relations with sounds and words and their slippery subject-object relations.

Despite his criticism, Barthes admits that it is futile to struggle against the inevitability of the adjective. Instead, he suggests a change to the musical object itself: “to alter its level of perception or intellection, to displace the fringe of contact between music and language” (1977, pp. 180–181). This I believe can be done if we choose to listen beyond meaning and signification; to listen beyond the codes of traditional music (with which Barthes is still concerned). It is this kind of listening, this recasting of the musical object as sound event—a sounding—that the Listening Lingua interviews attempt to encourage, hoping that, in its documentation, the “displaced fringes” may manifest as a range of poetic shards and strategies.

Poetic and Performative Research

This interview project employs Brad Haseman’s methodological proposal of performative research (2006). Drawing on J. L. Austin’s theory of "speech acts", in which there are certain contexts whereby the utterance of speech serves to constitute the act that it speaks of—such as “I do” in a marriage ceremony—performative research describes projects where the creative doing is the research activity. These projects “deploy symbolic data”, such as music, dance, theatre or media, rather than the qualitative standard of written reporting (Haseman, 2006, p. 102). (There is still leniency towards text in terms of creative writing when the creative project is the artefact of the research). Haseman allows for a blurring of borders between the qualitative and performative but maintains that performative research takes over when qualitative methods “will not accommodate completely the surplus of emotional and cognitive operations and outputs thrown up by the practitioner” (p. 104). This aptly describes this practice-based project, which explores the responses from the participants as creative and generative material rather than linguistic, psychological or sociological data.

In processing the research material I have employed the method of poetic analysis proposed by Timothy McKenna-Buchannan (2018). He defines this as “a method that creatively constructs data into expressive and artful representations”, allowing the researcher “to (re)organize and compose the data with poetic sensibilities” (McKenna-Buchannan, 2018, Abstract). In this research I employ what he calls poetic transcription, in which participants’ responses are edited and condensed as a collection of poetic fragments. While this could be construed as merely presenting the raw data—or violating the raw data with editing—poetic analysis reframes these expectations. McKenna-Buchannan says that poetic analysis allows the researcher “to distil the feeling back into each of the words or phrases extracted, and to capture the spirit of their participants’ stories” (McKenna-Buchannan, 2018, Overview). If conducted with an artistic/aesthetic intention and a sincerity in the representation, he proposes that this method encourages transformation within the experience of the data. In my application of the method, the sequencing of the responses also plays a role in this transformation, allowing the entries to “speak” to each other. Reading sequentially will reveal these connections, but equally, as mentioned, grazing across them may offer other insights in terms of variation and contrast, encouraging the reader to think more deeply about the findings.

Speech to Text

These are transcriptions because the responses are spoken and then rendered as written text. In the process of poetic transcription and editing I have streamlined the responses, removing some stumbling and repetitious elements and verbatim artefacts, while trying to retain the spirit of each participant’s contribution. The hedges and stumbles, trial and errors of speech, indicate the effort of “conjugating” and expanding our condensed thoughts—which may include non-linguistic modes, such as visual and conceptual thought (Vygotsky, 1986). While it could be argued that including all these raw elements of tentativeness illustrates the “doubtfulness” of sound, as Voegelin (2010) expresses it, it would be ingenuous as the verbatim roughness extends to situations beyond listening descriptions. In editing for conciseness, flow and ease of reading I have also tried to retain a sense of the participant feeling their way through language, testing and tasting language on the tongue.

In negotiating the potential friction between the spontaneity of speech and the premeditation of writing, I draw on Jacques Derrida's notion of arche-writing (1998). Derrida argues that “writing”, rather than being the exterior sign of the sign of speech, actually precedes speech, encompassing the whole field of language: “I believe that generalized writing is not just the idea of a system to be invented…on the contrary that oral language already belongs to this writing” (1998, p. 55). He proposes arche-writing to signify this concept that can “constitute not only the pattern uniting form to all substance, graphic or otherwise, but the movement of the sign-function linking a content to an expression, whether it be graphic or not” (Derrida, 1998, p. 60). Consequently, I am using arche-writing to refer to the greater “sense” that is revealed in the spoken responses, which I hope to have retained in the poetic translation to written text. I am interested in the overall move towards language as “pattern uniting form” in relation to listening that may be evident in both the spoken and written form.

Structures and Best Intentions

I conducted 22 interviews with volunteer participants within the context of three different art events: the 2019 NOW now festival of improvised and experimental music in Sydney; a public engagement event to accompany the touring exhibition, Experimenta Make Sense at Latrobe Regional Gallery in Morwell, (2)My work, SonoLexic, offering preliminary sound and language research was in this exhibition. The interview format was initially devised to accompany this piece; and, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom interviews with participants gathered from a call made during a subsequent Experimenta-hosted artist talk. I also wanted to hear from artists who were intensively engaged in sound and music practices to see how greater familiarity with a medium might affect language, so four artists were chosen for their expertise and approach to practice, with those interviews conducted by Zoom in October-November 2021. This brought the total of interviews to 26. While the majority of the interviews were conducted in relation to an art event, the different contexts and locations meant that there were still varying levels of engagement with sound and music. Importantly, given the art event context, the interviews operated as both research interviews and intimate, one-on-one relational performances, explicitly enacting Haseman’s notion of performative research and the non-traditional forms in which it manifests.

After an introductory conversation around the participant’s engagement with listening—to both music and sound in the world—the main body of the interview is taken up with shared listening. The listening samples are divided into three sets based around three listening intentions. The first two draw on Pierre Schaeffer’s thinking on musique concrète (2017). (See theory analysis: chapter 2, “Seeking the Sonaural”.) Set one employs Natural Listening, in which the participants are invited to listen for the figurative information that the sound offers: what is the source or cause of the sound and what does this mean to us? Set two, Reduced Listening, asks the participant to move through the source or cause (rather than completely bracketing it out, as I don’t believe this is always possible) to then describe the qualities of the sound—the sound of the sound. The final set, Reflexive Listening, asks the participant to consider what it is to listen while they are listening. What are the processes they notice themselves going through? This encourages them to discuss what they become conscious of through the listening experience.

Sounds Seek Listening

While I ask the participants to attempt these different listening intentions, I am also aware that this is not necessarily achievable, depending on a person’s experiences with listening and their inclinations. However, the sounds themselves are selected/created to encourage listening modes and to ease people, particularly general public participants, into deeper listening in a way that may also be pleasurable.

The Natural Listening sounds comprise my own field recordings of natural environments. They have a strong sense of scene or action—what I call figure (in the visual art sense of figurative painting). The third sound played to the participant is still naturally derived, without manipulation, but has less of a clear figure, moving towards the abstract. For this I have a choice of two sounds, and I decide which to play the participant based on their previous responses. In this section I am encouraging the participant to gradually move towards a deeper mode of listening.

The first two Reduced Listening sounds are also naturally derived but are even less figurative. As the causes/sources are becoming less evident, the samples are intended to encourage a concentration on qualities—the sound of the sound. As with the previous set, I choose between two options for the third sound, both of which are synthetically created and thus cannot be attributed to any knowable real-world source (besides a synthesiser). This allows the participant to really enter the territory of qualities and imaginative descriptions.

Reflexive Listening features two different compositions, both of which are around two minutes long, which I choose from. One is gentler, offering both natural and electronic sounds. I play this to people who have indicated a dislike of electronic and technological sounds. The other is a harsher, glitchier track with strong pulses and layering. From an empirical perspective, the fact that not every participant is played the same set of sounds may seem methodologically unsound, however as my intention is not quantitative, employing different sounds allows me to get more and varied descriptions while still delivering reasonable sample sizes (approximately 12–14 responses for each variable sound). The flexibility of sounds allows me to adapt to different peoples’ tastes, which encourages more engaged responses, and reflects that the interviews are also relational performance experiences. That said, people are still played sounds they don’t necessarily like, but this also results in interesting descriptions.

While I explain and encourage the distinctions for the listening intentions, I do not strictly force the participants into these modes, allowing for their own inclinations to reveal themselves. A participant with little or no experience with sonic art and experimental sounds may tend towards seeking source or cause. An “expert” listener, may be reticent to name a source, even when it is the explicit intention, as they are accustomed, via their practices, to move quickly beyond the cause to other qualitative aspects. Not strictly enforcing the listening intensions could be seen, once again, as a methodological failing, however, through the process I decided it was more interesting to see how the sounds themselves started to encourage certain types of responses, and how people showed their own preferences for types of descriptions. Given the practice-focused intention and performative research paradigm, I felt that enforcing the intentions would not yield the most fruitful results.

This reflexive approach, in which I ask the participant to try and be aware of the act of listening while listening offers the richest responses. This intention aims to explore how listening activates a consciousness of listening. This reflects Husserl’s idea of transparency, which refers to how, when we experience things, “we can also be self-consciously aware that we are experiencing them and we can reflect on every structural aspect of the act” (Käufer & Chemero, 2015, p. 33). Similarly, it draws on Alva Noë’s notion that art operates by reorganising our expectations in a way that draws attention to the act of perception itself (2016). This is reinforced by the developmental theories of Vygotsky, who, via Claparède’s theory of conscious awareness, proposes that it is when we negotiate obstructions that we become aware of the process of development and learning that is taking place (1987). (See module (i): Listening to My Listening – A Listening Consciousness.) The way that art does this is by offering things that we perceptually and aesthetically need to negotiate, rather than things that we know and can predict. In composing the pieces, and the overall structure of the interviews, I move from the familiar to more challenging territory, so that the listener must negotiate “difficulty”, and become aware of this negotiation.

Destabilising Assumptions

In conducting the interviews I became more aware of how the interplay of the known and unknown operates in my practice as whole. I have sometimes referred to my work as oscillating between seduction and repulsion as it explores tensions between harmonic and traditional music material and more noise-based sounds. This creates liminal zones between figuration and abstraction where the listener can never be sure of what will come next, and therefore they need to be more active and in the moment as a listener. (The biological basis of this process is discussed in module (viii): Bedtime Stories.) This negotiation and activation is beautifully summarised by one of the participating artists:

Just as you are settling into thinking of this as almost a dance music-y stability—like somebody well known, or reminiscent of so many things—certain things manifest and change in the music to take away the assumptions and to draw you back into the actual listening, out of an assumed listening. So I’m suddenly going, “no I can't assume what this is…” It always kept me guessing, which I think a lot of good music does. I guess when music becomes clichéd, you're no longer guessing, you go, “ah, I know what that thing is”. But this is constantly bringing you back to sound as material, or something you don’t quite know. Just constantly keeping you asking: “what is this thing like?” (Jim, Reflexive Listening, Track 2)

In one final note, this interview project was initially called “Languages of Listening” but as this is now the overall title of the doctoral research project, I have retitled the interviews Listening Lingua, lingua meaning tongue. Given the multiple nature of the responses it should perhaps be tongues plural, but I find “linguae” a little too arch. While “listening tongues” has a connotation of conjured languages, the singular, “listening tongue”, reinforces the connection between the ear and tongue as part of a hearing and articulatory system. system. (3) Research confirms that when listening to sounds, or hearing silent voices in our heads, there can be activation of our speech organs, such as the tongue and throat (Hubbard, 2013, p. 222). Now, I invite you to explore your own listening ear and tongue as well as those of the twenty-six participants, to whom I am very grateful for their time, generosity and creativity.

Gail Priest, May, 2022

Notes

(1) The predicate is the part of a sentence that contains the verb and relates to the subject. For example in the sentence “She listens well”, listens is the verb and well is an adjective pertaining to the subject she. Thus “listens well” is the predicate. In some areas of linguistics the verb alone is considered the predicate but Barthes is working with the former definition (as am I).

(2) My work, SonoLexic, offering preliminary sound and language research, was in this exhibition. The interview format was initially devised to accompany this piece.

(3) Research confirms that when listening to sounds, or hearing silent voices in our heads, there can be activation of our speech organs, such as the tongue and throat (Hubbard, 2013, p. 222).

References

Barthes, R. (1972). Authors and writers. In Critical essays ( R. Howard, Trans.) (pp. 143–50). Northwestern University Press.

Barthes, R. (1977). The grain of the voice. In Image—Music—Text (S. Heath, Trans.) (pp. 179–189). Hill & Wang.

Derrida, J. (1997). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.; corrected edition). John Hopkins University.

Haseman, B. (2006). A manifesto for performative research. Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 118, 98–106.

Hubbard, T. L. (2013). Auditory imagery contains more than audition. In S. Lacey & R. Lawson (Eds.), Multisensory imagery (pp. 221–247). Springer Science+Business Media.

Käufer, S., & Chemero, A. (2015). Phenomenology: An introduction (E-book). Polity.

McKenna-Buchanan, T. (2018). Poetic analysis. In M. Allen (Ed.), The sage encyclopedia of communication research methods (Vols. 1–4). SAGE Publications, Inc. https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781483381411.n438

Noë, A. (2016). Strange tools: Art and human nature. Hill and Wang.

Schaeffer, P. (2017). Treatise on musical objects: An essay across disciplines (C. North & J. Dack, Trans.). University of California Press.

Voegelin, S. (2010). Listening to noise and silence: Towards a philosophy of sound  art. Continuum.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (newly revised ed., A. Kozulin, Ed.; E. Hanfmann & G. Vakar, Trans.). MIT Press.