# On Listening: Philosophical Reflections



## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

I have been reading a rather remarkable book by a contemporary French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy. The book is entitled _Listening_ (Fordham University Press, 2007), and it offers a sustained philosophic meditation on the nature of listening. It seems to me to be relevant to many of our concerns here and might provide a leaping off point for reflections on the experience of listening to music.

I will post a few excerpts that seem relevant to concerns of this forum. But, first, let me quote the blurb for the book, which does a pretty good job of setting out the book's broader concerns and contours:



> "In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding? Unlike the visual arts, sound produces effects that persist long after it has stopped. The body, Nancy says, is itself like an echo chamber, responding to music by inner vibrations as well as outer attentiveness. Since "the ear has no eyelid" (Quignard), sound cannot be blocked out or ignored: our whole being is involved in listening, just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears. The mystery of music and of its effects on the listener is subtly examined. Nancy's skill as a philosopher is to bring the reader companionably along with him as he examines these fresh and vital questions; by the end of the book the reader feels as if listening very carefully to a person talking quietly, close to the ear."


The French title of the book is _À L'écoute_. The English equivalent is "to be all ears". Nancy asks early on as his core question the following:

"I want to understand 'being all ears' .. in an ontological tonality: What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all his being?" (p. 4).

Let me post just one of his nuanced reflections on music and the experience of listening:

*Music as Prophecy and as a Touch of Eternity*: "What distinguishes music ... is that composition, in itself, and the procedures of joining together never stop anticipating their own development and keep us waiting in some way for the result-or outcome-of their order, their calculations, their (musico)logic. Whether or not he is a musician, for someone who listens, the very instant a sonority, a cadence, a phrase touches him (of which he can, if he is a musician, determine the value, measure, etc.), he is propelled into an expectation, urged toward a pre-sentiment. Whereas painting, dance, or cinema always retain in a certain present-even if it is fleeting-the movement and opening that form their soul (their sense, their truth), music, by contrast, never stops exposing the present to the imminence of a deferred presence, one that is more 'to come' [_à venir_] than any 'future' [_avenir_]. A presence that is not future, but merely promised, merely present because of its announcement, its prophecy in the instant. Prophecy in the instant and of the instant, announcement in that instant of its destination outside of time, in an eternity. At every instant music promises its development only in order the better to hold and open the instant-the note, the sustaining, the beat-outside of development, in a singular coincidence of movement and suspense. It is a question of hope: not a hope that promises itself possible futures, but rather an expectation that, without expecting anything, lets a touch of eternity come and come again." (Jean-Luc Nancy, _Listening_, pp. 66-67)

I'll post others later, as well as some comments about Nancy and the context of his project. Perhaps we could use this thread as a place to do some philosophically oriented reflections of our own. A few possible questions:

*What is your experience of listening?
*How does listening to music affect your listening to the world?
*How does listening to music perhaps train one to encounter the world differently than others, who may be more visually oriented or verbally oriented?


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

It's all only an illusion, of course, this thing we call "listening to sound". In order to hear anything, it has to be produced. But when does that happen? Music is most problematical, since it cannot even exist in time. If one asks, how long does a moment last, one faces the paradox of Zeno. A moment, in which the "sound" sounds, can never even be, since it is shorter than a second, and shorter than a half second, and shorter than a quarter of a second ... and shorter than a billionth of a second .... And we simply go on and on dividing our second out to find the "moment" in which the sound can be heard.

And then what is a tune? A collection of sounds of the moment? How can _that_ work? Listening to a tune must consist of remembering a lot, of memory use, since the only real sound is the one inside that "moment" which we're still trying to find because we now have a trillionth of a second to divide a trillion times ....

Forget reading books about "listening" ... and just listen. Maybe you'll even hear some good music -- impossible or not.


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## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

Alypius said:


> ...
> *What is your experience of listening?
> *How does listening to music affect your listening to the world?
> *How does listening to music perhaps train one to encounter the world differently than others, who may be more visually oriented or verbally oriented?


For the vast majority of listeners, these are straight forward. A composed/improvised tune that reaches the ear is the basic listening experience, and the same majority clearly separates the music tunes with noise. But a fringe minority would incorporate all noise and tunes as music that give them a radically different encounter view of the world. Now don't get me wrong. All I'm trying to do is separate out the two.


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

A few comments on Jean-Luc Nancy: Like any philosopher worth his salt, he thinks about many matters simultaneously in often complex and subtly intertwined ways (even when he seems to be making simple points). And he operates at high levels of generalization, even when it may not look like he is. As a French philosopher, he tends not to create these highly technical, self-contained language systems that I associate with much German philosophy. But, like many French philosophers, he is deeply conscious of word-roots and his writing is full of wordplay (that makes translation a challenge). As one reads him, it helps-but is not technically necessary-to be alert to the philosophic discussions that he is part of in France. His contemporaries (including some who were his teachers) include: Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946). And so, these often form the immediate background of his reflections (not to mention the longer history of Western philosophy).

In the book he notes philosophy's bias toward the eye, toward seeing. And he asks what if we came to the world differently, as oriented to the ear. Our eye-based approach subtly sections us off from one another (we are separated by our visible bodies); philosophy-and, in particular, French philosophy ever since Descartes-has made much of a mind / body dualism and of the autonomy of the self. Nancy denies any philosophic stance that treats us as bodies locked into our respective inaccessible interiorities (a very Cartesian perspective; for that matter, a rather widespread perspective). Coming at things from the vantage point of hearing, the self becomes something else altogether. The walls between us come down. He is also playing on one big domain of contemporary philosophy, namely, semiotics, sign-theory. Much discussion has focused on the sign-quality of words, how words are pointers that point us to realities of varied sorts and signs that point to and interact with other signs in a highly complex, gamelike fashion. Well, Nancy subtly is shifting the ground by bringing thinking about music into the mix. What is listening? Not just to words, to signs shared between separate and separated selves, but to encounters in sound that work differently than the referential system (the semiotics) of human language. Music, of course, is quite different, and he want to think about what it means "to be all ears" (être l'écoute) (this is the French title of the book).

Here's an interesting perspective on the history of 20th-century music by comparison with the other arts:

*20th Century Music* "... The difference between cultures, the difference between the arts, and the difference between the senses are the conditions, and not the limitations, of experience in general, just as the mutual intricacy of these differences is, as well. Even more generally, one could say that the difference in sense ... is its condition, that is, the condition of its resonance. But nothing is more remarkable, in this order of consideration and experience, than the history of music, more than any other artistic technique, in the course of the twentieth century: the internal transformations following Wagner, the increasing importations of references of music labeled 'classical,' the arrival of jazz and its transformations, then that of rock and all its variations up to their present hybidizations with 'scholarly' music, and throughout all these phenomena the major transformation of instrumentation, down to the electronic and computer production of sounds and the remodeling of schemes of sonority (timbres, rhythms, notations) which itself is contemporaneous with the creation of a global sonorous space or scene whose extraordinarily mixed nature-popular and refined, religious and profane, old and recent, coming from all continents at once-all that has no real equivalent in other domains. A musical becoming of sensibility and a global-becoming of musicality has occurred, whose historicality remains to be thought about, all the more so since it is contemporaraneous with an expansion of the image whose extent does not correspond to equivalent transformations in the perceptible realms" (Jean-Luc Nancy, _Listening_, 11).


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Alypius said:


> A few comments on Jean-Luc Nancy: Like any philosopher worth his salt, he thinks about many matters simultaneously in often complex and subtly intertwined ways (even when he seems to be making simple points). And he operates at high levels of generalization, even when it may not look like he is. As a French philosopher, he tends not to create these highly technical, self-contained language systems that I associate with much German philosophy. *But, like many French philosophers, he is deeply conscious of word-roots and his writing is full of wordplay (that makes translation a challenge*).


Of course, the better the writer is within his/her own language, the more challenging (and even devastating) is translation. Shakespeare may be more popular in some languages than he is in English, but only in the original Shakespearean (Early Modern) English do we "get" the full glory of his work, due to his extensive use of punning and word allusion. The same must be said of Dante (Florentine Italian), Chaucer (Middle English), the Beowulf writer (Old English), Goethe (German), Chekhov (Russian) .... And it explains why Samuel Beckett's _Godot_ is just as good in English as in the original French -- because Beckett himself wrote both versions. But read the German translation someday, and compare. (Our own American English writer Edgar Allan Poe is sometimes _better_ in translation -- but that's fodder for a separate debate!) Of course, the reality is that we have to deal with translations. (This is more easily accomplished with something like the_ Beowulf _or the Dante _Commedia_ since there are multiple good English translations which allows one to access several different ones and thus get somewhat "closer" to the original through ingesting the various subtleties of each version and producing a sort of composite meaning. -- I've always encouraged my lit students, when dealing in translated works, to access a minimum of three to achieve a more accurate focus than any one will allow.)

You don't say whether you're reading the French or the English translation (which I take -- from looking it up -- is by Charlotte Mandell). I don't have either copy of the book on hand, and I simply wonder if the quotations you cite are your own translations or those of Ms. Mandell. In any case, I've looked at a few reviews of the text, and they prove encouraging.

An imperative read for the studious music listener or anyone interested in the sonic arts. It's an insightful and meticulously comprehensive dive into the basis of aural perception and the relationship between sound and listener. Have a notepad and pen nearby, because you'll want to mark some of this down for future referral. -- C. Alexander Gonzalez, at Goodreads

This is Nancy on not only aural arts, but also sound and music; on what it means to hear and what it means to listen. But this is a discussion with Heidegger and Husserl on phenomenology and the subject. It is about how, as resonant spaces, we come to constitute to ourselves as listeners who not only listen the murmur of others, but also in speaking are ourselves audience to the din of our own voices. -- A.J. at Goodreads

Encouraging enough to prompt me to explore further and to pick up a copy (or two -- one in English and the original French) to read after I finish my latest Brad Thor thriller.

In any case, the cover of the _English version _of the book seems inviting.









Compared to the French original:









Which maybe says more about English readers than it does about issues of translation!

Thanks for posting.


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

SONNET CLV said:


> ... You don't say whether you're reading the French or the English translation (which I take -- from looking it up -- is by Charlotte Mandell). I don't have either copy of the book on hand, and I simply wonder if the quotations you cite are your own translations or those of Ms. Mandell....
> 
> In any case, the cover of the _English version _of the book seems inviting.
> 
> ...


While I read French pretty fluently -- and a lot of what I have to read professionally is available only in French --, I am reading Nancy in Mandell's English translation. She does include a translator's preface about certain French terms and she (wisely) puts in brackets the French original at varied points (as, for example, in one of the quotations I gave earlier). Concerning the cover painting by Tatian, _Venus, Cupid, and an Organist_ (ca. 1550): In the closing "Coda" Nancy discusses the painting in terms of its musical implications:

"We'll add an image here, which has not been much commented on: Titian painted this Venus listening to an organ-player. Evidently--it is clearly shown--the musician is gazing sensually at the woman. But isn't this belly that he is gazing at the very place where his music comes to resound, and isn't it also the resonance of his instrument he is listening to? In this reverberation, the inside and outside open up to each other. The background of the scene is not that of a room, but a park whose trees prolong the organ pipes in a perspective that turns toward us like a large resonance chamber. The ear opens onto the belly, or the ear even opens up the belly, and the eye resounds here; the image distances its own visibility to the back of its perspective, in the distance from which music returns, resounding with desire, so as, with it, not to stop letting its harmonies resound. From very far away, in the arts and in time, one can reply to this painting with music by Wagner, the instant that Tristan, to Isolde's voice, cries out: _What, am I hearing light?_--before he dies in front of the woman who will survive him only long enough to join him in the song of death that she is _alone in hearing_, in the breath of death that becomes _the melody that resounds_ and that will mingle with and resolve into, _the mass of waves, the thunder of noises, in the All breathing with the breath of the world_" (Nancy, _Listening_, pp. 45-46)


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Alypius said:


> Titian painted this Venus listening to an organ-player. Evidently--it is clearly shown--the musician is gazing sensually at the woman. *But isn't this belly that he is gazing at the very place where his music comes to resound*, and isn't it also the resonance of his instrument he is listening to?


Ahem ... I'm not so certain the organist is gazing at her "belly", but that aside .... Apparently Titian painted several manifestations of this piece, with different backgrounds, different characters, and different gazes from the organist.

In this one, with a dog instead of a child,









the organist seems to be staring at her butt. I'm compelled to wonder if she doesn't have the score of the music tattooed there. The Renaissance in Italy was sometimes a crazy place.

And then there are the parodies:


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Alypius said:


> *What is your experience of listening?
> *How does listening to music affect your listening to the world?
> *How does listening to music perhaps train one to encounter the world differently than others, who may be more visually oriented or verbally oriented?


Contrary to what Sonnet was saying in post #2, I'm glad to finally see someone else besides me exploring the nature of hearing, and contrasting it with the visual.

Listening to music is essentially, and will always be, a 'hot' medium, in McLuhan's terms, in comparison with television, especially with the advent of HDTV. To understand what 'hot and cold' mean in terms of media, HDTV is so clear and has so much information that very little effort or imagination is required to be involved in it, compared to reading a book, which requires imagination and visualization.

I learned long ago that I hear things that other people do not, such as music structure, pitch, and resolution of remastered recordings, which most people dismiss and cannot hear the difference in an MP3 and an uncompressed file. That's pitiful, to me.

"Just sit back and listen" is a more appropriate sensory mode for watching HDTV. Listening to music is a 'hotter' experience, and demands more involvement. I think that there is a 'hangover' effect created in many listeners from watching so much HDTV and not reading.

Our culture has always been visually biased. I think that being a listener changes your whole being; it makes you more imaginative, more involved. There's a lot more I could say.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

SONNET CLV said:


> It's all only an illusion, of course, this thing we call "listening to sound". In order to hear anything, it has to be produced. But when does that happen? Music is most problematical, since it cannot even exist in time. If one asks, how long does a moment last, one faces the paradox of Zeno. A moment, in which the "sound" sounds, can never even be, since it is shorter than a second, and shorter than a half second, and shorter than a quarter of a second ... and shorter than a billionth of a second .... And we simply go on and on dividing our second out to find the "moment" in which the sound can be heard.


I think that what is illusory is our experience of time. The 'now' is the only thing that exists, and 'now' is always changing and evolving. So, we have to reframe our experience of time in terms of what we can cognitively grasp, and how we distinguish moment-time from longer memory-retained time. I discuss this in my blog.

http://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/millionrainbows/1521-new-conceptions-musical-time.html


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## Kazaman (Apr 13, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> I think that what is illusory is our experience of time. The 'now' is the only thing that exists, and 'now' is always changing and evolving. So, we have to reframe our experience of time in terms of what we can cognitively grasp, and how we distinguish moment-time from longer memory-retained time. I discuss this in my blog.
> 
> http://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/millionrainbows/1521-new-conceptions-musical-time.html


Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Barbour#Timeless_physics


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> I think that what is illusory is our experience of time. The 'now' is the only thing that exists, and 'now' is always changing and evolving. So, we have to reframe our experience of time in terms of what we can cognitively grasp, and how we distinguish moment-time from longer memory-retained time. I discuss this in my blog.
> 
> http://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/millionrainbows/1521-new-conceptions-musical-time.html


Million, what is your reaction to Nancy's claim in the quote that I give in the opening post? Nancy argues a position that is contrary to your (Augustinian) perspective, namely, that music _is not 'now'-oriented_; it is inherently _futural_, it has an inherent drive in its present sounding toward a not-yet, an inherent orderly but as as-yet-incomplete betokening of a completed order that awaits a futural cadence -- so that the now's incompleteness subtly touches upon the eternal.


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## Kazaman (Apr 13, 2013)

Alypius said:


> Million, what is your reaction to Nancy's claim in the quote that I give in the opening post? Nancy argues a position that is contrary to your (Augustinian) perspective, namely, that music _is not 'now'-oriented_; it is inherently _futural_, it has an inherent drive in its present sounding toward a not-yet, an inherent orderly but as as-yet-incomplete betokening of a completed order that awaits a futural cadence -- so that the now's incompleteness subtly touches upon the eternal.


I don't think there's a substantial contradiction. Based on our current experiences, we anticipate certain things, which shapes our perception of the music we hear as it confirms or flies in the face of our expectations. The experiential basis of our expectations is the "now" and the expectations themselves are Nancy's "not-yet." Incidentally there's a really good book on this that covers ground in music theory and cognitive science called Sweet Ancitipation.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Alypius said:


> Million, what is your reaction to Nancy's claim in the quote that I give in the opening post? Nancy argues a position that is contrary to your (Augustinian) perspective, namely, that music _is not 'now'-oriented_; it is inherently _futural_, it has an inherent drive in its present sounding toward a not-yet, an inherent orderly but as as-yet-incomplete betokening of a completed order that awaits a futural cadence -- so that the now's incompleteness subtly touches upon the eternal.


That concept works for music which is goal-oriented, as most tonality is. When we encounter minimalism or drones, or Eastern concepts of time, the picture changes; we get 'lost' as far as goals, destinations, or time is concerned.

You can only split hairs so far; we are human and we appear to exist in timwe, as far as our normal experience and memory tells us. Perhaps this is a survival mechanism, a sense of time for the predator, or the fearful hider, as we wait for the moment to strike, or run in fear.

But in meditation, the 'eternal' is now. This is the sense of moment-time that Messiaen was trying to evoke in his idea of the 'end of time.'

Anyone who has used Pro Tools or Logic is familiar with the optional "moving time line" which can optionally be changed to a static point; in this mode, we are the still point, while the music moves by our cursor in the background, seeming to create a static point of 'now' in which the music moves 'through,' constantly changing and evolving.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

I don't know, not having read this particular book, aside from the excerpts you posted (and forgetting which Nancy I did read in school), how closely this aligns with the author's views, but here's my take on the difference between listening and hearing, and different kinds of listening.

When a person hears something, it is taken as a single object, not necessarily to be retained in memory, and only important as a surface gesture. The sound is itself, or the object that it comes from.

When we listen, we are attentive, not only to the sound itself, but to the relations between that sound and those which have also come into our consciousness in sequence with it. Our mind looks for connections and tries to find them rhythmically and in terms of pitch.

Listening to music is hearing such that everything is predicated on those things that come before and also those that come after (Nancy's future, of course). Although there are musics in which a linear structure is not emphasized, such as in Japan and Bali, the predominant western conception of music from chant through Adams, Boulez, and Ligeti is of events happening in sequence such that one can be audibly connected to those that preceded and those that follow. In that we do not hear them in themselves, they are dependent on those around them and are thus predicated on them. To listen to music in this way requires that we be aware of, if not the precise connections, the fact that those connections exist or are supposed to exist.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Kazaman said:


> I don't think there's a substantial contradiction. Based on our current experiences, we anticipate certain things, which shapes our perception of the music we hear as it confirms or flies in the face of our expectations. The experiential basis of our expectations is the "now" and the expectations themselves are Nancy's "not-yet." Incidentally there's a really good book on this that covers ground in music theory and cognitive science called Sweet Ancitipation.


From my blog:
*Vertical time* means that whatever structure that is in the music exists between simultaneous layers of sound, not between successive gestures. A virtually static moment is expanded to encompass an entire piece. A vertical piece does not exhibit large-scale closure. It does not begin, but merely starts. It does not build to a climax, *does not set up internal expectations, does not seek to fulfill any expectations that might arise accidentally, does not build or release tension,* and does not end, but simply ceases.
*Minimalism* exemplifies vertical time, but instead of absolute stasis, it generates constant motion. The sense of movement is so evenly paced, and the goals are so vague, that we usually lose our sense of perspective.

In Shingon Buddhism, the adherent is outside in the elements in a gazebo, and has to count a string of beads until he reaches a million. If accomplished, enlightenment is obtained. Many who try this get lost, get whacky, and are distracted by the cold. I see a connection here with what we are talking about; it just shows how memory, and perception, and our sense of time, are mind-constructs which can be changed, discarded, or bypassed, and whether we experience this as being 'lost' or not depends on something else, perhaps to do with our 'being.."


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Good post. This points out a very important idea:



Mahlerian said:


> ...Although there are musics in which a linear structure is not emphasized, such as in Japan and Bali, the predominant western conception of music from chant through Adams, Boulez, and Ligeti is of events happening in sequence such that one can be audibly connected to those that preceded and those that follow. In that we do not hear them in themselves, they are dependent on those around them and are thus predicated on them. *To listen to music in this way requires that we be aware of, if not the precise connections, the fact that those connections exist or are supposed to exist.*


That's what John Cage is saying; we should listen to *all sound* as if it were music, and that...


Mahlerian said:


> ...we be aware of, if not the precise connections, the fact that those connections exist or are supposed to exist...


*...or that we will imagine them to exist anyway, whether they are intentional or not, because Man is a pattern-seeker of meaning.

Beautiful!
*


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Lol. Another manifestation of why my simple soul has no truck with much, if any, _philosophy._

Re: On the difference between listening and hearing, any thirst I might have for philosophy on the subject is wholly satisfied with this paraphrase of a Stravinsky quote, 
"Even a duck can hear."


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> ... When a person hears something, it is taken as a single object, not necessarily to be retained in memory, and only important as a surface gesture. The sound is itself, or the object that it comes from.
> 
> When we listen, we are attentive, not only to the sound itself, but to the relations between that sound and those which have also come into our consciousness in sequence with it. Our mind looks for connections and tries to find them rhythmically and in terms of pitch.
> 
> Listening to music is hearing such that everything is predicated on those things that come before and also those that come after (Nancy's future, of course). Although there are musics in which a linear structure is not emphasized, such as in Japan and Bali, the predominant western conception of music from chant through Adams, Boulez, and Ligeti is of events happening in sequence such that one can be audibly connected to those that preceded and those that follow. In that we do not hear them in themselves, they are dependent on those around them and are thus predicated on them. To listen to music in this way requires that we be aware of, if not the precise connections, the fact that those connections exist or are supposed to exist.


Actually, your reflections mirror Nancy's. He distinguishes scientific time or any linear notions of time from the "sonorous time" -- time experienced while listening. As I am working through his book, I've begun to think that he is trying to do his meditation as though he was blind. He is reflecting on encountering things simply as a hearer -- and then contrasting that with other approaches. What his approach / meditation uncovers is that many of our "commonsense" notions break down when one comes at the world with an ear rather than with an eye. The stock categories are revealed to be categories based on the visual rather than the auditory:

Two more passages, the first has to do with listening and the "self." He is playing here against the standard way we come at this with our eye-orientation. If I am listening to a person who is speaking, and I am doing so with an eye-orientation, then the person and I are different, distinct, separate, two bodies. But what if I am present to that person by listening, what is the self that I am and what is the self that that person is. The ambiguities of that come even more to the fore when I listen to a musician who is playing music: who am I? who is the musician? Here's the passage:

*Listening and the Constitution of the Self*: "To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the lookout for a relation to self: not, it should be emphasized, a relation to 'me' (the supposedly given subject), or to the 'self' of the other (the speaker, the musician; also supposedly given, with his subjectivity), but to the _relationship in self_, so to speak, as it forms a 'self' or a 'to itself' in general, and if something like that ever does reach the end of its formation. Consequently, listening is passing over to the register of presence to self, it being understood that the 'self' is precisely nothing available (substantial or subsistent) to which one can be 'present,' but precisely the resonance of a return [_renvoi_]. For this reason, listening-the opening stretched toward the register of the sonorous, then to its musical amplification and composition-can and must appear to us not as a metaphor for access to self, but as the reality of this access, a reality consequently indissociably 'mine' and 'other,' 'singular' and 'plural,' as much as it is 'material' and 'spiritual,' and 'signifying' and 'a-signifying.'" (Nancy, _Listening_, p. 12).

A second passage: This grapples with the issue that you (and Millions) raised about the nature of time. He has an almost Buddhist sense of the ephemeral -- which links with your comments on the non-linearity of certain Oriental perspectives. Here is his meditation of what it means to be present as a listener and what that deep listening says about who we are and what time is:

*Presence in the Sonorous Present*: "This presence is thus not the position of a being-present: it is precisely not that. It is presence in the sense of an 'in the presence of' that, itself, is not an 'in view of' or a 'vis-a-vis.' It is an 'in the presence of' that does not let itself be objectified or projected outward. That is why it is first of all presence in the sense of a _present_ that is not a being (at least not in the intransitive, stable, consistent sense of the word), but rather a _coming_ and a _passing_, an _extending_ and a _penetrating_. Sound essentially comes and expands, or is deferred and transferred. Its present is thus not the instant of philosophico-scientific time either, the point of no dimension, the strict negativity in which that mathetical time has always consisted. But sonorous time takes place immediately according to a different dimension, which is not that of simple succession (corrollary of the negative instant). It is a present in waves on a swell, not in a point on a line; it is time that opens up, that is hollowed out, that is enlarged and ramified, that envelops or separates, that becomes or is turned into a loop, that stretches out or contracts, and so on" (Nancy, _Listening_, p. 13)

For those familiar with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, one can spot how he has taken certain cues from them, but also coming (in a unique way) at the world as an auditor rather than a watcher. By the way, as I read him, Nancy would see all music -- not only Oriental, but also Western music -- participating in this looping nonlinearity. Musical sounds are always sounds that are at once present and at the same time signifying of a future that loops back to the present and that harkens to a beyond-time-ness (eternity).


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

PetrB said:


> Lol. Another manifestation of why my simple soul has no truck with much, if any, _[philosophy._
> 
> Re: On the difference between listening and hearing, any thirst I might have for philosophy on the subject is wholly satisfied with this paraphrase of a Stravinsky quote,
> "Even a duck can hear."


How is one to overcome or transcend one's assumptions unless they 'philosophize' about them, and become more aware in the process? I love being able to think! I'm glad I'm not a duck, because I can waddle already.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

I find this discussion quite interesting, PetrB. For me, hearing is passive. As someone said, you cannot close your ears, as you can your eyes. Listening is active. It is a conscious involvement of the aural sensory apparatus and a conscious mental processing of the heard information. This is an important distinction, like looking and seeing. You can look at something by moving your eyes, but do you really see?

Anyway, I recently read _This is your Brain on Music_ by Daniel Levitin. He speaks of the physical structures in our brains that enable cognition of sound, and I was left wondering whether there was any research done on what the effects of sonic stimulus of these structures actually does to us. This discussion is somewhat an answer.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

brotagonist said:


> I find this discussion quite interesting, PetrB. For me, hearing is passive. As someone said, you cannot close your ears, as you can your eyes. Listening is active. It is a conscious involvement of the aural sensory apparatus and a conscious mental processing of the heard information. This is an important distinction, like looking and seeing. You can look at something by moving your eyes, but do you really see?
> 
> Anyway, I recently read _This is your Brain on Music_ by Daniel Levitin. He speaks of the physical structures in our brains that enable cognition of sound, and I was left wondering whether there was any research done on what the effects of sonic stimulus of these structures actually does to us. This discussion is somewhat an answer.


I think the Stravinsky quote, in full, makes that clear; its paraphrase, imo, is clearly implicit as to the passive vs. active 'just hearing' vs. 'wholly attentive listening.'

Too, I'm either dead simple or a flaming genius [either of which, plus the fare, gets you on the bus] -- it seems to me to not be in the exclusive bailiwick of either rocket science, psycho-acoustics, or philosophy, that one of the most obvious traits of music is how powerfully it messes with the listeners' sense of linear time, i.e. that element is such a fundamental no-brainer I don't think of it as any kind of startling revelation


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

No argument there, PeterB  Music does distort one's perception of time.



Alypius said:


> A few possible questions:
> 
> *What is your experience of listening?
> *How does listening to music affect your listening to the world?
> *How does listening to music perhaps train one to encounter the world differently than others, who may be more visually oriented or verbally oriented?


My experience of listening is that I notice, when I really do listen, that I don't do it often and that it is difficult to do for any length of time. It evokes a lot of thoughts in me when I do indulge, which sends me off into arpeggios of not listening, and when I finally realize that I got lost in the music, I have to start all over at listening.

I think that listening to music has given me an appreciation for the beauty of sound and that not all sound need be made by nature or musician to be pleasurable or perceived as musical in some way. I also am perhaps especially aware of how sound I do not want to be subjected to affects me. I also sometimes think of imaginary sound. I remember reading that Lachenmann said that Nono had told him to listen to the sound of the grass growing. Such sound exists within me, when I want to hear it.

It is likely that others do not perceive sound in this way, judging by general reactions to music I find pleasurable, beautiful, moving, interesting, etc.

I would like to "be in the exclusive bailiwick of... philosophy" and come up with more profound insights, but right now I want to get outside and do some jogging in the sunshine (and listen to the grass growing, the pavement expanding, my cells dehydrating...).


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

These are examples in which I feel time* becomes a static entity, and, if you immerse into the piece, you find yourself in a completely different "state":

John Cage - Four4

John Cage - "Twenty-Eight with Twenty-Nine"

Scelsi - "Aitsi"

Morton Feldman - Between Categories

I think these pieces succeed in giving you a notion of time* completely different to the western, "event follows event in a causal way" notion.

On the other hand, it's possible to combine the two approaches:

Ligeti - Atmospheres, Lontano, Requiem, Lux aeterna.

Scelsi - Prânam II, Hymnos

Btw, the notion of time in modern physics is far more complicated than the descriptions mentioned here (with the exception of the Barbour theory someone mentioned, though it's speculative).

*I'm speaking of musical time and my subjective perception of it; real, physical, objective time is a different thing.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Here are some things about hearing vs. vision that McLuhan said. When you are in the dark, just hearing, things can appear suddenly, without warning, like a sound off in the distance, and suddenly you hear a voice only a few feet away. It sneaks up on you. With vision, you would have been able to see things coming from farther away, and they'd be more predictable, and continuous, not sudden. This is why vision is uniform, continuous, and connected, whereas the ear is sudden and unpredictable.

That's why scored classical music has a lot of visual bias, because the scores and the development is like reading and writing; connected, and linear.

Stuff like Varese is more truly 'ear' music, because things happen suddenly, in the moment, like speech.

I'm not saying the visual is bad, but by this comparison, you can see how the ideas of "uniform, continuous, and connected" which we got from writing have affected the linear form that Western music took.

Many people still cannot get out of the 'eye' mode, and the music of Messiaen and Varese might seem strange to them because of this different sensory mode. There are different ways of listening.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> That's why scored classical music has a lot of visual bias, because the scores and the development is like reading and writing; connected, and linear. ...[Y]ou can see how the ideas of "uniform, continuous, and connected" which we got from writing have affected the linear form that Western music took.


I understand how this would affect the performer, who is following the written score, but how about the listener? To him, even written music is just a continuous stream of sounds and silences, all of them unexpected, unless the piece is familiar.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

brotagonist said:


> I understand how this would affect the performer, who is following the written score, but how about the listener? To him, even written music is just a continuous stream of sounds and silences, all of them unexpected, unless the piece is familiar.


Well, to really understand what I'm talking about, you'd have to know what "non-visual" sound or music is like, as compared to a connected, continous 'narrative ' form. It probably won't matter if you're going to be listening to Mozart. But Messiaen and Varese are good examples, and Messiaen freely admits that his music is not based on traditional Western notions of harmony or development.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Mahlerian said:


> When a person hears something, it is taken as a single object, not necessarily to be retained in memory, and only important as a surface gesture. The sound is itself, or the object that it comes from.
> 
> When we listen, we are attentive, not only to the sound itself, but to the relations between that sound and those which have also come into our consciousness in sequence with it. Our mind looks for connections and tries to find them rhythmically and in terms of pitch...To listen to music in this way requires that we be aware of, if not the precise connections, the fact that those connections exist or are supposed to exist.


After listening to Morton Feldman (who took John Cage's advice to "let sound be sound"), there is yet another twist on this:



Mahlerian said:


> "When a person *hears* something, it is taken as a single object, not necessarily to be retained in memory, and only important as a surface gesture. The sound is itself, or the object that it comes from."


Hmm. That sounds like what Morton Feldman *wants* us to hear in his music, as if it were just "a sound we hear."...and after knowing this, I hear it that way too. Therefore, the former impression I had that his music "didn't make sense" now* does *make sense. His music used to sound absurd to me, and it still does; but now I understand that he *wants* it to sound absurd.



Mahlerian said:


> "When we listen, we are attentive, not only to the sound itself, but to the* relations* between that sound and those which have also come into our consciousness in sequence with it. Our mind looks for *connections* and tries to find them rhythmically and in terms of pitch...To listen to music in this way requires that we be aware of, if not the precise connections, the fact that those connections exist or are supposed to exist.


Or in Feldman's case he puts out "bait" for us, knowing that we will *try *to relate one idea to the previous or following ones, but it never pays off in that sense; we are constantly thwarted, and constantly waiting for meaning, trapped in an existential stasis of absurdity. We are either frustrated, or we give up and surrender to the absurdity of the "object-in-itself."


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> Well, to really understand what I'm talking about, you'd have to know what "non-visual" sound or music is like, as compared to a connected, continous 'narrative ' form.


I'm a huge fan of Messiaen and Varèse since the mid-'70s and I got into Mozart pretty heavily since the '90s, too. Still, I don't have a clue what "'non-visual' sound or music" is


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Alypius said:


> *What is your experience of listening?
> *How does listening to music affect your listening to the world?
> *How does listening to music perhaps train one to encounter the world differently than others, who may be more visually oriented or verbally oriented?


Wonderful, fascinating thread. Thank you so much for doing the work of sharing these ideas with us.

One thing that strikes me is, unless I've missed something, that everyone is approaching these questions solipsistically. I think that's a huge mistake if we want to understand ourselves.

I prefer to approach any question like this with imaginative reconstructions of the experience of our ancestors. Inevitably these risk being just-so stories, but I can't do without them.

So for me, music "naturally" exists as part of a community. Of course people hum and sing to themselves, but I doubt that kind of thing has ever been the main music of a human culture. Instead, ordinarily, music is a social project and experience. In fact, often enough, it's a very powerful shared experience - the kind of power that creates and sustains communities.

Related to that, I suspect that having a very strict performer/listener duality is profoundly unnatural. Figuring out why we classical music folks usually insist on that so fiercely is a very worthwhile historical/sociological project. I doubt it's ever been the main way for any culture to experience music; even in our culture, we sing along at churches and rock concerts, clapping hands, shouting; parents and their children sing together; and that's most of the music. I'll bet most of us hum or sing along, at least in our minds, when we're listening to classical music. Distinguishing very strictly between listening and performing is probably an exceptional, maybe even bizarre in an anthropological sense, way to approach music.

Related to both of those, we experience music in a physical way - music moves us, literally. We tap our feet, we nod our head to a beat, our eyes water, whatever, and probably the most natural condition of listening to music is dancing. Of course all human movement is implicitly social, some kind of nonverbal communication; as we perform/listen to music, we are creating and defining and exploring our social world. Once again, even in our strict and possibly bizarre classical music culture, I think we've all had an experience of looking across a concert hall and noticing someone who was obviously enjoying the music greatly (an experience nonverbally communicated), and being moved by our perception of that person's experience, and thereupon appreciating the music itself more profoundly.

So all of that leads to - I suspect the main thing listening to music prepares us to do is to share music with each other. If it has any other benefits - such as, perhaps, making us more alert to the inflections of each others' voices - I suspect those would be more like minor side effects than anything central to the experience or nature of music.

In terms of the comparison to visual or verbal art forms, I suspect that they too are saturated with social aspects. To be human is to exist and perform socially; the individual is an illusion.

Ok, all that is a different line of thought because it's not about the individual's perception of musical elements, and in the past I've found that I'm almost alone in finding this line of thought interesting. But I can also play the game I'm supposed to play here!

We've all been thinking about time here, because obviously music is almost distinct among other art forms for existing in time. This could get semantic as we contemplate poetry and dance and so on, so I'd prefer to avoid that by not insisting on any particular way that music is absolutely unique. But what distinguishes the experience of such arts from the experience of purely plastic arts is the demand on our attention. Of course we can start daydreaming anytime, but listening attentively is more of an active thing than a passive thing, a skill that we develop with practice. Of course appreciating any kind of art involves skills and knowledge, but the point here is that music (and perhaps a few other arts) demands a particular ability to maintain unbroken focus for long periods of time.

I suspect that unbroken focus - rather than anything more phenomenologically or religiously exotic - is what makes it so similar to meditation. I even suspect that, just as yoga is really a form of dance, blissful meditation is a kind of cognitive trick achieved in large part by using the musical parts of our brain in funny ways.

Well, that's more than enough suspicion for one single post....


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

I tried an experiment recently. With an ardent fan of Dancing With The Stars and hater of classical music well within earshot, I played the last movement of Mozart's keyboard concerto #6, one of the most infectiously danceable and tuneful pieces I know, to see if I would get a reaction from her.
I played it twice. Reaction: nothing.

Conclusion: there is a big difference between hearing and listening. I'm sure she heard it, but as soon as she heard that it was something "classical", her brain automatically blocked it out and deprived herself of what could have been a breakthrough listening experience.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

hpowders said:


> I tried an experiment recently. With an ardent fan of Dancing With The Stars and hater of classical music well within earshot, I played the last movement of Mozart's keyboard concerto #6, one of the most infectiously danceable and tuneful pieces I know, to see if I would get a reaction from her.
> I played it twice. Reaction: nothing.
> 
> Conclusion: there is a big difference between hearing and listening. I'm sure she heard it, but as soon as she heard that it was something "classical", her brain automatically blocked it out and deprived herself of what could have been a breakthrough listening experience.


That's not only a reflection of her own stubbornness. She doesn't experience pure sound when she hears classical music - she experiences society. For about 200 years, people like you and I have treated people like her in ways probably _calculated_ to turn them off to our music. In fact, I have a hard time believing that most of the time when we pretend to complain about something like that, we're not actually celebrating what we perceive as our cultural superiority.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

science said:


> That's not only a reflection of her own stubbornness. She doesn't experience pure sound when she hears classical music - she experiences society. For about 200 years, people like you and I have treated people like her in ways probably _calculated_ to turn them off to our music. In fact, I have a hard time believing that most of the time when we pretend to complain about something like that, we're not actually celebrating what we perceive as our cultural superiority.


I don't know. I didn't "announce" I was about to play a certain piece and I wanted her to listen to it. I was sort of hoping that being "unannounced" (no pressure from my end) and only about 20 feet away, she would come in and say "Wow!! What was that???"

I've always been a dreamer!!! :lol:


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

hpowders said:


> I don't know. I didn't "announce" I was about to play a certain piece and I wanted her to listen to it. I was sort of hoping that being "unannounced" (no pressure from my end) and only about 20 feet away, she would come in and say "Wow!! What was that???"
> 
> I've always been a dreamer!!! :lol:


Um, your expectations were obviously way too high. Rome wasn't built in a day, and you're not going to tear it down in a few minutes either.


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## Alypius (Jan 23, 2013)

I am very happy to see this thread prosper -- and elicit a wide variety of responses, both in terms of broad, philosophically oriented responses and more personal, reflective ones. 

I began this thread partly out of the personal sense that I and most people who inhabit this forum come at the world differently, that we come at it with our ears first. I walk into the average department store and the first thing I notice is not the sales signs or the new clothing lines but the crummy 80s rock music playing overhead. When I walk down the street and a motorcycle goes by, I have to cover my ears. I wince at all sorts of loud noises that rarely bother other people. Where many friends love to go to movies, I love to go to concerts. I think that I am wired a little differently. That affects how I listen to music, how much I enjoy music, but also how I encounter the wider world. I walk outside and the first thing I notice are bird songs or the rumble of traffic and the sound of the leaves blown by the wind. 

I am fascinated by the fact that people from their mid-teens to their mid-twenties tend to be very interested in music, but many, perhaps most, stop listening to new music beyond that age. Those who are musicians don't, of course. But the number of people who are, over the course of their lives, deeply sound-oriented seems to be a minority. It is not very exactly correlated with intelligence -- I know many very brilliant people who are, for all practical purpose, musically deaf. I am not sure why music functions for most people in a pretty limited way and a limited time period in their lives. 

I teach college. I find that teaching college students, who tend to be more attuned to music than people at other ages, vary quite widely in their own sensitivity to music qua music. For some, music is more a social matter -- something they share with their friends, something they enjoy at the clubs, something to dance to. But because they are more open to music at this time in their lives allows me as a teacher to discuss music with them, on occasion gently to open them to various musics, to a variety that they may not easily find on their own. While they are open to classical music, they are drawn especially to its newer forms. I have reflections about why that is so, which I've articulated elsewhere and might return to later. Also as I have noted on other threads, traditional classical music looks and sounds very very European to my very American students. The whole idea of the orchestra, with an army of violinists, with an orchestra dressed in tuxedos, looks weird, looks like an arcane relic. Audience behavior -- the relatively unenthusiastic response to virtuosity, the not-applauding between movements -- seems to them too stiff, too aristocratic. All that said, a fair number of my students have some musical training and background -- often piano lessons as children or playing in the band in high school or singing in a school or church chorale. The musically-trained especially, but a number of others, are fascinated by the worlds music opens up. The sheer vastness of classical music is quite daunting. The whole idea of listening to a 45-minute symphony is massively counter-cultural. It is important to see -- and hear -- the world from their point of view. The internet allows them access to a dizzying buzzing blooming confusion in terms of music. They do discover and dabble with an interesting range of musics. In music, as in so many things, they teach one another, often subtly, indirectly. And so if one or another of them plays an instrument, performs at a school concert, and invites a friend to a classical concert, they often learn, get interested, get their curiosity ignited. I try in small ways to make suggestions, to alert them to resources (e.g. the university library which has a decent collections of music), to alert them to concerts, both at the university and in the city. I am optimistic that a decent minority will find their way to classical music, that some will take it up as players, mostly as amateurs and a few perhaps as professionals. The old wars of the 20th century make almost no sense to them. They listen to what they listen to, and they are unafraid of modernism. They are just as unlikely to be ideological champions of this or that school. I expect them to be eclectics -- and transform the tradition by being so.

I have a number of reflections that I would like to find a way to articulate, about the power of music in enriching human experience, about composers' ability to speak to us wordlessly via the media of instrumental music. But this all seems enough for the moment.


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