Immanent listening

Listening is vital to music but to pin it down to a definition has proven difficult because what is ‘heard’ by any one person is unverifiable and has no specifiable correlation with the acoustical properties of sound. Listening, along with hearing and the ‘ear’, turn out to be metaphors for a complex constellation of physical, psychological, historical and cultural factors. Listening assumes a range of engagements, encompassing varying degrees of attention across a variety of sounding phenomena and raises a number of questions. Does sound exist independently of anyone who listens? Where does the ear begin and sound end, and vice versa? To complicate matters even more, are our engagements with sound solely a matter for the sense of hearing? What role do our other senses, such as touch and sight, play in listening? Is listening a passive or active engagement with sound? Might we imagine that sound attends to us? How might listening play a role in subject formation? How might listening be caught up with an ideological agenda, or are sounding phenomena necessarily non-ideological as physical entities in the world? These are just some of the contested issues in the research about listening, which have produced a diversity of opinion and some of this opinion is captured in the next two chapters in Part IV of this collection. Despite this diversity of thinking in the field of listening, much of the research tends to view it as a more or less stable activity and to think of sounding phenomena as fitting neatly into ready-made categories. These categories – such as music, noise, natural and synthetic sounds, and spoken, sung and vocalised language – are then taken as givens. When sound is treated as an object, it is defined, standardised, measured and manipulated. In Deleuzian thought, this produces the figure of the Same. Sound becomes homogenised and our ways of engaging with it set in train endlessly recurring patterns of listening, diminishing the possibilities for difference. Such approaches to sound fail to acknowledge the heterogeneity of sound, and the fact that it will continuously spill out of its categories and/or overlap with other categories. Deleuze’s philosophical framework provides a productive alternative approach to such representational modes of listening. In representational modes, the listener is trained to reproduce an existing model of ‘what sound is’ – thus representing that which is prescribed by, for instance, musical notation or theoretical systems of musical organisation. But what happens to listening if these requirements to ‘hear correctly’ are lifted? What happens when the trained ear and sounds disengage from one another, becoming discrete entities, bouncing off each other and ‘continually transform[ing] themselves into each other, cross[ing] over into each other’? Such a question highlights the complexity of listening and the difference between listening as a mode of representation and immanent listening. In this chapter, I will map some of the research on listening, interspersing it with a Deleuzian critique.