Seeing the sense : imagining a new approach to acousmatic music and listening

Jonathon Crary argues that the dominance of vision in Western culture is a problem that is often assumed and adopted uncritically. Rather than accept this problem as fact, he urges us to understand that this dominance is a problem that has emerged through complex power relations as a construct. Contemporary musicological discourse accepts vision’s privileged status as being evidenced by the musical score and, following Crary, this chapter argues that this, too, is a problem that has gone largely unquestioned. Subsequently, a visual bias poses real implications for musics which are not written down (such as acousmatic music) and for the listener more broadly. Acousmatic music (music heard solely through loudspeakers) relies upon a lack of visual information and therefore does not fit neatly into an epistemological framework that cites vision as the dominant way of knowing. Thus, I argue that the portrayal of vision as the dominant way of knowing is disconcerting and potentially damaging, particularly for a discipline such as music that takes sound as its foundation. By drawing on the concept of difference as posited by Deleuze and Guattari, a space is opened up whereby listeners are free to engage with the music without the limits of opticality.