- Listening
- Creating good sound begins by "listening" to sounds and environments.
- Good sound will lead listeners to see, feel and interact with visual elements.
- Pauline Oliveros (1932 – 2016)
- She used the subjective experience of listening as an inclusive tool of social engagement and healing.
- Hearing vs listening
"Hearing is something that happens to us because we have ears – it is our primary sense organ.
Listening is something we develop and cultivate our whole life. Listening is what creates culture. Listening is very diverse and takes many forms as cultures take many forms.”
- Deep Listening
Oliveros developed "Deep Listening" practice to expand creativity, compassion, and highlight awareness of the self and others.“Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing.
Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds.
Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through Deep Listening”
- She used the subjective experience of listening as an inclusive tool of social engagement and healing.
- Max Neuhaus (1939 – 2009)
- LISTEN (1966)
- Max Neuhaus stamped the word LISTEN on the hands of his audience and took them for a sound walking tour of the Lower East side of Manhattan in 1966.
- It was a pivotal moment in his transformation from Composer to Sound Artist. He called it a “concert of traveled and traveling music.”
- Instead of bringing sounds to the audience, he took the audience outside to experience the acoustic everyday world on site.
- The idea was for people to concentrate on the "listening experience" until they returned to the point of departure, thus refocusing their auditory perspective.
- In 1978, he produced a do-it-yourself version of the work in the form of a postcard bearing the word LISTEN, which the owners could place at selected locations.
- Max Neuhaus stamped the word LISTEN on the hands of his audience and took them for a sound walking tour of the Lower East side of Manhattan in 1966.
- Timesquare (1977)
- Neuhaus’s Times Square is a rich harmonic sound texture emerging from the triangular island located at Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets in New York City.
- Visitors and residents in Times Square may experience the artwork 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
- Neuhaus’s Times Square is a rich harmonic sound texture emerging from the triangular island located at Broadway between 45th and 46th Streets in New York City.
- LISTEN (1966)
- Creating good sound begins by "listening" to sounds and environments.
- R. Murray Schafer (1933 – 2021)
- Listen
- Schafer brought the concept of the “soundscape” to widespread recognition and pioneered the field of acoustic ecology the relationship between sound, people and the environment.
- Schafer brought the concept of the “soundscape” to widespread recognition and pioneered the field of acoustic ecology the relationship between sound, people and the environment.
- Jana Winderen (1965 - )
- Through focused listening and recording, Winderen has been exploring coral reefs in the Caribbean and in the Pacific with hydrophones (A hydrophone is a microphone designed to be used underwater for recording or listening to underwater sound).
"I am also experimenting with different types of microphones to collect sounds which are not obviously recognizable, but give room for broader, more imaginative readings or sounds that are unreachable for the human senses, such as ultrasound.
I use these sounds as source material for composition in a live environment or to create immersive installations, also for film, dance, radio, CD, cassette and vinyl productions.”
- Through focused listening and recording, Winderen has been exploring coral reefs in the Caribbean and in the Pacific with hydrophones (A hydrophone is a microphone designed to be used underwater for recording or listening to underwater sound).
- Akio Suzuki (1941 - )
- Listening as a practice
- Since his infamous Throwing Objects Down a Staircase 階段に物をなげる event at Nagoya Station in 1963, Suzuki has pursued "listening as a practice."
".......... but just as in the letter “X” in which two lines intersect, when my two concepts about Junk and Music intersected and I was beyond this point of intersection, the actual sounds that emerged (the clangs ♪ and the splashes ♪), as I was finally being taken away by the station’s public safety employees, were surprisingly more raw and fresh than what I had imagined."
"It was then that I realized my goal to diminish the gap between music born out of concepts and real-life noise. That was how I began my study in sound. Since then, I still experience things as the “intersection of X.”
"I was 23 or 24 years old when I decided to quit architecture and found myself in Sound. I was self-taught and my teacher was Nature... "
- Space in the Sun: structure sound project (1988) Amino, Kyoto, Japan.
- This project reflects his practice of listening, and was inspired by Debussy’s La Mer, a depiction of the ocean in sound.
Space in the Sun (1988) Amino, Kyoto, Japan
- The piece comprised a brick floor and two brick walls, creating a space in which to "listen" to the area it inhabited.
- It took 18 months to complete the structure and consisted of 10,000 handmade earthen bricks.
- He recalls, “I acquired through this bodily experience, the skill to become one with nature, like the trees that surrounded me.”
- Although in recent years Space In The Sun has been in disrepair, the piece existed for sonic pilgrims who wanted a space for their own listening.
- While the end product was fascinating — the idea of sitting for a day in one place to listen to the world — the amount of labour that it took to build it was of equal importance in Suzuki’s work.
- In fact, Suzuki later learned that Hokusai’s famous Ukiyo-e (woodblock prints and paintings) of a wave had originally inspired Debussy to compose La Mer.
"I thought Debussy was sitting in front of the sea for a day, but I had never done such things before. I never used time like that before.”
The Great Wave, Katsushika Hokusai
Debussy: La mer | Bernard Haitink and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
- Oto-date (1996 - )
- Oto-date is an ongoing project first created in Berlin in 1996. Otodate is a Japanese word, signifying ‘listen’ and ‘point’ respectively.
- Akio marks out the site of an experience that promises to be literally ‘exceptional’ for anyone who takes the time to pause a moment and place their feet on the two signs within the circle.
- For oto-date, Suzuki wandered about the central island of Berlin looking for listening points. Over the course of his time there, he found twenty-five points from which to listen to the city.
"Oto-date is a musical piece. Normally, a musical piece is five lines and dots—a score.
My score is this big field where people come and stop and then they listen and compose music by themselves with the surroundings.I want people to open their eyes when they listen. Sometimes in a concert, people close their eyes and listen only to the sound—to try to listen to pure sound.
But I want the audience to use all their senses. I want people to open their senses, open their eyes, and feel their total surroundings.”
- His listening practice extends beyond the music to a philosophy of hearing and watching. That philosophy absorbs the ever-changing environment as if it were a score, allowing sound to accumulate and reverberate, to echo through our lives.
- Oto-date is an ongoing project first created in Berlin in 1996. Otodate is a Japanese word, signifying ‘listen’ and ‘point’ respectively.
- Since his infamous Throwing Objects Down a Staircase 階段に物をなげる event at Nagoya Station in 1963, Suzuki has pursued "listening as a practice."
- Listening as a practice