Listening

What Lies Beyond the Darkness investigates how a creative sound and land-based art practice can position humans as an active part of any given ecological system; equal to ‘other’ natural and non-human co-habitants. This practice-based research aims to discover how to frame or heighten natural environments to facilitate a focused mode of listening and perceiving that can encourage audiences to emotionally respond to an environment. This will be achieved through the use of; existing natural environments such as nature reserves, public parks, and national parks; aesthetic interventions including outlined paths, mirrored partitions, sheer partitions, and contemplative signage; written guides; and audience surveying. This research contributes to a community of practice including sound and land artists that consider investigations into and creative work regarding environmental conservation and rehabilitation a major and timely concern.

Based on the author's artistic research on migration, contemporary urban experience, and sonic alienation, The Nomadic Listener is composed of a series of texts stemming from psychogeographic explorations of contemporary cities, including Copenhagen, Berlin, Kolkata, Vienna, Delhi, Hong Kong, Mumbai, and New York, among others.
Each text is an act of listening, where the author records his surrounding environment and attunes to the sonic fluctuations of movement and the passing of events. What surfaces is a collection of meditations on the occurrences of life movingly interwoven with memories, associations, desires, and reflections. Readers are brought into a tender map of contemporary urban experience and the often lonely, surprising, and random interactions found in traveling. The Nomadic Listener includes parallel drawings based on the original audio recordings and appears as ghostly renderings of the corresponding experiences. The recordings are published by Gruenrekorder and accessed through a QR code in the book.

This chapter brings the practice of soundwalking, walking the landscape with a focus on listening to one’s environment to the museum, expanding the roaming pursuit of walking into the locale of its galleries, to use the boundariless ephemerality of sound to illuminate museological conventions and traditions and the way we interact with these. in this context the soundwalk stages a journey of exploration, a phonographic expedition, whose aim is to re-experience, question and expand stayed assumptions about the museum, curatorial practice and the contemplation of art.

Chapter in The Multisensory Museum Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone (eds), Alta Mira Press, 2014

The present study examined listeners' identification and rating of words in passages as "stuttered" when the duration and frequency of occurrence of sound prolongations were manipulated. Thirty-six participants listened to a 219-word passage containing voiceless fricatives digitally increased from their normal durations to 200, 300, and 420 ms. Listeners heard one of three passages that contained 5%, 10% or 15% altered stimuli within the passage. In Condition 1, listeners identified words considered "stuttered." In Condition 2, listeners rated specifically selected words in the passage relative to the extent they considered the words "stuttered." The results showed that 1) both the duration and the frequency of occurrence of the altered phonemes within the paragraph length material had an impact on listeners' perception of words identified as a sound prolongation; 2) listeners gave significantly higher ratings in Condition 2 than Condition 1 when determining if a word was stuttered or produced fluently. The implications of these results are discussed.

Es gilt als lobenswert, gut zuhören zu können, und man tadelt es, wenn jemand nicht gut zuhören kann. Daran zeigt sich, dass Zuhören keine Selbstverständlichkeit ist. Es geschieht nicht automatisch; es will offenbar gelernt sein. Dieser Vortrag fragt nach der Fähigkeit des Zuhörens und ihrem Ort in Streitgesprächen. Wo Kontroversen – z.B. politische Debatten – die Form eines rohen rhetorischen Kampfes annehmen, geht das oft damit einher, dass man sich nicht mehr gut zuhört. Die Sachlichkeit der Auseinandersetzung scheint auch damit zu tun zu haben, dass die Beteiligten bereit sind, „sich etwas sagen zu lassen“. Dennoch spielt die Fähigkeit des Zuhörens in der Philosophie oder Argumentationstheorie kaum eine Rolle. Thematisiert werden fast ausschließlich Sprecher, die Gründe geben und Argumente entwickeln können; dass diese Sprecher auch hören und zuhören müssen, wird in der Regel ausgeblendet. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist zu fragen: Was bedeutet es, zuhören zu können? Kann man das Zuhören als argumentative Fähigkeit verstehen? Wie lernt man zuhören? Diskutiert werden diese Fragen in Auseinandersetzung mit der Geschichte der Philosophie, etwa mit Ansätzen der Antike und der Phänomenologie.

Si la trace humaine, au sens très large du terme, indélébile et souvent hégémonique est un marqueur de l'Anthropocène, pour le sonore, nous pouvons observer une position un peu différente. Trace immatérielle, éphémère, mouvante, le son, celui de l'Anthropocène est quelque part une métaphore d'une fragilité intrinsèque, celle de notre planète en l'occurrence. Le sonore ambiant nous révèle à la fois des carences, disparitions, paupérisations, notamment dans le règne animal, comme il met en avant des expansions chaotiques, des vacarmes incontrôlés, des magmas sonores qui nous empêchent de lire et de comprendre clairement le monde par l'oreille, ou tout simplement parfois de nous parler. Entreprendre de travailler sur une esthétique liée à la fragilité peut paraître une incongruité, voire un certain non-sens, et pourtant cette gageure me semble en accord avec notre époque, y compris avec les passionnants débats que nous avons eu durant les rencontres acousmatiques 2018. Esthétique Prenons les choses dans l'ordre, est esthétique ce qui recherche la beauté, sa ou ses différentes défnitions, ce qui tend à cerner la perception, si ce n'est la fabrication du beau, avec toutes les variations culturelles et subjectives de ces notions. Le beau, ou la notion du beau, tout subjectifs et culturels qu'ils sont, constituent de ce fait une notion intrinsèquement fragile. Fragilité Est fragile tout ce qui peut se rompre, s'altérer, voire se détruire, disparaître être anéanti. Sont donc fragiles autant les choses solides matérielles que les ressentis, sentiments, expériences humaines. L'esthétique de la fragilité cherche à construire une beauté pouvant, voire devant constamment être remise en question, sans canons académiques fgés, mais plutôt dans une inconstance constructive, dans un ressenti aussi mouvant que la marche elle-même par exemple. C'est d'ailleurs enfoncer une porte ouverte que de constater la fragilité des ressentis et sentiments humains. Il en est comme de l'état d'esprit, le moral comme on dit, d'un marcheur, qui variera au fl des dénivelés, kilomètres, embûches du terrain, conditions météorologiques, forme physique… Le marcheur peut-être fétu de paille dans la tempête, mais aussi, fort heureusement, roseau résiliant, plus tenace et coriace que jamais devant les diffcultés pour atteindre son but. La métaphore de la marche est bien évidemment liée à mes travaux de promeneur écoutant, paysagiste sonore et au fnal, metteur en écoute. Des PAS Parcours Audio Sensibles Ces derniers nous ramènent au promeneur écoutant, concentré sur des espaces et périodes où les sons prennent une place des plus importantes dans sa perception du paysage. Là encore, la non matérialité et non visibilité du sonore, comme une trace vibratoire d'action énergétique, nous ramène une fois de plus à la notion de fragilité, de caractère fugace, éphémère. Le parcours, fut-il tracé, balisé, cartographié, prolongé via différents média-supports, pourra lui aussi être dans une logique de cheminement non défnitif, chemin de traverse, soumis à de multiples contraintes, aléas, modifable à l'envi par d'innombrables variantes, ou variations, obstacles, égarements, détours, impasses, impraticabilités chroniques. Si on considère le PAS comme un geste collectif, ce qu'il est intrinsèquement pour moi, vient alors s'ajouter l'aventure humaine, avec toutes ses beautés justement, mais avec aussi tous les risques de ruptures, de non collectif ou de sa dissolution, d'écoutants

In anthropology and across the humanities and social sciences, zoos have tended to be theorized as places of spectacle. Scholars often focus on the ways in which these institutions enable the viewing of other-than-human animals by human publics. This article, however, uses sound-focused ethnographic fieldwork to engage with two UK zoos and to describe a particular mode of cross-species listening which is enacted by zookeepers. The concepts of pastoral care and control discussed by Foucault and applied to the zoo context by Braverman are productively reworked and reoriented in order to understand this form of listening. The article also demonstrates the interconnectedness of keeper, visitor and animal sound worlds, in the process generating an original perspective that complements and enriches conventional zoo studies.

This essay introduces a large and diverse special issue on 'The Acoustics of Justice: Law, Listening, Sound'. Until recently the acoustic dimensions of law and justice were not a major concern in the academy, either in self-consciously legal scholarship, or elsewhere. Things are changing, as indeed the size of this collection suggests. And our hope is that the work gathered here will go some way to addressing this deficit. Nevertheless, this introduction does not attempt to theorise how. Though the collection was conceived in 2019, it was mostly produced since the arrival of COVID-19. And we are tired. We have been working from home too long; or rather our homes have been 'requisitioned' for work. Our teaching loads have increased and the teaching itself rapidly onlined. All while separated from loved ones and attempting to school or otherwise entertain our kids at home. And we are the lucky ones. This introduction is, in a sense, an anti-introduction, or a non-introduction then: a strategic withdrawal of labour that opens the door onto the collection but offers little in the way of guidance to readers once they step through. Whether that is generous or irresponsible we leave to readers to decide.

have argued that the different domains comprising language (e.g., phonology, semantics, and grammar) may influence reading development in a differential manner and at different developmental periods. The purpose of this study was to examine proposed causal relationships among different linguistic subsystems and different measures of reading achievement in a group of children with reading disabilities. Methods: Participants were 279 students in 2nd to 3rd grade who met research criteria for reading disability. Of those students, 108 were girls and 171 were boys. In terms of heritage, 135 were African and 144 were Caucasian. Measures assessing pre-reading skills, word identification, reading comprehension, and general oral language skills were administered. Results: Structural equation modeling analyses indicated receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge was independently related to pre-reading skills. Additionally, expressive vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension skills were found to be independently related to word identification abilities. Conclusion: Results are consistent with previous research indicating that oral language skills are related to reading achievement (e.g., A. Olofsson & J. Niedersoe, 1999; H. S. Scarborough, 1990). Results from this study suggest that receptive and expressive vocabulary knowledge influence pre-reading skills in differential ways. Further, results suggest that expressive vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension skills facilitate word identification skills.

Questo libro è dedicato all’educazione linguistica del parlato e dell’ascolto ed è un libro da ascoltare oltre che da leggere. Per la prima volta le spiegazioni e le analisi sono illustrate concretamente attraverso un’analisi dettagliata di testi parlati autentici di allievi e insegnanti, che si possono ascoltare presso il sito dell’editore all’indirizzo ??.
Si rivolge ad insegnanti, ad operatori del mondo educativo, con numerose proposte di attività didattiche concrete, e a tutti coloro che si occupano di comunicazione parlata. È una guida alla conoscenza delle caratteristiche delle abilità linguistiche di ascolto e di parlato nella comunicazione quotidiana, al loro sviluppo nel corso della vita di ciascun individuo e al ruolo che esse hanno nella vita sociale.

Does a city project a certain inner character within the subjective auditory perception of the listener’s experience of its complex sound environment? This paper examines the artistic processes involved in the author’s recent composition elegy for Bangalore, which sheds light on the methodologies of listening to and field recording in an emerging and transfiguring Indian city toward composing its urban character.

The very phrase, ‘Listen with Mother’ conjures up an image of the archetypal domestic radio audience, while effortlessly connecting modern media consumption with more traditional forms of storytelling  - and listening. This chapter takes the title of the iconic BBC radio children’s programme, Listen with Mother (1950-82) as the starting point to consider the act of listening in the practices and representations of childhood in the modern media age. The subtitle, ‘Cultivation of Children’s Radio’, refers to both the development of children’s radio as a genre, and to the ways in which children’s radio sought to ‘cultivate’ its listeners and their listening skills. Significantly,  children are not exhorted to listen to Mother, but to listen with her. Moreover, the maternal voice is no longer the intermediary channel for children’s engagement with the written word. That role is taken over (albeit temporarily,) by a less ‘familiar’ voice,  and the mother’s role is to be an intermediary for her children’s engagement with the broadcast word, a new hybrid of the written and the spoken, the public and the private.

The central questions for this chapter, then, are how early radio remediated earlier forms of storytelling for young children and how fears of the unruly (infantalised and feminized) mass audience connect with fears of as-yet uncivilized children. It will explore how the audience, listening at home, listening with mother, is domesticated both literally and figuratively and how, paradoxically, the spectre of the innocent child, listening in to programmes not designed for their ears, has haunted broadcasting policy from the earliest days.

Communication studies tell us that a mere 7 percent of communication is verbal; the other 93 percent are something else, ranging from body language to mimics, from context to subtext. What remains under-researched is the aspect of listening, one of the best-kept secrets of high performers and effective leaders. This article, based on the forthcoming book Macht Durch Sprache (Power Through Language, Springer 2015), explores the power and impact of listening in commmunication. Listening is not merely like a light switch to turn on or off, but a rich repertoire of skills essential to effective leadership and management. Listening makes the difference between mediocre and great companies in a host of business areas including competitive intelligence and strategy, innovation and product development, marketing and sales, not to speak of process efficiency. Institutionalizing listening may well be one of the highest-leverage investments CEOs can make in the productivity of their organizations.

Utilizing video study methodology where participants, as well as the researcher, analyzed their own video data, this research examined the nature of students talking aloud during peer collaborations in mathematics. The findings suggest that students engage in three types of talking aloud: (1) clarification of thinking (i.e. spontaneous utterances related to the mathematical task); (2) expressions of confusion (i.e. “I don’t understand!”), with the explicit intent of eliciting support from peers; or (3) a combination of (1) and (2). The findings also show that students do not perceive other students’ talking aloud as an inter-communicative gesture. This research highlights the importance emphasizing to students that talking aloud during peer collaborations should be viewed as a potential antecedent to communicative interaction and the importance of teaching students how to listen to one another.

In accordance with Progressivism, Matthew Lipman, introduced an educational model for renewal and change by means of the child. With his Philosophy for Children programme he wished to offer an alternative for the intellectualistic oriented education which silenced children. The answer to the search for freedom and change, Lipman finds in the symbioses between 'Philosophy' and 'Children'. Philosophy expressed in critical thinking and communication, was the basis to emancipate the child from the oppression of the adult and to cause change. According to Lipman the main purpose of philosophy is to free every individual from determination. This plea is being elaborated by dialogue.The main issue of our paper concerns the question whether Lipman's alternative 'Philosophy for Children' can fulfil the promise of change and freedom. To answer this question we will investigate thoroughly where dialogue and change in Philosophy for Children stand for. Finally we will propose another perspective of dialogue. A dialogue stressed on listening. Listening to how the world appears to us and how we appear to ourselves.

Aizuchi refers to particular utterances performed by listeners during interaction such as un (‘yeah’). Previous researchers have claimed that L1 Japanese speakers have a heightened sense of awareness of aizuchi when compared to speakers of other languages. However, researchers have yet to formally establish the ways in which Japanese speakers are aware of this phenomenon. As a result, this study reports on L1 Japanese speaking participants’ descriptions of aizuchi. These descriptions were elicited through semi-structured reflective interviews and were folk linguistically analysed. The results indicate that participants can articulate accurate and detailed descriptions of aizuchi, when they were compared to previous research findings. Specifically, participants described aizuchi as a particular form, as an affective function, and/or as an interactional function. Participants also distinguished aizuchi responses from other forms of verbal and non-verbal listening behaviours, which they typically described as “reactions”. Consequently, a taxonomy of listening responses in Japanese is proposed in this study. Overall, this research establishes L1 Japanese speakers’ explicit knowledge about aizuchi, which may have implications for other languages, interactional-oriented studies, and Japanese second language classrooms.

Recipes are filled with sensory directions related to taste, appearance, texture, and smell, but less often to the sounds of food cooking. While cooking and eating, whether at home or in a restaurant, is recognized as a sonic experience, we are rarely specifically instructed to “listen in.” Some scholars argue that such skills cannot be written into recipes, but rather must be passed on in practice. While I largely agree with this claim, I was challenged to find exceptions in cookbooks. In this essay, I discuss some of the few but delightful examples of sonic instruction in recipes. I conclude that while sounds are rare in cookbooks, as these examples show, listening is a skill that provides valuable information in the kitchen.

In academic discourse, zoos have often been conceptualised as places of spectacle, with scholars focusing on the ways in which these institutions enable the viewing of other-than-human animals by human publics. This article, however, describes a set of guided listening visits conducted at two UK zoos. The visits were designed to question, disrupt and offer alternatives to ingrained zoo visiting conventions. They were also used to generate data on how sound mediates, or has the potential to mediate, relations between zoo visitors and zoo animals. The article describes the visits, reflects on their conceptual underpinnings and discusses themes emerging from participants' experiences. It demonstrates the relevance of listening walks as a research methodology and illustrates the complexity of sound as a form of multispecies entanglement in the zoo context. The listening visits are also shown to indicate potential directions for wider changes in zoo visiting culture.

Listening habits offer us insight into music's affect on us as individuals, artists, and as members of the various communities we inhabit. Using the lens of phenomenology to assess and explore the nature of the listening experience, I will investigate recent writings on music perception, and modes of listening focusing on their use: by individuals in everyday life; in perceiving musical works and the role of music in multimedia; and in generating habitus-social codes in the musical cultures we inhabit. Once the notions of habits and habitus have been established, I will posit that listening, in the context of new technologies affords the opportunity to the individual to compose, or use listening as a creative or performative process; generating, as Attali has proposed, ''one's own relationship to the world.''

In communication between people, listening plays an important role. Active listening, which implies giving the full attention to the speaker and showing interest to the communication by using a variety of verbal and nonverbal signs, maintains the communication relations and contributes to mitigating conflicts in different social contexts. Moreover, active listening is the most desirable form of response in the interaction between interlocutors, in activities where communication and comprehension are essential, as is the case with social work. Starting with the delineation of the place of listening in the verbal communication and the outlining of the characteristics of the active listening, this paper deals further with the ways in which the importance and the

Bei einem »Soundwalk« handelt es sich in der Regel um eine geführte Exkursion, bei der eine Gruppe sich entlang einer zuvor festgelegten Route durch alltägliche Umgebungen bewegt – durch Straßen, Plätze, Parks und Brachen, durch ein Waldstück oder ein nächtliches Dorf. Die Teilnehmer*innen werden gebeten, während des Soundwalks nicht zu sprechen, um sich ganz auf die Klänge und Geräusche ihrer Umgebung konzentrieren zu können. Am Ende gibt es eine Feedbackrunde, bei der die Teilnehmer*innen Gelegenheit bekommen, über ihre jeweiligen Hörerfahrungen zu sprechen. Ziel eines Soundwalks ist es, die Teilnehmer*innen für die Vielschichtigkeit unserer akustischen Lebenswelten zu sensibilisieren. Sowohl in der Kultur- und Sozialgeographie als auch in künstlerischen Kontexten kommen Soundwalks gerne als performatives Format »auf Straßenebene« zur Anwendung, um eine Gegend zu erkunden oder sich einem sozialen Milieu behutsam anzunähern.
Welche Rolle können Soundwalks als methodische Strategie in der Feldforschung spielen? Inwiefern verändert sich beim bewussten Hinhören meine Perspektive auf die Umwelt (vielleicht sogar: meine Haltung zur Welt)? Welche Gegenstände, Ereignisse oder Vorgänge treten dabei in den Vordergrund, was entzieht sich hingegen meiner Wahrnehmung? Und inwiefern kann sich dies auf meine subjektive Position als Forscher*in auswirken bzw. am Ende in den Forschungsergebnissen niederschlagen?

The study of skill acquisition is of great importance in cognitive psychology. One aspect of skill acquisition research is whether practice in SLA is skill-specific or not. To date, research done has not led to either unanimous rejection or acceptance of the theory. This article is an attempt to examine this question in an EFL context where L2 learners have limited or no access to target language data outside the classroom. More specifically, it tries to see whether listening and speaking in an EFL context necessitate their own specific practice or not. Based on a post-test only design, 16 male, beginner Iranian EFL learners received input-based instruction for three months. When the instruction was over, both listening and speaking performances of the subjects were assessed. The result showed that the subjects had significantly improved their listening ability while their speaking ability had little or no improvement, indicating that different language skills in EFL contexts need specific practice. The findings not only confirm the skill-specificity of language practice, but also rejects VanPatten's seminal claim that comprehension practice is enough to bring about development, not only in comprehension but also in production.

Listening pedagogy in language education treats listening proficiency almost exclusively as a function or skill, the purpose of which is to generate products or outcomes desired by language users. Though listening is rhetorically acknowledged to be an active and complex process of making meanings within contexts and relationships, in practice teacher education and pedagogical discourse treat listening simply as a linguistic transaction and listening pedagogy as a technical and instrumental process of skill building, with the goal of enabling learners fluently to perform such transactions. Such a means-to-ends orientation, however, is inadequate or insufficient to encompass holistic moral and relational dimensions inherent in listening.These dimensions might be added to language listening pedagogy by, for example, broadening the idea of “dialogue” to include more open-ended perspectives from other disciplines, contextualizing the relationality of typical coursebook listening passages, and working with metaphors such as hospitality that encourage a high attentiveness to communication accompanied by a high moral respect for persons.

People who are involved in a conflict often complain that the other
side is not listening. Even when the counterpart does listen, it is usually to debate, argue, convince, or discount, rather than to understand. Based on our research, we argue that people will be more effective in negotiations when they practice high quality listening.
The benefits of experiencing high quality listening include reduced
anxiety, increased open- mindedness, better awareness of alternative
perspectives, including those contrary to one’s initial attitude, and
moderation of extremism, to name only a few.

Participating in reform-oriented mathematical discussion calls on teachers and students to listen to
one another in new and different ways. However, listening is an understudied dimension of teaching
and learning mathematics. In this analysis, we draw on a sociocultural perspective and a conceptual
framing of three types of listening—evaluative, interpretive, and hermeneutic (Davis, 1996, 1997)—in order to interpret the listening interactions in a fourth-grade classroom. Using interaction
analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to pay close attention to how participants responded to one another during a carefully selected lesson segment, findings reveal that these students listened in complex
ways with explicit support from their teacher. From this revelatory case, we offer a framework for understanding the teacher’s role in supporting complex listening

I argue that the difficulty Kant encounters in evaluating music in the third Critique is caused by his problematic attempt to separate sound (the physical phenomenon) from meaning. Analogously, Wordsworth attempts in the Preface to divide metrical pleasure and the feeling derived from the semantic meaning of poems. In both cases, this separation can be overcome by a radical, Romantic understanding of musicality, whereby music not only participates in meaning but becomes its grounds. While this remains latent in Kant, Wordsworth's ‘Tintern Abbey’ can assert the centrality of listening to thinking, which has important implications for his poetics.

In the last 10 years interest and activity in urban sonic design has expanded. The way we listen to, think about and understand sound determines the way we value, manage and design with it. However practitioners in the area would benefit from detailed forms of site documentation and analysis that go beyond physical sound measurement.

This Masters explores the use of the Sonic Identity Model developed by Pascal Amphoux of CRESSON (the Centre for Research on Sonic Space and Urban Environment) in the early stages of urban sonic design.

In this dissertation I provide a high-level overview of urban sonic design as a sub-domain of sound studies. I review established approaches and methods available to designers in environmental noise management, soundscape studies, urban soundscape design and sonic experience studies, and outline their differences and similarities. I investigate one urban sonic design approach in detail: the Sonic Identity Model. I comprehensively explain the methodology, examine five practitioner uses of the Model and evaluate its reported usefulness.


I then demonstrate the Model’s use as a tool for understanding indoor and outdoor urban sonic environments from my subjective listening perspective. Through research-led creative practice I adapt and apply the Sonic Identity Model for use in the early stages of urban sonic design. Through three site studies I iteratively document two urban spaces, analyse the results and audio record the sites. I present high-level descriptive findings on my listening experience of each sonic environment. This field work is further informed by my attendance at workshops at CRESSON and interviews with its key researchers.

The research project concludes with three outputs: a comprehensive explanation of the Sonic Identity Model; my adaptation of the Sonic Identity Model as the Sonic Identity Practitioner Adaptation; and the documentation, analysis and description of the sonic environments of each project site. This project is applicable for practitioners in sound and environment practices including urban design, soundscape studies, urban soundscape design and environmental noise management.