To »untune« implies that there is a point at which »tune« has been calculated and accepted. Often, we can only know what something is through a categorical rejection of what it is not. Finding this point of agreed categorisation requires a confluence of theoretical, technical, socio-cultural, and broader physiological conditions that must be recognised and repeatable. The repetition is a kind of cultural resonance, a lingering understanding that persists from generation to generation, albeit with sculpting and the occasional rupture in the depth of understanding.

When contemplating a history of listening and the tuning into our understandings of audition, only in the past century or two have we come to recognise the complexities of this sense, that is most often thought of as providing the extraction of meaning (spatial, semantic, and the like) from vibrations in air. Whereas traditions such as portraiture, sculpture, and even performative musics have enjoyed many centuries of refinement and the associated critical discourses that accompany that process of sophistication, sound studies has historically suffered from a certain muteness.

Until very recently sound, and listening, has lacked rigorous investigation, the reasons for this reflect our emergent engagement with many sonic phenomena and specifically the capacity for the reproduction of sound, which traces a history of just over 150 years. As we come to explore and develop greater understandings of sound both audible and inaudible, we have also begun a process of considering how our apprehension of these phenomenon takes place, and, moreover, how we can engage with these sonic events, not just as inert, essentially unconscious bodies, but as agentive conscious performers.

Fundamentally, our capacity to understand sound is through listening. It’s important to extract the act of listening from the sense of hearing. Listening is not the mere perception accorded to hearing, but rather an agentive, agenda-driven process that is ultimately an earned condition stemming from an individual’s socio-cultural, linguistic, political, aesthetic, and psychological concerns and also their physiological abilities. Within these variables, we can develop a series of understandings that push outward from preconceptions of audition and contribute to what might be called an untuned conception of listening. An approach to listening that seeks to embrace the chaotic flux of sound evolving moment to moment.

This baseline conception of our audition reflects substantial research around the biological and physiological aspects of our hearing receptacles, the ears. Moreover, it represents some considered theoretical analyses of listening developed by 20th century authors and composers including Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, Annea Lockwood, R. Murray Schafer, Don Idhe, and Michel Chion. Recently, the contributions of authors including David Toop, Salomé Voegelin, and Seth Kim Cohen have broadened the premise of listening, pushing us to reconsider how it is we might begin a process of untuning our listening. For this untuning to be of value and to contribute to a profound understanding of how listening can be critically framed, we must undertake an absolute reconsideration of how we theorise listening. We must push beyond the predominantly functional modes of listening crafted by theorists such as Chion, who provoked us so critically, to contemplate our listening deeply and with a restless curiosity.

Occupation of the Ear

When approaching sound, the ear, the body, and the mind are subjective, idiosyncratic nodes on a complex network of potential perception and interpretation. There is a promise of fathomless engagement, both psychological and physiological, that may manifest through this interaction. For this promise to be made good, however, it requires us, as listeners, to be present.

This opportunity to be present and to attend to our potential as a listener is haunted by the ghosts of our experience to date. These opaque spectres can cloud our abilities and limit our willingness to conceive of new possibilities or advances in our capacities to listen. In short, they are metaphoric scarecrows, keeping us away from the crops of possibility. Furthermore, while we may not have literal earlids, this does not preclude us from psychologically separating ourselves from that which is around us. The sum of us, our socio-cultural baggage, our aesthetic capabilities, our curiosity, our physical condition, and ultimately our willingness to be agentive, are at the root of our potential not just to be, but to be present.

This prospect of being present and the variations accorded to this state are key to understanding why listening is heterogenous. The dimension of our being present is conditional on the self, framed within these variables. Thus, at any moment, we may share a time and place but our experiences of the dynamic auditory events that go on in that shared environment may include few commonalities. We might hear similarly, but to what it is we listen, and that to which we give awareness, may be almost entirely unrelated.

With the lack of uniformity comes a promise for acumen and perspective upon which we as artists and creatively engaged listeners may convey to other ears. The challenge lies in the transmission of these unique listenings. If we are to untune our ears, to push beyond the confines of tuned understandings of listening and make a space for experimentation for this foundational engagement with sound, we must address the way in which these perspectives can be transmitted. We must ascertain a means through which these politically driven, agentive acts of listening can be made to resonate beyond their moment of experience. They must be able to recur, to echo in other places, other times, and make connections to other ears, conveying their exclusive focus.

In his book Listen: A History Of Our Ears, Peter Szendy offers two very provocative questions that drive at this issue. He asks: can one make a listening listened to? Can I transmit my listening as unique as it is? It’s these two provocations that open a rich vein of investigation for those mindful of how we listen. Most importantly, the questions invite a dialogue around issues that are situated at the very fundament of our auditory participation. They ask us to consider listening not merely as functionally uniform, but as unique. The listener’s listening is a performance. It is a way in which that listener can shape, through all manner of internal psychological techniques (and physiological ones too), a sculpted sonic impression of a given time and place.

This impression is forged by our abilities not just to receive, but also to reject. At this very moment, consciously or not, you are participating in this kind of anti-listening. It’s a deadening, a defining muteness that negates the opportunity for any form of tuning or for that matter untuning, which requires a consciousness within the listener. If you stop for a minute now and re-engage with your listening, a wealth of otherwise ignored sounds should emerge into your sphere of audition, a horizon which might without reflection, appear static and still. Sounds are always in flux; they are non-repeatable, and in this moment of comprehension, they become extinct. As you perceive them, they have already expired, buried in the shallow grave of memory never to be experienced under those circumstances again. 

Resurrection of the Transmission

If we accept the challenge to untune our ears and seek to transmit our unique listening, we are breaking from the functional and prioritising more radically invested modes of listening (political, aesthetic, etc.). We assume an agentive position that desires to transcend the self. To do this we must occupy our sense, and perform our listening. This crafted listening, which prioritises some elements and shuns others, can be made to serve any number of creative interests in the listener.

These listenings may reflect preoccupations, framings, or foci of attention, they may equally and intentionally seek to reduce or ignore certain phenomena, something that dominated the interests of R. Murray Schafer, for example. However, the listening is trapped unless a means of transmission can be realised. How is it we can transmit this occupation, this uniquely actualised, perhaps even composed listener’s listening and offer it for other ears to engage with? Ultimately, how do we, as artists, make available the listener’s listening?

The answer to this predicament stems from the ever-present concern of any artist seeking to express his- or herself through the reproduction of sound. Sonic arts, for example field recording, must concern themselves with the reproduction of sound in time. Additionally, the listener must come to recognise that, within the reproduction of the listener’s listening, two sets of ears are in relation. As well as the subject’s organic listening, a second, prosthetic listening is introduced through which transmission can take place. This prosthetic ear of the microphone brings with it a listening that shares none of the listener’s internal psychological interests or agentive concerns. Rather, the prosthetic ear listens externally, a receptacle within which sound is captured but not considered.