When in 1972 the U.S. presidential candidate George McGovern aired a television commercial that portrayed him as a listener, the commercial was hastily withdrawn by the campaign because, according to its producer, Charles Guggenheim, it “didn’t make him look presidential enough.”¹ Recounting this telling decision in an essay on listening in contemporary politics Andrew Wolvin suggests how in the decades after McGovern the status and meaning of listening evolved to the point that by early the 1990s presenting oneself as a listener became mandatory in the eyes of many politicians and their campaigns.

This collection of essays addresses recent and...

In what follows, I hope to be able to suggest, at least indirectly, that this simplistic reading of deconstruction prevents Sterne from considering how hearing has beenpracticed in theory, if I may say so. And it seems difficult to reallythink hearingwithout lending an attentive ear to such atheoretical practiceof listening. From this point of view, the “auditory turn” advocated by Don Ihde, decades ago, inside the phenomenological tradition is far more rigorous and consequent. Ihde is fully aware of the various traps awaiting such a theoretical gesture (for example, when he writes, “just as no...

What Sander van Maas calls “the grand history of musical subjectivity” may now be nearly over.¹ The reason is not just that music for roughly the past century has been increasingly skeptical about subjectivity—or, rather, and the point will be important for us, about a certain fetishized mode of subjectivity. Subjectivity itself is at a historical crossroads, as is the concept of the human that goes with it. At the very least, subjectivity in the forms familiar since the Renaissance is disappearing today and has been for some time. To be sure, this disappearance is not absolute. Past subjectivities...

Listening seems to leave the world intact. It leaves no marks on the objects of its address or on the subjects who perform it. There is little or no real telling if someone listens. Neither is it possible, in any direct way, to tell if an aural object has ever been listened to. Listening intervenes in and departs the world without touching it. Yet no realm is more strongly connected with experiences of devastation than the aural. Less able to destroy the external world than inner worlds, listening is a conductor of inner devastation.

In this chapter I will discuss...

Before Laurie Anderson, there was Aristotle. InDe Anima, he insists on a certain primacy or indispensability of touch by virtue of its being the single sense common to all animals: “The primary form of sense is touch, which belongs to all animals. Just as the power of self-nutrition can be isolated from touch and sensation generally, so touch can be isolated from all other forms of sense. . . . Some classes of animals have all the senses, some only certain of them, others only one, the most indispensable, touch.”² Touch is able to claim the primacy that Aristotle...

Although at the time of Friedrich Kittler’s death in October 2011 the media theorist had already published the two parts of the first volume of his planned tetralogyMusik und Mathematik, the importance of music in his work is often overlooked or neglected. Music, however, had been important in his work from his earliest publications onward. Toward the end of a 1995 essay titled “Musik als Medium,” which treated music aesthetics from Kant to Nietzsche and beyond, Kittler wrote, “an other music should be invented—a music that would no longer derive its power from alliances with the medium of...

Sam Hayden’s music for3d music,⁴ written for the London Sinfonietta, has never been performed in concert, and it is not available on recording. To hear the music, listeners must visit an interactive website and navigate through a series of three-dimensional worlds that resemble a puzzle-oriented video game. As they manipulate objects and discover portals among the worlds, the website plays—and occasionally layers—musical clips recorded by the orchestra.

Listening to3d musicnecessitates becoming a pilot (though the pilot’s controls differ substantially from those in Xenakis’s quote in the epigraph). Without a listener’s continued movement through the virtual...

This well-known remark from the fifty-fourth section of theCritique of Judgmentseems to say only what is obvious to anyone who has lived by others: music becomes, for those dwelling nearby—and precisely because of a forceful, imposing quality intimately bound up with its pleasures—a nuisance, noxious and obnoxious, noise. It is not just a matter of personal irritation, though. Music lacks and, through this lack, seems to threaten urbanity: a certain way of being with others; a basic form of political existence.² Moreover, the sense in which music disturbs this way of being with others is political...

When one broaches the topic of music and torture, one generally has in mind how music or sound has been and continues to be used as an instrument for inflicting pain. One perhaps thinks about the disparate claims, substantiated or not, that describe all manner of acoustic assault and torment, most recently as a nefarious tool in America’s ongoing “war on terror.” What is rarely considered, however, is the converse case, one that may be discerned at some peculiar moments within the Western tradition, namely when torture has been used as an instrument of music. I have in mind not...

For the somatic educationalist Mosche Feldenkrais (1904–84), the violence that is embodied in the chiastic dialogue of “great reward” (pleasure) and “intense punishment” (pain) is essential to our being. The embodiment of this dialogue, he maintains, derives unconsciously from our birth and our growth, which is itself formed in an infinitely subtle struggle with gravity.² Feldenkrais perceives the implications of this problem as a “parasitic” or contradictory set of embodied impulses; the desire to do or stop doing something is colored by other habitual activities that, although they seem essential and pleasurable, may inhibit the clarity of a movement.³...

InAn Accented Cinema, Hamid Naficy uses the term “accent” to designate the films made by exiled or otherwise displaced filmmakers in the West.¹ Offering a survey of the themes, style, and modes of production of exilic and diasporic films, Naficy calls them “accented” in comparison to Hollywood cinema. In this essay, I propose to inquire into the question of listening in / to literature by transposing the concept of the “accent” as a marker of linguistic and cultural difference to the register of writing, flexing it to encompass both the linguistic and the musical accent. The notion of an...

Are we still living the age of distraction? In 1939, Walter Benjamin diagnosed distraction as a condition of the city in the late nineteenth century: “The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life (Erlebnis).”¹ Stimuli and information consume attention. Lots of stimuli and information at the same time divide and scatter attention. If consciousness just becomes a...

Imagine the slowest music. Those who are trained in classical Western music might spontaneously think of Franz Schubert’s proverbial “heavenly lengths,” perhaps the Adagio from the String Quintet, or slow movements from Bruckner or Mahler symphonies; those who are more interested in contemporary compositions might think of works by Morton Feldman, Toru Takemitsu, or Henryk Górecki. Now imagine music that is much slower still. This kind of slowness is perhaps best described by one of the Grimm Brothers’ less well-known fairy tales, the “Little Shepherd Boy.” When asked by a king to explain eternity, the shepherd boy replies: “[There is...

Electronic dance music (EDM) is an acoustic ecology whose perceptual and cognitive attributes have, since the late 1980s, engendered new modes of listening. The ordering of sound and the construction of electronic soundscapes is in a complex interface with cultural experiences such as clubbing, dancing, and drug taking. This has led to the development of electroacoustic musicology and has had a profound impact on the way we frame the question, what is listening? EDM also pushes to the forefront the essential question, why are we listening?

This essay explores these two questions by examining four principal features of the genre:...