The Body as Ear: A Listening Remix

During the past several months, I've been examining texts from across the disciplines--texts from biology, audiology, psychology, philosophy, sound studies, music, rhetoric, neuroscience, etc.--that deal with listening and hearing.  In the vast majority of these texts, listening is defined as a cognitive act, while hearing is represented as a sensory event.  In other words, hearing is defined as the physiological functioning of the ear, while most definitions of listening highlight an active state of attention and cognitive processing.  Hearing, then, is depicted as a necessary part of listening, but listening is not reducible to hearing. 

The static, linear diagrams accompanying these descriptions are especially striking to me.  Most of them illustrate a general hearing to listening trajectory that looks something like this:

Stimulus -->   Selection Process -->   Search of Memory Bank -->  Understanding or

Recognition --> Response or Storage

First you hear (or receive the stimuli), then you listen (understand, respond).  All one needs to accomplish this progression is an ear and a brain, or so it seems.  However, I am skeptical of such clear-cut representations.  Because the distinction between hearing and listening is so entrenched in scholarly and medical discourse, and because listening processes are commonly described only in terms of the ear and the brain, the question of how the rest of the body figures in to the reception and production of sound has been largely neglected.

In my own working definition of listening, I am attempting to trouble the discursively established binary between hearing and listening.  I want to suggest that listening and hearing are actually entwined, simultaneous processes that involve more than just the ear.  In fact, our bodies (even the unlikely parts) are much more ear-like than they appear to be.  As Steven Connor writes,

"Teeth have long been implicated in the idea of the mouth as a receiver as well as an emitter of sound--for example, in many stories of radio signals picked up by the fillings in peoples teeth...It is said that the deaf Beethoven gripped a stick between his teeth to convey the sounds of the piano to him.  Similarly, Thomas Edison would chomp on the wood of a gramophone in order to hear faint overtones that, as he claimed in a 1913 interview, were normally lost before they reached the inner ear" (168-69).

Biologically speaking, bodily matter (from teeth to bones to stomachs) is capable of receiving and emitting (consuming and producing) sound.  I understand listening, then, as a corporeally distributed process--a process that is not isolated in the ear and brain, but dispersed throughout the nervous system. Even if our brains are not aware of the sound waves constantly impinging upon our bodies, our bodies are reacting to those sounds.  The sounds trigger bodily responses that animate--that affect--us internally and/or externally.  Thus, the reception of sound (often identified as hearing) is not nearly as passive as it has been made out to be.  Like listening, hearing is active.  Our sensory-affective and cognitive responses comingle, and both contribute to our understanding of the sound event.  In other words, the body and the brain listen-hear-think communally.*

Interacting with digital audio technologies makes this kind of mind-body collaboration especially apparent.  For example, we physically manipulate the visual representations of sound waves in audio software programs with our fingers.  When we listen to the composition (bit by bit as the various parts are being assembled), the sound waves enter our bodies in the form of vibrations, producing affective responses.  Our bodies respond, and our reactions affect the way we listen-think about these sounds, which also affects how we choose to revise or edit them.  This is a recursive rather than a linear process.  Listening, hearing, thinking, touching, feeling, and seeing overlap and often occur simultaneously.  It's called multimodal composing for a reason, right?

By conflating listening and hearing, I do not mean to suggest that hearing impaired individuals have the same experience as hearing individuals.  I am not trying to downplay the serious host of medical problems and everyday challenges that people with physiological ear problems face.  However, as Evelyn Glennie explains, you don't need working ears to become an expert listener: "Hearing is a form of touch.  You feel it through your body, and sometimes it almost hits you in your face" (Touch the Sound).  Glennie, a deaf, Grammy Award-winning percussionist, uses her entire body as an instrument to channel vibrations.  Her work emphasizes how touch, sight, and sound converge during listening acts.  Hannah Merker, who lost her hearing in mid-life, concurs with Glennie's experience: "For a high sense of auditory awareness human beings must mingle visual and intuitive mental cues with the receiving of sound...We have untapped depths of flexibility and retraining.  It is possible for hearing impaired and deaf people to hear, to acknowledge cues that indicate the presence of sound.  It is possible for us to listen" (15).  I think we have a lot to learn from people who have had to retrain their senses due to a loss or lack.  While these individuals are forced to be hyperaware of how the senses work together to create meaning, most of us remain oblivious to the limits and affordances of our networked sensory systems. 

Cultivating our understanding of the embodied aspects of listening will require a remixing of conventional notions of listening.  In other words, we need to move beyond mind/body dualisms.  At this early stage of my project, I am still attempting to piece together a more dynamic definition of listening that allows room for sensory-affective and cognitive responses to be part of the same process--a conception of listening that treats the entire body as an ear.

* Perhaps Australian performance artist Stelarc provides the most exaggerated (and bizarre) example of the body as ear.  In 2007, Stelarc had a prosthetic ear surgically implanted into his arm.  This particular ear is able to both receive and transmit sound through a microphone that is connected to a Bluetooth transmitter.  The ear (and Stelarcs body) can actually broadcast audio from the Internet wirelessly, which raises all sorts of interesting questions about listening, bodies, technologies, reception, and production (http://v2.stelarc.org/projects/earonarm/index.html).

Works Cited

Connor, Steven. Edisons Teeth: Touching Hearing. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity. Ed. Veit Erlmann. New

York: Berg, 2004.

Evelyn Glennie, Touch the Sound Movie Trailer. DameEvelynGlennie. August 11, 2010. YouTube. September 15, 2010.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Edkx6ovQ9YM.

 Merker, Hannah. Listening. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. 

Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie. Dir. Thomas Riedelsheimer. Docudrama DVD. 2005.