What is listening?

Listening may seem pretty self-explanatory at first, but it’s more layered and nuanced than you might assume. Most definitions fail to capture listening completely, fail to do justice to the richness of what listening truly entails. The distinction between ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’, the physical and mental processes involved in listening, and the influence of our environment and personal context all go to show that listening does not start and end with our ears. This text explores the different aspects of listening and offers a new perspective on this fundamental human skill.

What is listening? If you consult the dictionary on the topic, you’ll be met with a very concise yet vague and oversimplified answer. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to listen is to:

1. Give one’s attention to a sound;
2. take notice of and act on what someone says.

At the time of writing, ChatGPT and Gemini hold the same narrow definition. Why does the definition of listening tend to be so scant?

You hear with your ears and listen with your brain

First things first, let’s make the distinction between hearing and listening. All too often, these terms are used interchangeably, which can cause confusion.

• ‘Hearing’ is the physical process by which soundwaves are perceived via the ears. The process is passive and involuntary. We do it without trying and are not able to switch this sense off.

• ‘Listening’, by contrast, implies an attentive and active engagement with the sounds that surround us. It is a voluntary and active process, during which our attention is trained on the present moment. We are able to zoom in or out, mentally, on what we are hearing.

So it’s fair to say we hear more than we listen. It seems that, rather than a matter of obedience, as implied by the second dictionary definition, listening is more about meeting each other in a state of attention.

Aifoon’s long-standing research into the phenomenology of listening shows that listening is much more than actively attending to sound. It also probes deeper than pre-existing models of listening such as listening to music and listening as a part of communication. Environmental sound – our particular focus at aifoon – is always present, even when we are sleeping. It has a daily impact on people and yet there are no genres, canons or formats of environmental sound. In fact, there is hardly any culture or literacy surrounding sound at all. Assessing the different layers, ranges, movements and dimensions of listening is therefore a pressing task.

Our ears only partially account for how we hear

We might not like to admit it, but our human senses are relatively limited. According to the literature, the human auditory frequency range is between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, but, in practice, people hear best between 100 Hz and 5 kHz. Elephants can easily perceive up to 16 kHz and dogs up to 45 kHz. Some bats can hear all the way up to 200 kHz. So, there are clearly many more frequencies than we humans are capable of perceiving.

There are some low frequencies (such as sound waves generated by wind turbines) that we are more likely to hear with our bodies (the soles of our feet, our chest) than with our ears. A phenomenon that hasn’t escaped filmmakers and game developers, who take full advantage of it in creating a more immersive experience.

Then there’s bone conduction, a method of sound reproduction where vibrations are transferred directly to the inner ear through the bones of the skull. The technology bypasses the outer and middle ear, making bone conduction headphones handy for runners, so they can safely listen to music without shutting out the sound of traffic. There are also certain contact sounds that we feel as much as we hear, such as the vibrations of guitar strings as heard through your stomach, or the purring of your cat as heard through the palm of your hand. These examples illustrate how much hearing has in common with touch, and how physical hearing influences listening. In this sense, we are not just listening to our bodies, we’re listening through our bodies.

‘Embodied listening’ is a more in-depth form of listening, during which we are fully present in the surrounding environment. Just because we listen with our brain doesn’t mean that listening is a purely cognitive activity. Sound is not something external to us. On this topic, Jean-Luc Nancy describes a state of sensory openness where the body opens itself to the world of sounds. This entails an active involvement of the body in the sonic environment. Our physical position (where are we?), presence (how attentive are we?) and sensory experiences (what do we feel?) are integral to how we perceive and respond to sound. Do you recall the first time you entered a big party venue? Or did you ever visit a Buddhist temple as a tourist? The sensory impact was no doubt overwhelming in both cases. Listening as if it were the first time is an attitude that you can also adopt in your everyday life.

Listening also has meditative qualities that can help instil a deep restfulness, focus and awareness. When we are attentively present – when we empathically connect, let go of judgement and make room for self-reflection – listening bring us an inner quiet and balance. Imagine walking through the woods and pausing to concentrate fully on the gentle rustling of the wind through the leaves, the chirping of birds, the crackling of leaves underfoot. Now your attention shifts completely to the sounds around you, without judging them or thinking about them. All you’re doing is listening. You are fully present in the here and now. You are one with the environment. This attitude promotes inner peace and calm as you connect with the moment.

Space can shape and colour sound

Soundwaves travel through space and the acoustics of a space influence the timbre (‘tone colour’), intensity and dynamics of the sound. A sound can seem more dull or bright depending on the acoustic properties of the space.

While you may not be fully aware of it, we humans orient ourselves not only based on what we see of a space, but also based on its acoustic reflections. Depending on how close we are to an object, pressure differences act on our ear in a way we can sense. Our own form of echolocation. Consider how footsteps in a stairwell have an added ‘drama’ due to the intensity of the acoustic reflections, or how the city’s acoustics are muted after snowfall.

It’s not only a space’s physical properties that radiate to us through sound but also its identity. Environmental factors such as background sound and the layout of the interior can have a significant impact on how we perceive and respond to auditory stimuli. The difference in feeling you get from a gigantic cathedral or a claustrophobic attic is huge, and that has an impact on how we interpret the space. It affects our ability to concentrate on and understand auditory stimuli. In other words, we have an spatial-auditory consciousness (or unconscious) that guides our listening.

What are the elements of listening?

The term ‘listening’ is often reduced to one of the following meanings: listening to music, obeying a command, or the skill valuable in communication. Not only have these derivative meanings been thoroughly studied and categorised due to their prominence, they share a strong linearity in that they imply a transmitter and a receiver. Listening is not linear, however. Its situatedness (its physical, contextual and spatial aspects) make it reciprocal and dialogical.

In addition to its physical, contextual and spatial aspects, listening is influenced by our personal history, previous experiences, our emotional situation and our relationship to what we hear. Take, for example, the Syrian newcomers to Belgium who had never heard seagulls before. During their first three days in Ghent, they heard ‘crying babies’ everywhere. Listening is interlinked with the listener’s own particular context. This means there’s no way of predetermining who will give which meaning to what.

To add to that, perception can also be culturally determined. What people from one culture feel comfortable with may seem entirely unpleasant and unsettling to people from another culture. In Eastern meditation cultures, for example, calm and serenity are found in silence, while in other (urban) cultures, it is completely normal to experience bustling environmental sounds as a comfortable blanket of lively activity – in that context, silence would be the uncomfortable situation.

Speaking of silence: even pauses, interruptions and gaps in sound are an integral part of listening, contributing to the process of making meaning and the dynamics of the experience.

Listening also has a certain momentum. You listen differently when you are in love than when you are hungry. For example, our practice shows that in the morning children associate a sound clip of rain with the sound of a shower and in the afternoon with the sound of melting butter ... that’s hunger speaking! Of course, various different temporalities may be intertwined during listening.

So, it bears repeating that listening is more than just one-way traffic. It is a shared experience that creates connection between individuals and their environment. As John Cage says: ‘It’s not merely a one-sided relationship between the performer and the audience, but an ever-expanding project of awareness,’ and in this sense a dialogue.

This dialogue can also come about mutually, as a sort of ‘equalising’, where you compose the city together, or tune a space together acoustically. What if a neighbourhood decided collectively what sound they would like to live in (see our Phonorama project)? What if a teacher addressed the acoustics of their classroom together with the students (see our Interioor project)? At the individual level, too, auditory interpretations and perceptions are questioned, leading to the development of strategies in response. Listening is a never-ending, reciprocal process.

Above all, we find that our exercises in co-listening – collective listening – create connection by fostering a shared experience of attention and presence. Listening and reflecting together without judgement creates a sense of mutual understanding and empathy, leading to a deeper connection between people.

Unconscious listening

Not all listening is conscious. Our brains are constantly processing auditory stimuli. We automatically pick up on background sounds, notice changes in our environment and react instinctively to certain auditory signals, such as the sound of a car horn or a crying baby. Relatedly, a busy office environment can have an impact on our well-being, health and productivity, because our brains are constantly registering and categorising the associated stimuli.


One positive aspect of unconscious listening is that we are capable of filtering out irrelevant ‘noise’ so that we can concentrate on the ‘important’ things.

This mental paradox would seem to undermine our definition of listening. We define listening as a conscious process where we focus attentively on what we are hearing, but now we’re saying there’s such a thing as unconscious listening ... What do we call this unconscious listening, then?

Is it the same as hearing? No, ‘hearing’ is simply the detection of sound stimuli by the auditory system, whereas unconscious listening goes beyond hearing in a cerebral way; it entails the unconscious processing and interpretation of auditory information. ‘Aha ... it was just the noise of the extractor fan that had me so restless.’

So, instead of understanding conscious and unconscious listening as being mutually exclusive, it is more correct to understand listening as a complex cognitive process where both conscious and unconscious elements can be involved, depending on the context and the state of mind of the individual.

Marcel Cobussen describes listening as a movement between auditory attention and imagination, between sensory experience and a search for possible meaning. ‘To listen is to travel,’ he says. Sometimes we follow a sound, sometimes we return to what we heard before, sometimes we lose ourselves in the world of sound, sometimes we anticipate what we hear, sometimes we register sounds and sometimes we don’t.

Conclusion

Listening is more than just hearing; it’s about understanding the nuances of the silence between the sounds and the stories that the wind whispers to us. Listening is not linear, but through its situatedness (its physical, contextual and spatial aspects) it is reciprocal, dialogical. It’s a matter of tuning into the world around us and embracing the beauty and the chaos within. Listening affects what resonates back to us.

Listening is both focal and global. Listening involves the perceptual tuning in and out of certain auditory stimuli in what we hear. It is a form of composing where virtuosity lies not in manipulating an instrument or objects but in the choices you make and how you relate to what you hear. Sometimes what you hear may be beautiful and poetic, sometimes really funny, and sometimes unpleasant. Then it challenges you to compose: to relate to what you hear, to seize upon it, to shift it or filter it out.

Listening is an essential part of our existence and our understanding of the world. Listening is one way we have of tuning into the world. Our listening practices can make us more aware of the situatedness of our existence.

There no one way of listening. Recognising the layered, dialogical and situated nature of listening is important if we are to have a listening culture that is nuanced and enriched. Through our work on listening, we have developed interpersonal artistic tools that call into question and set in motion the act of listening, both individually and in relation to others.

With our impactful aifoon projects, we seek to challenge the idea of a virtuosity of listening and embrace the complexity of a ‘world of many worlds’ (see anthropologists Marisol de la Cadena and Michael Blaser) as a polyphony of a shared world, rather than decolonising and categorising it by means of an ‘objective canon’.

Perhaps it is because of the elusive, reciprocal and polyphonic nature of listening that it does not lend itself to an encyclopaedic definition.

Want more?

Numerous artists, philosophers and researchers have cast their light on the question of the essence of listening.

For the sake of completeness and as a source of inspiration, here is an overview: Reduced Listening (Schaeffer, 1967), Deep Listening (Oliveros, 2005), Profound Listening (Lopez in Cox and Warner, 2004), Body Listening (Leitner, 2008), Gestalt Listening (Cahen, 2011), Ambient Listening (Eno, 1978), Acousmatic Listening (Schaeffer, 1967), Structural Listening (Adorno, 1962/1982), Adequate Listening (Stockfelt in Cox and Warner, 2004), Collective Listening (LaBelle, 2006), Spatial Listening (Leitner, 1970), Imaginative Listening (Ihde, 1976), Absent-Minded Listening (Yoshihide in Cox and Warner, 2004), Affective Listening (Wang Jing, 2012), Improvised Listening (Ultra-Red, 2012), Background Listening (Truax), Schizophonic Listening (Murray Schafer, 1977), Causal Listening (Chion, 1994) and The Listening Artist (D. Scott-Cumming, 2017).