The Spectacle of Listening

By Paul Hegarty

There’s a lot of listening happening today. A lot of attention paid to hearing, to sound, to openness, to empathic communication, to shared soundworlds. Some of this attention happens in the zone of sound studies, pleased that at least some part of the world around it has finally grasped McLuhan’s sense that the future would be full of sound, and that the acoustic would be the privileged way of imaging space and social interaction. Without wishing to distinguish too much between listening and hearing, can we say that hearing more sound is better? Presumably, as writers never tire of pretending, the ears cannot be closed, so so react passively, even submissively to sound produced by someone else. Acoustic ecology tries to rectify this terrifying presence of McLuhan’s allatonceness, and restore the measure of listening, in place of unwilled hearing.

Much of the hearing is of music, the organisation of time through sound. Only now this is consumer space/time being structured by centrally-generated sound. If not that, then the surprisingly healthy medium of radio, notwithstanding government attempts to restrict the gift-like promise of its medium or long wave travels (digital might be available everywhere there is some sort of internet, but within a territory it allows state broadcasters to regulate and monitor users, ensuring flow of resources in the form of licenses. TV iPLayer ‘catch-up’ is the explicit rendering of the reterritorialisation of viewing and listening rights). Or it might come in the form of the noise of people, or even sounds they produce in a private and mobile sound territory emanated by their phone. As retail leaves the cities, maybe all this sound will dissipate, replaced by audio green shoots, perhaps in the clarity of hearing a nearby river or a conversation that doesn’t seem too aggressive/too different/too new/too foreign/too fucking loud.

But audio predators stalk urban streets, mumbling, shouting, laughing, their eyes glazed. But the niche occupied by the illuminated drunk is now taken by the invasive phonewielder, holding their upturned shell, peering into it, talking one-sidedly, while the circuit’s completion remains unrevealed to the passive listener, the unwitting consumer. There are no objective sounds in the city, only sounds in relation to listeners, contextually constructed listening devices interacting in a mass bone oscillation. It is tempting to say that if there is more for us to hear, then it would be good for us to listen, to apply conscious ears where before not all hearing was actually heard. In passing: Jonathan Sterne has pointed to the connection that should be made more between sound studies and disability studies, rather than drifting through a world where full hearing is presumed. I do not presume all our ears are open, equally, or in the same way, or to the same things – any listening involves selection, loss of messages. Any hearing involves diminution of other potentials. All the while, things are also simply not heard because they fall outside the capturing point of significance. I think listening has become so good, so prevalent, so welcome, that it has turned into a personal commodity, a demonstration. Have people ever listened so much? To so much music and chat? Has it ever been so obvious?

So we need to go back, even beyond the habitual passage by the door of John Cage, and think of listening as something worthy of seeing. There is of course a massive history of music in painting, and indeed of listening to orators, to lovers, to words from superior beings: a history of attention conveyed through showing and looking at it. For all the interest in Vermeer’s guitar playing girl, announcing the self-reflective humanist subject and a reconception of music as secular philosophy, it is worth having a quick look at Manet’s Concert aux Tuileries from 1862, a foundational modernist work, in which there is very little sign of the music, or indeed of listening, as Manet’s sitters and other figures attend to being seen by concert-going public and painter alike. For modern music in Paris was about attendance, about music as a social condensation. Also, if we look at his Café Concert (1878), we can see a very specific listening at play – distraction, but also the role of music in permitting distraction, in allowing observation as well as audition. In the social gathering of the cafe (highlighted by Benjamin in his ‘Berlin Chronicle’), we do not look at the performers, dedicate multisensory reception to the production of music, but only listening, as looking is dedicated to the surrounding members of your class.

R Murray Schafer tells us that audiences only became silent in the 18th century, with their soundmaking contribution restricted to points inbetween those of the musicians. Whilst this heightens the discipline of proper listening, it does also build tension and drive the possibility of a potentially tumultous and acoustically unpredictable moment of excess. Avant-garde movements of the 20th century tried shaking up audiences in many ways, but did anyone try harder than Cage in presenting the silence of 4’33” in 1952? The audience becomes a heightened listening machine, and in the minutes of silent non-playing, it makes many of the sounds that will fill the acoustic space, and, more importantly, makes the piece through its listening. In one fell swoop, Cage had changed the borders between music and non-music, silence and sound, performer and audience, and opened the world up as a producer of an essential musicality of all things. But what he also did was create a skilled, trained audience, establishing a practice of close listening, of open ears, ready to receive the world, and as this skill was one generated by you the listener, you could display this skill through your stasis (or, your knowing movement), your listening face. Your understanding of the history of the world being opened up could play gently across your ever-so-slightly moving head, which is trying to capture slight variations in sound.

At roughly the same time, Yves Klein produced his Monotone Symphony, seemingly written in the late 1940s, theorised further in the wake of 4’33”, and played in 1960 as part of a performance where models covered themselves in his trademark International Klein Blue (IKB) and pressed their bodies to canvasses, producing sub-Matisse imprints in the process. The symphony consists of one note played for 20 minutes, then an equivalent period of silence. Unlike Cage’s piece, Klein’s symphony addresses the divide between music and silence, summons all music into one note and then dismisses it. Cage fills the world with sound, Klein empties it, a void where once was sound. Maybe that’s what we see in this audience for the piece, but actually what we have are competing models of attention. The last 20 years have seen the slow, hesitant spread of the silent disco, where a room full of people shuffle around, singing to themselves as they listen on heapdhones instead of over a PA – as if participating in a sound art event, or learning about exhibits in a gallery. The privatisation of a nightclub to the point of listening to your choice of different music tracks is then, not very different to other technological developments around what used to accurately be called a personal stereo.

Meanwhile, starting in 1942 in Sao Paulo, IBOPE began measuring radio audiences, raising the question, further on, as surveys became more targetted, not just of listening quantity but also quality – what kind of listening was going on? Rock ‘n’ roll audiences made the breakthrough for the display of listening as ecstatic communion, a situation both threatening and commercialisable. As rock diverged into different genres, the way in which listening was done would alter, and would be depicted differently according to genre-based practices, such as looking at art, or dancing, contemplating, throwing yourself around. All of these practices signify your commitment to being a certain sort of listener in a given context, but it is when this context goes private on a mass-scale, that things change, and the 1980s saw this in the shape of the Walkman, amid more public developments such as the boombox/ghettoblaster allowing a portable version of the block party, and also the mobile phone. All of these are about the transit of sound through the city, all involve machinery that can be seen when in use, or merely through being transported; all therefore reterritorialise sound on the individual and heighten the possibility for displaying the act of listening. For now it is the act of listening in itself that is on show, whereas concert performances had established behavioural genre conventions (the cassette or 8 track-equipped car was a way of transforming the visual of the car into sound, displaying that listening could happen, not the listening itself).

So, a simple media archeology, a bit like running a metal detector over a huge lump of metal rock. Without even mentioning Mike Judge’s innovative programme that showed Beavis and Butthead watching music videos, listening constantly alters, and what is being displayed when we look at listening alters, and does so significantly when the Walkman is relaunched as the iPod. Up to this point, what we experienced as those seeing listening was the visibility of it, not its mobilisation as display. Hi fi headphones were for the secret pleasure of the audiophile, and full of the microscopic variation that Baudrillard identifies in his 1968 book The System of Objects, or that Bret Easton Ellis observes in American Psycho. These new buds would be the sign of adherence to a cult – white, slightly streamlined compared to the now mass-produced and cheaply sold standard earphones that came with the discman, the shuffling, jittery upgrade of the cassette walkman. The white buds have remained a defining Apple object, even amid a new bloom of variety, once Apple saw it was missing out on the colours and mock-aerodynamics of fitness buds – different for every discipline, for every self-improving and no doubt mindful set of exercises. So earphones offered new possibilities for status identification – the white ones signalling belonging to the rebellious outsider, Apple, and, more relevantly, still today, the access to a big volume of data that you now had on your iTunes drone device – today this access no longer needs to signify the stockpiling capacity, as it is access to streaming and internet aquisition that counts.

In a way the iPod seems very much like the end of an old model of music collecting and listening, but I don’t think we should be misled – the stockpile is rampant, even if not necessary amid the entropic sprawl of ‘everything all the time at once’. Things have moved on: for the double life of the home audiophile has blossomed into fertile variegation through what seem to be real headphones, which dramatically improve the standard of iMachines, as Sterne notes in his MP3 book (237). But I can’t help noticing… them. Multi-coloured, advertising their design purposes like upstart wines telling you the grape they are made from instead of their terroir, and sitting largely and expensively on many heads. Audiophile websites and other media are not impressed, and I’m sure in some way they are right: Beats by Dre are today’s Bang and Olufsen, or the christmas tree excess of 80s/90s cheap stereo systems.. But I’m not interested – the point is that allegiance, expenditure, quality and embrace of the industry standard, in all its trimmings, is on show. In fact, Beats and its imitators (or its purchasers for $3 billion, in the case of the industry standard of industry standards, Apple) turn the tide on what was widening of public sounding of devices – from early mobile phones, to the normalising of their use, to their use on public transport as audio display machines, a properly pathetic miniaturising of the boombox. Now the headphone is the display, and the same can be seen in concerts – with the development of a range of in-ear sound delivery objects came a parallel surge in noise-reducing buds, and loud concerts feature the ostentatious display of their use, mimicking the use of onstage earphones used for checking vocal pitch or as more general monitors, or in some cases, to preserve hearing when close to amplification.

So what’s going on with this rendering visble of the act of listening? Is it an assertion of the value of music (or more general listening) in an era which seeks to cheapen it through easy availability? A land grab of listening by tech companies? Sterne observes that the presence in the world of the easily exchanged mp3 format might have removed finance form some parts of the music industry, but it has proved extremely profitable for patent holders, manufacturers and retailers of mp3 and net-friendly devices, telecoms companies, and now, headphone makers. Unwittingly, it is Chris Ruen’s 2012 anti-downloading polemic, Freeloading, that gives us a sense of what the extent of this increase in financial value of music must be. He says that avareage spending on CDs etc dropped from $71 in 2000 to $26 by 2009, a colossal drop. But, actually, it tells us how little was ever being spent because the higher figure is one from the year of greatest turnover and profit from musical recorded commodities. The amount being spent on devices, on wireless internet connections, even when we discount the profits made by ‘pirates’ who are more accurately to be thought of as skip chasers, lazy foragers… then listening machinery accounts for huge expenditure.

Looking beyond the glee of those who manoeuvred themselves into the right market position by establishing industry standard formats, it seems that demand is truly there – people want to pay. As pro-downloaders guess of their fellows. They really want to, and if they don’t get round to it, they’ll go to a concert. But concert sales and whatever music is still being sold is increasingly only of meaning to already established or in-house media corporation artists. People want to spend money on listening, not on music. In fact, this reterritorialisation, its radical machine capitalism, is a sort of resistance to dematerialisation: the headphone becomes a way of refusing the absence of objects – listeners have not been weaned nearly as much as we think. Only their fetish is no longer in sound, if that sound is in file form, then the desirable objects is in a container that cannot prove to be valueless a few days after – or before – release. Much more than triumphalist vinyl junkies, Beats-cradled listeners have erected a barrier to piracy by renovating the commodity. Unfortunately, that also means they have something worth stealing, as early adopters of iPods found through identifying their ownership via the white buds.

Paul Hegarty