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.

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