Introduction

“Can you hear me”?

This question is often asked at the start of a Zoom meeting, as we try to connect remote and in-person presenters and listeners. At a conference about listening, this question is asked again and again, each time with a different tone. The phrase also asks those in the room (whether virtual or physical) to turn the question to themselves: Can I hear you? It’s not an easy question to answer. What does it mean to hear someone? And what is the context in which I am listening? To be able to begin answering this question, we have to start with an understanding of our own positionality, which might shift from context to context. Sometimes, we might feel at home, surrounded by familiar sounds: I hear what you’re saying when you have felt you understood what someone is communicating. Other times, we may find ourselves as unfamiliar listeners, not sure of what we’re hearing, or even if it is meant for us. Xwélmexw scholar Dylan Robinson introduces the practice of “guest listening” as a form of critical listening positionality (defined below).^[1] As a guest, we would consider the question of “whose sound territory am I on?” Robinson’s deep work on listening positionality calls to the surface the ways that settler listening practices seek to both understand and assimilate, and in doing so to enact structural, cultural, and epistemic violence. Robinson’s framing of the guest listener reminds us that we are all guests somewhere, and that, as such, all sounds may not be for us. Rather than trying to understand and assimilate, Robinson prompts us to remain with the incommensurability of some knowledges. Sometimes, as a guest listener, I can’t hear you because what you’re saying is not meant for me. In his keynote talk for the conference, Robinson talked about Rebecca Belmore’s Wave Sound, a sculptural piece that initially appears as a device for amplified listening with the ear; in his discussion of the piece, we are introduced less to an acoustic experience of listening than a multi-sensory experience of listening to the landscape itself: bending down, putting an ear against the sculpture, feeling the soil, smelling the ocean. Belmore describes each Wave Sound sculpture as encouraging us to “hear and consider the land and our relationship to the land,” which will be different for each listener.^[2]

An understanding of listening as deeply relational frames the materials gathered here, which grew out of a Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies (GLASS) conference held in October 2022 on the theme of “Listening as a Shared and Social Practice.” Responding to a turn in sound studies toward a greater attention to the role of listening, the conference call invited presentations, workshops, and performances that considered the co-constitutive nature of listening, which we embrace in this volume.

Rather than compiling the entirety of the conference proceedings, we offer here a collection of materials that help us to think about how the conference’s theme might shift and change when activated by different groups of learners, whether in or outside of a classroom. The materials gathered here are not meant to be understood as a totality, and we don’t look to provide an exhaustive collection of essays from the 2022 gathering. Rather, we hope that this can be a place for generating, building, and maintaining relationships through acts of listening, and that the activities and essays that form this book offer starting points for listening and noticing more deeply, through different frameworks and lenses.

Listening guides us toward a plurality of ideas and perspectives, challenging dominant, Eurocentric cultural binaries such as human/non-human, expert/non-expert, male/female, music/noise, and teacher/student. Steeped in academic traditions that can promote binary expectations such as these, we initially felt an urge to offer best practices for teaching and engaging with these materials, yet our dialogue with one another guided us away from offering prescriptive ways of being and doing. We committed instead to the kind of slowness required for shifting awareness and attention through the perceptual process of listening. Instead of best practices for engaging with these materials, we offer pedagogical threads and guiding questions based in frameworks that grew from Robinson’s keynote and complemented by related excerpts from some of the participating artists and authors.

Collective Study of/through Listening

It is through deep listening and collective study that we learn to value complexity, connection, and care. We hope that these materials might provoke study and creative practice in groups and through relationships that do not separate teaching from learning or teachers from learners. The materials were generated after the conference. As the authors worked with their conference offerings and developed the texts you find here, they shared ideas and provided feedback with one another through a collaborative editing process.^[3] Many contributors offered activities and provocations informed by a central guiding question: How can we deepen our understanding of study and creative practice by nurturing collective, critical engagement with listening?

Being attuned to the potential of the sonic, we could not help but transform the process of going up the enclosed stairwell into an impromptu collaborative sound piece. Our collective footsteps thudded and echoed throughout the concrete and metal shaft. —Josh Rios

Continue to dial your listening between individual and group. —Jami Reimer

Sound is a community building device. We are sounding bodies. We are listening bodies —Lorelei d’Andriole and Kayl Lockett

Not paying attention is usually considered a bad thing. But there can be different reasons for not paying attention. —Magda Stanová

A focus on the collective can prompt an attention not only to our social experience of listening, but also to the physicality of our listening bodies.

 
Embodied Listening
You will encounter full-bodied, multi-sensory listening practices in this collection. The authors and artists share ideas and activities that centre physical sensations, imagination, and emotional responses in ways that help us cultivate relational practices of listening. For many, practising relational listening is lifelong, decolonial work. Instead of trying to incorporate what we are hearing into what we already understand, Robinson reminds us to sit with the incommensurability of some Indigenous Knowledges and Eurocentric logics. How can we learn to recognize the types of listening we’ve learned, and what might we unlearn through a critical practice of listening? Many of the contributions to this volume address another guiding question: How do we experience listening in our bodies?

Bioacoustics, with its own history of listening and its particular epistemological aims, carries both the orthodoxy of scientific method and the sensuous archival practices of musicology and media studies. —Jami Reimer

Closely observe the movement of a real or imagined tree before you. Feel the shared verticality of your spine and the tree trunk. —Eleni-Ira Panourgia, Lisa Sandlos, and Rennie Tang

It was analogous to the feeling I get standing in front of this Mark Rothko painting in the Art Institute of Chicago where I feel the colour’s pulse is slowly breathing at me. . . . The impulse motivating all this work is the exchange between understanding experience through language, signs, and intellectual cognition versus understanding via one’s nervous system, body, and, intuition. —Steve Stelling

My earliest instruments included the human body as part of the architecture of the instrument itself. I wanted to use parts of my body as the bridge, neck, or resonant body of the larger system. —Lorelei d’Andriole

In developing a deeper attention to the present tense of listening, we’re also invited to understand the longer histories, to build foundations for listening futures.

 
Imagination and Place
How might embodied, critical listening help us to see ourselves as part of longer, place-based histories, and turn our imaginations toward vibrant futures? For those raised with world views derived from dominant, mainstream culture (as is the case, for example, for the editors of this book, who are both white American settlers^[4]), listening is essential to noticing the ideas and practices that inform one’s imagination. Practices of guest listening offered by Robinson introduce positionality, and in particular listening positionality, to develop more specific attention to our relationships with land and place and how that shapes how we can listen. Several contributions offer ways to consider the follow key question: How can intentional listening both affirm and complement the urgency of imagining and shaping new futures?

Part of what excited me about subsurface listening was the deeper connection I was able to experience with trees and the broader ecosystem. I spent several years listening inside trees and plants, within the forest floor, under bodies of water, and so much more. After associating natural areas with loss for so long, learning something novel about the interior landscape of the ecosystem helped me feel closer to it. This gave me energy, hope, and a deeper empathy for my natural surroundings. —Nikki Lindt

Trans-generational pieces of music . . . provide a glimpse of deeper time that moves backward to those sections of the piece that have come before, and forward to those pieces we will not live to hear. —Sean Steele

Reading a text aloud is one of the various ways poetry can live in the world. . . . How will your contribution connect listeners to a complex weaving of the histories and ecologies of place? —Fereshteh Toosi

Practices of specificity resound in many of the contributions, not only as one way to imagine futures, but also to reimagine the learning process itself.

Resonance and Response 

From what land or place are you encountering these electronic materials? What can you hear right now? We join one another in this publication with hopes that we will each encounter ideas and practices different from our own. How could you engage with these materials in deeply contextual ways, allowing them to reverberate within you? What frameworks, mindsets, biases, experiences, stories, and expertise do you bring to these materials? How might this affect how you relate to them? Can these materials connect to, build on, and deepen your existing knowledge and experiences?

The learning process itself can prompt us to reconfigure our space of study and learning. bell hooks reminds us that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”^[5] Many of the contributing authors offer forms for improvising, responding to, and remaking existing social structures and habits, embracing experimentation and play throughout the learning and listening process.

Academic lectures and conferences are formats for shared listening, but somehow they took on conventions that make the listening itself difficult. . . . When you are not paying attention during lecture because you started to think about something that you’ve heard or seen during the lecture, it is a good thing. —Magda Stanová

These experiences of defamiliarization act like a wedge, taking us out of conventional Eurocentric ideas about music composed and performed within Western musical traditions. Similarly, these moments of defamiliarization can engender reflections on deep time that relativize settler-colonial historical narratives. —Sean Steele

How is your project accessible to people with different abilities? Is the area bumpy or paved? Hilly or flat? Is the path accessible to wheelchairs and walking sticks? Are there places to sit, or will listeners stand, and for how long? —Fereshteh Toosi

Music, to me, is sound-as-presence that blooms and fills a space. —Steve Stelling

The spirit of experimentation and learning proposed in so many of the following chapters is echoed in the choice to share these materials in an open-access format.
Sharing & Acknowledgements
As an open educational resource,^[6] this project is made to be read, shared, modified, and repurposed, so that the materials gathered here might be re-gathered, reorganized, grown, and recontextualized. In offering these materials in this way, we ask in exchange that the authors and their images and works are credited so that these individuals are acknowledged for what they’ve offered.

As editors, we’d like to express our gratitude to an incomplete list of the many people and organizations that have helped make sharing this publication possible in different ways: Amin Malakootikhah, Isaac Mulolani, Shuana Niessen, Josephine Forest, Sabina Vaught, and the editors of Knowledge Justice, Sophia Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight; contributors Eleni-Ira Panourgia, Lisa Sandlos, Rennie Tang, Fereshteh Toosi, Josh Rios, Jami Reimer, Lorelei d’Andriole, Kayl Lockett, Magda Stanová, Nikki Lindt, Sean Steele, and Steve Stelling; the various conference presenters; conference co-organizers jake moore of the University of Saskatchewan and Jeremy Morris and Jennifer Smart of GLASS. Funding for this publication was awarded by the University of Regina through an OER Small Project Grant. “GLASS Canada: Listening as a Shared and Social Practice” was supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, USask Art Galleries and Collections at the University of Saskatchewan, and the Humanities Research Institute and Library Services at the University of Regina.