Deep Listening and being a Music Explorer

The story goes that experimental musician Pauline Oliveros was experimenting with a reel to reel tape machine, and at one point hung both the microphone and her head out the window of her New York apartment.  When she listened back, she was astonished at what more the microphone recorded than what she had heard with her ears.

The fact is, when we human beings listen, normally we are attending to one thing, and therefore blocking out any other sound.  If I was speaking this out loud to you, you would be blocking out the sounds of the room, or outside, to be able to attend to my voice.  Our brains are wired up to work this way for a reason, so that we can function in the world, but the Deep Listening experiment involves reversing it, and opening up your hearing so that you're aware of the entire sonic landscape.

Often this kind of injunction comes across as a criticism, or as a rule for how you should always be - you've heard them before, "Humans only use 10% of our brain," "You should go through your day using Mindfulness: pay careful attention to how the Cheerios feel as you eat them for breakfast, take a different route to work, shop at a different store." "Observe the visual using the right side of your brain."  They often sounds like criticism of how you normally live, and injunctions to always drive your experience this other way.

Deep Listening is not like that, because it wouldn't work to always listen this way.  It would be as they describe certain types of autism - being confronted by a full palette of undifferentiated sound all the time, and not being able to distinguish anything.  It would be worse than impractical, it would be dangerous.  So, the injunction is not a criticism of how you've been hearing all your life, it's just an interesting experiment you can do with your attention, it's an alternative experience to try, but we certainly don't expect you to live this way all the time.

So, the experiment is - try to flip your attention, so that you're not attending to one sound and trying to block out the rest of the background noise, but attend to what the whole landscape of sound around you sounds like.  I will stop talking. Can you hear the ticking of the clock?  Can you hear the ticking of both clocks, the one right here and also the one in the other room?  What else?  Furnace, bird, car passing by, bubbling fountain?

And then, the next step is, become a sonic explorer.  Put your ears in a different relationship with the source of a sound - turn your head, rotate your body, get up close to a hard surface to see if the reflections change the sound.  Then pick things up, hit them, ping them, crumple them.  What sound does this make?

You can't do this all the time.  But we can all do it more than we do, and it opens up, at least during the experiment, a sonic world that is most of the time hidden to us, because of the way we attend, which we can't help doing and is helpful for survival and getting by in the world, but because we can attend, we can also open up, and for a while see what it's like.