Paul Hegarty—The Display of Listening (TSpec2)
Channel: Karen Eliot
Date: 2015-01-11

Since the latter days of the last century, the study of sound has emerged in what was seen as the visual-heavy world of the contemporary, Finally, sound was finding its place. At the same time, the ways in which sound was being consumed were beginning to alter dramatically. Instead of worrying about the demise of the paid artist, I want to reflect on the new valorisations of listening as something social, rather than individually contemplative, and how this plays out across new commodities, such as headphones, mobile devices used as public listening posts, sound art explorations of listening, acoustic ecologies more widely, and even in the paradoxical audiophile practice of wearing noise reducing ear inserts to concerts. Maybe it is time all this attention to listening needs some thwarting, so that hearing can return, not as some unmediated and true encounter with the world, but as a way of fracturing quickly established mass modes of listening that are essentially about consuming sound. What shape would that thwarting take? Machine? Noise? Ear? Non-ear?