Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that
the bottoms of your feet become ears.
Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Meditations
As I write this I can hear, the swish of traffic, the hum of electric, the chirruping of birds, a distant online conversation, building works and the cooing of pigeons.
Pigeons always sound as if they are saying something. Which reminds me of this beautiful Kate Bush song.
When we listen deeply, either externally or internally, we become aware of much more subtlety, complexity and unheard experience.
Listening is a gateway to presence.
What does it mean to listen?
Last week, at a work away day, we spent the morning being creative. Guided by a visual artist on the theme of listening we first tried to draw our ears on our hands, all kinds of labyrinthine patterns emerged, like some kind of strange tattoos we all placed our hands together as tribal members. Then we tried to see what our ears looked like by taking a selfie. Much harder to do than you think. Looking at these images we could see how unique our ears were, like a fingerprint. We tried to draw them.
Next, we stood a in circle with a large twig between our teeth (building on our tribal experience). We twanged the twigs and listened to the reverberation in our heads, the different notes and quality, and then we were given different mediums to try and capture this sound visually.
The whole experience was a journey into the art of listening.
The Art of Listening
I’ve recently completed a short online course with Will Crawford on the Art of Listening, combining mindfulness with music. What a joy. Each session beginning with a five minute listening meditation, mindfulness and breathing practices followed and each session we were asked to listen to pieces of music. Other than at a concert, when else do I stop and just listen to music? How wonderful it was to be immersed in music for five minutes with no other distractions. What a practice in the art of listening
These courses are run through Intercultural Roots which is an organisation supporting arts for health and social change.
Will - a classical guitarist - also runs Quiet Note which offers meditations accompanied by individual and uniquely composed pieces of music to ensure a more personal and deeper understanding of experience. Meditations range from beginner to experienced and help calm the mind, relax the body and deal with stress. With some beautiful animations from Cat Kennedy, a taster of which you can see above.
Deep Listening
It was Will’s course that introduced me to the work of Pauline Oliveros and her work on Deep Listening.
Deep Listening, as developed by Pauline Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening. The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, and interactive performance, as well as listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination, and dreams.
The ear hears, the brain listens, the body senses vibrations. Listening is a lifetime practice, it depends on accumulated experience with sound. I differentiate to hear and to listen. To hear is the physical means that enables perception. To listen is to give attention to what is perceived both acoustically and psychologically.”
“Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included. Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception. Through accessing many forms of listening we grow and change whether we listen to the sounds of our daily lives, the environment or music. Deep Listening takes us below the surface of our consciousness and helps to change or dissolve limiting boundaries.”
Pauline Oliveros
Listening Inwards
Pauline Oliveros called Deep Listening a radical attentiveness, a form of meditation.
Listening isn’t just an outward sensory experience. We can also listen internally to our body, feelings, thoughts. Our inner experience is always communicating with us, but often we are so caught up in our external world and our thought processes we don’t hear it.
Try this meditation on receptive listening my Michael Stone.
Or this meditation on listening to our depths from Gil Fronsdal.
The sound of silence
In Japanese aesthetics there is a concept called ‘ma’. The Japanese concept of Ma is something that relates to all aspects of life. It has been described as a pause in time, an interval or emptiness in space. It is the space between and the space around, full of possibility and potentiality.
In architecture ma is the space between the walls of a building, In the art of sumi-e brush painting large areas of space are intentionally left unpainted and in music it is the silence between the sounds. Music cannot exist without silence.