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The Bloomsbury handbook of the anthropology of sound, 2021

Abstract

This chapter is about listening, and more specifically about how listening isn’t singular but plural—or better, multiple. This is by no means a new idea, and throughout the following sections I trace how different authors and disciplines have approached the sensory domain of audition through categorization and classification. It is widely agreed that, in broad terms, listening is a sensory activity shared by human (Handel 1989) and non-human actors (Brigstocke and Noorani 2017). Following a long spell of thought dominated by oculocentric presuppositions, listening has been foregrounded by the auditory turns of disciplines ranging from philosophy and psychology to cultural studies and the social sciences (Ihde 2007, Szendy 2015). Listening as a practice is at the center of extensive debates in sound studies and auditory culture research (Hilmes 2005), and the ideologically charged attributes of a recurring “audio-visual litany” (Sterne 2003: 14) have been criticized as perpetuating clear-cut distinctions between the senses. As Tom Rice recognizes in his comprehensive overview of the term: “types of listening and terms for listening have developed in tandem with the creation of sound technologies” (Rice 2015: 100). One of the most striking commonalities among theorizations and descriptions of listening is the attempt to differentiate this “heterogeneity of levels of hearing” (Chion 2012: 48) through typologies and taxonomies. From Adorno’s “types of listeners” (1976) and Schafer’s “modes of listening” (2017) to Torgue’s “aspects of listening” (1999) and Clarke’s “ways of listening” (2005), writers across disciplines and genealogies of thought strive to clarify how listening isn’t a singular experience nor a monolithic activity, but rather a bundle of practices that, following Annemarie Mol, I characterize as “multiple” (2002).

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