In the section, we're going to think about listening as practice. So, there's a couple of people we'd like to bring up in considering this term. One, is the composer, who you've heard about already in this series, Pauline Oliveros. Pauline Oliveros, was the founder of the Deep Listening Institute. And, you might say, well, what does deep listening mean? What is the practice of listening? For her, deep listening was really trying to extend the way that your ears function. So, she believed that you could not only listen with your ears, but you could actually listen with your entire body. And so, was a physical practice, that you really needed to kind of tune into, to have an awareness of how you were listening. And for other people, listening has a kind of political dimension. So, for another composer who was starting practicing around the same time, for him it was in the early 1970s, R. Murray Schaffer. He has quite a famous essay that we'd like you to read called Open Ears. And, in this essay, he asks three quick key questions I think, that we can ask of any practice of listening. So, he asks, who is listening? What are they listening to? As well as, what are they ignoring or refusing to listen to? So, then that bears to mind, not only who is listening, but also how they're listening. So, artists have used different extended techniques for understanding listening for a long time. Artists have used them, but so have, for example the state. So, we think of surveillance. Surveillance is also a kind of form of listening, of tapping in as well, and so, these devices are used for very different means. One of the exercises for some of you, we'd like you to explore as well is, what are devices for listening? One very simple device, is a microphone. A microphone can be used to sort of listen to sounds that might extend the abilities of the human ear. One very simple one, is a contact microphone. So, what a contact microphone does, it's a very small mic, or you can make a very large one. And, you can put it on an object for example, and what it does is it amplifies the vibrations of that object. That's the very basic dimensions of sound. Sometimes, it can change your relationship, not only with what's around you, but those things that are often too silent to be heard. So, it can amplify those voices as well. And if you remember, in some of our analytical concepts that we started the MOOC with, we had this idea of the material frame. But thus far, up until this week, we've been focusing on the frame, in the sense of what materially produces sound. And right now, we're shifting in this lecture, we're shifting to what produces listening, right? So, for Oliveros, it's not just the body, it's not just the ear but the human body, but Kanes was just mentioning all these technologies, right? They're used to listen, right? Not just to produce, but to actually perceive sound. There is also the kind of wider philosophical and political aspects of this. A few decades ago, already Roland Barthes, really important semiotician, very influential in all kinds of different areas of the Humanities. He wrote a beautiful essay called Listening. And, in the opening of that essay, he argues that, in order for speech to transform radically, we must also reform listening, and transform listening. And we must learn how to move beyond the ways of listening of the disciple, the patient, and the believer, right? And that makes us think of specific places where there's an authority who is allowed to speak, right? Then, for the disciple, it's the teacher, for the believer, it's the preacher, and for the patient, it's the doctor. So, each one of these are disciplines of knowledge that come with the weight of authority. And we've gotten used to just listen, right? And he has nothing against listening. He loves listening, but he thinks we have to transform our relationship to those figures of authority of speech, right? And that listening can do that, even though listening is kind of silent. When people are listening, you don't know how they're listening, you're just observing them. There is a whole school of thinking, with a diverse set of voices, that people call decolonial thought, or the colonial movement. It includes a wide range of thinkers and activists, like Aníbal Quijano, Silvia Rodriquez Cusicanqui, Walter Mignolo, María Lugones. And, in terms of their focus on listening, they've written on a whole range of subjects. But, to put it very briefly, what they share is this idea that coloniality, and the structures of colonial power, persist long after societies have gotten rid of the official colonial power. So, for example, in post-colonial Mexico, or in Latin America, centuries after the Spaniards are no longer in power we still use Spanish, right? So, decolonial thinkers pay attention to how coloniality persists in our everyday experience and existence, and what we can do about it. First, we try to understand it, but we also try to transform it, and liberate ourselves from it. And so, they've argued that for example, language is a key area where coloniality persists, of course, legal structures, but also race. Like racism was instituted by colonialism around the world. And it persists long after colonial emancipation. So, with this in mind, let's think about, whether decolonial listening could be. Some of these thinkers have argued that the body of colonial subjects themselves, ourselves, we have inherited certain kind of priorities and hierarchies that's come with the colonialist mindset. Often that is, priority of the visual, of the textual. So, in that already sound has a really strong decolonial force, right? By resisting that hierarchy. But it's also about the senses and how we can examine as artists, as scholars, how colonialism still persists in our sensation, in our experience, and how we can use sound to subvert that, to go against it. Exactly. And so, there are scholars, including ethnomusicologists, as well who are examining this, not only the history of sound, but how sound is embodied. And then, is reperformed through our own language, through our own gestures. One of the scholars working on this as well, is Dr. Dylan Robinson. He's a Stó:lō scholar, an indigenous scholar from near Vancouver, Canada. And, he has developed a term, based on what his people were calling the newcomers, to his region. And their name in the Stó:lō language for them, to translate it into English meant The Hungry Ones. Because they were literally hungry, but that hunger went beyond just having enough food to eat. It also meant that they were constantly hungry for resources. So, they were looking for gold. So, Dylan's question then is, is there way for us to listen that goes against this idea of hungry listening? Is there a way to listen without the intent of what you want to hear? So, to really examine all aspects of that, and to think about, not think of listening as a kind of accumulation of sounds, or accumulation of resources, but to really try to think of it as also an experience, without a proposition of what you're going to hear. An example, I think of a kind of early decolonial practice of listening, was a project that was done by Rebecca Belmore, a Canadian artist, in the early 1990s. And it was a project that took a number of years, and sometimes reperformed. And it was a megaphone that was called, Speaking to Our Mothers, in the Anishinaabe language. So, it was a giant megaphone that she made with a technician out of wood, out of elk hide, and really this megaphone was carried across the land of Canada, to all the communities who wanted and needed it. Because the question was, what needed to be amplified that wasn't being amplified? What messages were not being heard? Who needed to hear these messages? So, in some cases, this was brought to very rural areas where people just sang songs, and spoke through it. And then, it ended its journey, on the steps of parliament, in Canada in Ottawa, where she was kind of provoking politicians, to also see if they would be brave enough to sort of speak through this megaphone. Because they're the voices that we often hear. And many of them wouldn't. But it was also an opportunity to talk about indigenous languages, indigenous land, and rights, and at that moment in time, at that time when there were a lot of rights being taken away, these messages really needed to be broadcast and needed to be heard.
