How to Listen
​Extract from my thesis 'True Receivers' 2015
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Ear versus Eye: listening and looking as ways of knowing
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We come into being as creatures that feel and smell, and that experience gravity; then at about sixteen weeks of gestation we become listeners. This is when the foetus starts reacting to sound, registering vibrations in its skin and skeleton (although the ear is not complete until twenty-four weeks later). Listening is something we always do with our whole bodies since it is really sensitivity to vibration. In evolutionary history we can trace this sensitivity back to the emergence of what are called ‘non autotrophic life-forms’: [. . . ] 'those that didn’t just sit and photosynthesise. They developed cilia that let them move around. And in moving around they found more food.'These cilia became sensors that were able to detect motion, ‘one of the very first telesensory systems [. . .] able to detect changes in the environment at a distance’. It is worth noting that perhaps counterintuitively, listening is our fastest sense.
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We can deduce from this that in any discussion over the relative merits of seeing and hearing, hearing is without doubt the most accurate way to assess what is going on temporally, however marginal the advantage. Sound also has the advantage of being able to penetrate our earliest perceptions. Such is our sensitivity to vibration in the womb we can discriminate between different noises, even developing preferences for specific pieces of music. In contrast, eyelids don’t open until the twenty-sixth week of pregnancy, and the sensory information available to our eyes is limited because of the constraints of the uterus and its relative darkness. Our ears are complete at birth, but our eyesight is still developing. ‘First sight’, meaning sight which is focused and clear, happens roughly two months after we are born; this is when the brain can interpret visual messages properly. ‘First hear’ happens when we are at our most permeable and permeated, enclosed within the maternal body. to see properly you must have distance to see, and it follows that you must have a sense of being separate from your mother. Though sight and hearing are both categorised as ‘distance senses’, sight requires (at the very least) a small amount of distance to work at all. Hearing makes no such spatial demands. This is a crucial practical and ontological difference, for as we will see, it is argued by certain philosophers that hearing tends to produce a far more fluid sense of subjectivity than we experience when gazing.
2. Listening to Language
For most of us, the eye and the ear offer the closest sensory relationship with language, but if the relationship between sight and language is relatively arbitrary (braille shows that texture and touch can also communicate effectively), human language almost certainly has its origins in sound. Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the pre-literate world led to a reevaluation of the significance of oral culture and the implications of the fact that for most of human history, language has been passed on via the ear and then through the mouth. Spoken language may be quarter of a million years old, but it is likely that written language emerged only several thousand years ago.For a song or poem to endure it had to resonate in and through different bodies and mouths, with all the smoothings, amendments and misrememberings this entails. With the invention of writing came the ability to hold language on a page at a distance; words did not have to enter the ear, they could be observed as objects ‘out there’. And whereas what is ‘seen’ does not necessarily feel ‘inside’ us, what is ‘heard’ may feel as if it has entered us. Because sound works through vibration it literally ‘moves’ the body. For good or ill our ability to print words has contrived to separate language from the body’s weight, pressure and idiosyncrasies, all of which are evident in handwritten texts. It is argued by McLuhan and others that this distancing process enhanced the apparent ‘objectivity’ of language.
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