New modes
of listening and methods for contemporary sound art practices
Our contemporary, globalised society demands new forms
of listening. But what are these new forms? In Listening to the Other, Stefan Östersjö challenges conventional
understandings of the ways musicians listen. He develops a transmodal
understanding of listening that is situated in the body—a body that is extended
by its mediation through musical instruments and other technologies. Listening
habits can turn these tools—and even the body itself—into resistant objects or
musical Others. Supported by extensive multimedia documentation and drawing on
examples from the author’s own artistic projects spanning electronics,
intercultural collaboration, and ecological sound art, this volume enables
musicians to learn how to approach musical Others through alternative modes of
listening and allows readers to discover artistic methods for intercultural
collaboration and ecological sound art practices.
This book is closely
linked to a series of cutting-edge artistic works, including a triple concerto
recorded with the Seattle Symphony and several video works with ecological
sound art. It represents the analytical outcomes of artistic research projects
carried out in Sweden, the UK, and Belgium between 2009 and 2015.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
List of Media Files in the Online Repository
Chapter 1
Situated Listening
Chapter 2
The Question of the Listening Subject: Ecological Perspectives on Sound, Perception, and Musical Performance
Chapter 3
Embodied Interactions in Instrumental Space
Chapter 4
Finding a Shared Voice in Intercultural Collaboration
Chapter 5
Being-in-the-Presence-of the River: Embodied Listening and Eco-Systemic Sound Art
Stefan Östersjö is chaired professor of Musical Performance at Luleå University of Technology, Piteå School of Music, and associate researcher at the Orpheus Institute.
'Listening to the Other' is both innovative and rigorous as an account of how listening shapes the creative process within particular kinds of collaboration, and its methods will surely prove generative for those attempting similar analyses in a wide range of musical contexts.
These compelling case studies are put into conversation with an impressive range of theoretical perspectives from musicology, postcolonial theory, sound studies, acoustic ecology, and the work of other artists (such as the Japanese artist Akio Suzuki, whom Östersjö interviews in the book’s audiovisual materials). Clearly, Listening to the Other advances studies of musical performance and distributed creativity. Yet it also contributes to theories of listening based in cognitive science and philosophy. Throughout, Östersjö’s thinking engages 4E cognitive science, according to which cognition is embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended. Here the book might be understood to describe instances of “cognition in the wild,” as in cognitive anthropology. Östersjö also responds to philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Emmanuel Levinas, and his case studies provide phenomenological insights about situated listening and (inter)subjectivity. Finally (and importantly), this book about musical practice has a practical aim, proposing an ecological, postcolonial ethics of listening. Insofar as listening involves relations with Others, it is already social and political, and Östersjö wishes to bring this aspect of listening to light, to put it to work. “Through musical practices and sound art,” he writes, “we must seek a thinking-through-listening that counters the dominant and anthropocentric powers of present-day politics. Listening to the Other then becomes an act of resistance” (p. 166).
"I highly recommend 'Listening to the Other' to anyone who enjoys exploring new ways of thinking. Östersjö’s conversational writing style makes it feel like you’re sitting right alongside him on the riverbed, listening intently to his theories, as he adjusts the strings on the floating guitar, immersing us completely in his world." Kris Rodriguez, Resonance (2020) 1 (3): 328–331, https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2020.1.3.328