BY MARK BOSCH, LEAD CRITIC
It matters how we listen, not just to music but to each other. Are we listening selectively? Listening to respond? Pretending to listen? Listening to understand, or simply to evaluate?
In the Aristotelian tradition, we have dedicated so much energy to speaking, to the art of rhetoric, to being heard, that we have largely overlooked how we hear. But there is an art to listening that stretches back millennia. It’s an ancient art we can all learn to greatly enrich our relationships, communities, and lives in general.
It’s called Deep Listening. It’s a term that means different things to different people, but definitions tend towards a listening that is open, empathetic, holistic. It’s listening that is always engaged, not just with words or sounds in themselves but their contexts, the social, cultural, emotional, psychic congeries that surround them.
The late American composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros actually registered Deep Listening® as a service mark. In all seriousness, though, Oliveros dedicated much of her career to the scholarship, practice, and dissemination of deep listening.
As she writes in Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (2005), it’s “a practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible”.
This expansion “means that one is connected to the whole of the environment”, and that compassion and understanding can emerge from “listening impartially to the whole space/time continuum of sound, not just what one is presently concerned about”.
Listening impartially, non-intrusively and without judgment, is what it’s all about.
But this is nothing new. The Ngan’gi languages of the Daly River region in the Northern Territory have a word: dadirri.
Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr AO, Aboriginal elder, educator and artist, has called dadirri “perhaps the greatest gift we can give our fellow Australians”.
dadirri is “inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness”, a way of not just listening, but learning and living.
Indigenous trauma scholar Judy Atkinson has used dadirri to observe how healing can occur when we use deep listening as a way of “relating and acting within community”, not just something to heighten our aural awareness. Rather, it’s emotional and relational.
Take a few minutes to be still and quiet, unflinchingly open and sincere. Listen deeply to your surroundings. Allow the environment to speak freely and pay attention to its expressions.
Do the same when somebody is telling a story, or playing a piece of music. Or when you yourself are doing these things; listen to yourself. The principle of Deep Listening® is the same wherever you carry it.
Featured image by Gabrielle Henderson/Unsplash.
