What’s the Point of ‘Deep Listening’?
A recent scientific study suggested that Lapland longspurs and white-crowned sparrows were having to wait longer for their potential mating partners to come to the Alaskan tundra due to changing climate conditions. When scientists sorted through the sonic data compiled by an AI, they found a void in the soundscape. It recalled the powerful idea, put forward by the writer and environmental activist Rachel Carson, decades ago, of a Silent Spring (1962): what if the changing of the seasons, she wondered, was no longer declared by the sound of birdsong?
Sound can clarify what at first seems invisible. The late Pauline Oliveros – American avant-garde composer and hippy theorist – was a keen scholar of how reformulating the act of listening (into ‘Deep Listening’) can conjure timescales beyond conventional comprehension. Oliveros’s life was dedicated to expanding our field of sensory perception via these idiosyncratic philosophies, which she developed from the 1970s onwards, initially as a response to the Vietnam War and the self-immolation of a protester at USCD, where she was teaching at the time. Oliveros found herself turning inward from the horror, sometimes meditating on a single drone, which she would play on her accordion.