The listening of listening?

 Recursivity (GNU Not GNU) is a core element in musical composition (Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit). Listening to music works as the retroactive assignment of meaning rather than mere deferred action, and derives the notion of ‘listening to listening’ from their combination. A dialectical conception of time is proposed, with interpretation involving three logical phases (sensation, memory, forgeting), respectively incumbent on the listening analyst, on the music and on both. The music listener speaks about music from a position dictated by his unconscious identifications, which also causes him to reinterpret the listening interpretations and his silences. By listening to the music's reassignment of meaning to his interpretations, the listener can discover the music's unconscious identifications and, together with the music, thereby facilitate the process of psychic change of listening possibilities. We contend that by the function of ‘listening to listening’ it is possible to overcome the dilemma of whether the listener with his interpretation or the music with his own reinterpretation of it by showing a recursive formulation:

Listening is the music of music.

The silence of silence? Noise, (Cage, 1968)
The noise of noise? Music, (Attali, 1986)
The art of art? Autopoiesis, (Pound, 1908)
The provability of proofs? Metasystems, (Gödel, 1931).
The computability of computation? Abstract automata, (Turing, 1936).
The control of control? Cybernetics, (Wiener, 1948).
The hierarchy of hierarchies? Holons, (Koestler, 1967).
The psychanalysis of psychanalysis? Schizoanalysis, (Guattari and Deleuze, 1968)
The distinction of distinctions? Form, (Brown, 1969).
The cycle of cycles? Hypercycles, (Eigen, 1971).
The formation of forms? Catastrophes, (Thom, 1972).
The perception of perception? Eigenbehaviour, (von Foerster, 1973).
The ordering of order? Spontaneous Social Orders, (von Hayek,1975).
The reality of reality? Communication, (Watzlawick, 1976).
The structuring of structures? Dissipative Structures, (Nicolis and Prigogine, 1977).
The organization of organization? Synergetics, (Haken, 1977).
The nature of nature? Complexity, (Morin, 1977).
The boundary of boundaries? Fractals, (Mandelbrot, 1977).
The dimension of dimensions? Fractal dimensions, (Mandelbrot, 1977).
The system of systems? Living Systems, (Miller, 1978).
The production of production? Autopoiesis, (Varela, 1979).
The loop of loops? Tangled Hierarchies, (Hofstadter, 1979).
The life of life? "La Methode” for thinking complexity, (Morin,1980).

The evolution of evolution? The self-organizing Universe, (Jantsch, 1980)

What does listening want?

Hearing Possibilities:
To increase diversity
To maximize freedom/choices
To expand the space of the possible

Sounding Efficiencies:
To increase specialization/uniqueness
To increase power density
To increase density of meaning
To engage all medias and meanings
To reach ubiquity and free-ness
To become beautiful

Harmonic Complexity:
To increase complexity
To increase social co-dependency (interlistening)
To increase self-referential nature of listening
To align with nature in its stochastic recursive form

Rythmic Evolvability:
To accelerate evolvability
To play the infinite transphony

In general the long-term bias of listening technology is to increase the diversity of sound artifacts, musical methods, acoustic techniques. More ways, more choices. Over time listening advances invent more energy efficient cultural methods, and gravitate to sounds which compress the most information and knowledge into a given space or weight. Also over time, more of more of sound on the planet will be touched by metalistening processes. Also, sounds tend toward ubiquity and cheapness. They also tend towards new levels of complexity (though many will get simpler, too). Over time sounds require more surrounding technologies in order to be discovered and  to operate; some bioacoustical technologies become eusocial – a distributed existence – in which they are inert when solitary (anoise). In the long run, listenability increases the speed at which it evolves and encourages its own means of invention to change. It aims to keep the transphony of change going.  

What this means is that when the future trajectory of a particular field of listening is in doubt, "all things being equal" you can guess several things about where it is headed:

• The varieties of whatever ways of sounding will increase. Those varieties that give humans more free choices will prevail.
• Ways of sounding (and listening) will start out general in their first version, and specialize over time. Going niche will always be going with the flow. There is almost no end to how specialized (and tiny) some niches can get.
•  You can safely anticipate higher energy efficiency, more compact tools and everything getting smarter towards their means, although which will be these wiill keep being ethical discussion.
•  All are headed to ubiquity and free. What flips when everyone has one? What happens when it is free?
•  Any highly evolved form becomes beautiful, which can be its own attraction.
•  Over time the fastest moving listening will become more social, more co-dependent, more ecological, more deeply entwined with other listenings. Many technologies require scaffolding tech to be born first.
•  The trend is toward enabling technologies which become tools for inventing new ways of sounding easiest, fittest, cheaper.
•  Listening needs clean water, clean air, reliable energy just as much as humans want the same.                          

These are just some of the things listening wants. We don't always have to do what listening wants, but I think we need to begin with what it wants so that we can work with these forces instead of against them.

Auriculture Fields Of Research

Philosony As A Discipline
Ontological and epistemological questions about what is music, sound, noise and listening: artefacts/structures or human processes?
What is listening cognition and understanding of noise/sound/music?
What is a musical experience? What is a noise experience?
What is the place of musical experience in traditional acoustical analysis?

Listening Analysis
Can traditional analysis be helpful in explaining listenable experience: tension or complementarity?
Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to listening.
Formal and informal analysis beyond the score: analysis by ear.
Cognitive maps and music.
Analysis and experience.
Analysis and validity: psychological and ecological reality of existing and future approaches of listening.

Noise, Sound And Music Semiotics
What is musical sense-making?Sense-making and signification: same or different?
Levels of listening sense-making and its correlations to noise, sound and music: syntactic level, semantic level, pragmatic level.
Semantics and hermeneutics.
Semantics and narrative.

Listening Semantics
Music as reference: self reference or extra-musical reference.
Program music/absolute music.
Sintagmatic referentiality in sound and noise.

Sound Pragmatics
Sound as felt, as experienced.
Sound and its inductive power.
Sociology of listening.
Music and entrainment.

Vocal Pragmatics
Voice as tool for communication (e.g. prosody, techniques, etc.).
Voice as tool for expression.
Voice and emotions.
Communicative and affective functions of human voice.

Intermediality Of Listening
Opera, musical, concert albums, song cycles, etc.
Text, performance, music.
Intermediality and communication: role of listener as target or actor.
Intermediality as persuasive instrument.
Attentional strategies: how to capture the attention of the non-schooled listener?
Soundart Intervention.

Listening And Time
Time consciousness and music.
Musical time and realtime.
In-time and out-of-time experience of music.
Perception, memory and imagination.

Listening As Experience
Listening as temporal art.
Music as sounding art.
Sensation, perception, cognition as applied to music.
Experience and cognition.
Embodied and enactive approach to music cognition.
Listening And Emotions
Chills and thrills.
Music and arousal.
Biological foundations of musical emotions.
Cognitive foundations of musical emotions.
Physiological aspects of musical emotions.

Biophony
Neurobiology of listening.
Physiological responses to listening.
Music/noise and the brain.
Music/noise and the hormone system.

Music As Sound
Impact of sound.
Spectrographic approach to music listening.
Music and overtones.
Music and resonance.
Music and drones.
Music and vibration.
Music and the body.
Music and movement.
Music and dance.
Action and perception, perception as simulated action.
Music and rhythmic entrainment.
Bodily resonance to music.
Music and trance.

Evolution Of Listening
Origins of music: why is there music?
Comparative approach: what are the functions given to listening and music all over the world.
Musical sense-making between nature and culture.
Listening instinct/faculty versus language instinct/faculty
Archeoethnomusicology.

Ecological Approach To Listening
Music as sounding environment.
Sound as listening environment.
Coping with the sounds.
Functional significance of sounds.
Musical affordances in sociological structures.
Listening and direct perception.

Listening Universals
Psychophysical commonalities.
Listening and psychobiology.
Universals of music/noise perception.
Universals of music/noise cognition.
Sound/music and Gestalt perception.
Auditory scene analysis.

Visualizing Listening
The musical score: limitations and possibilities.
Existing animation software: two-dimensional and three-dimensional.
Iconic versus symbolic approach.
Discrete versus continuous approach.
Spectrogram: limitations and possibilities.

Philosonic Research Commitments

 Competence 

1. Who  can make sounds/music, and who can interpret/use them? 

2.  What is  the  pattern of  musical acquisition and learning? 

3.  Are there stratifications of skill and knowledge? What types? How are they sanctioned, recognized, and maintained? 

4.  Is musical acquisition assumed to  be  unproblematic? A  necessity? 

5.  Do ideologies  of  "talent"  determine or  constrain acquisition and competence? 

6.  What is the relationship between competence, skill, and desire for music? 

7.  What are the differences between production and reception skills, for individuals, across social  groups? 

Form 

1. What are the  material musical means and how are they  organized into recognizable codes? 

2.  How  are musical means distributed across settings and participants? 

3.  What are the preferred aesthetic orderings? 

4.  What are the boundaries of perceived forms? What does it mean to be wrong, incorrect, or otherwise marginal from the standpoint of code flexibility and use? 

5.  How  flexible,  arbitrary, elastic,  adaptable, open is  musical form? How resistant to changes, internal or external pressures, or other historical forces? 

Performance 

1. What are the  relationships between makers and materials? 

2.  What is the relationship between individual and collective expressive forms and performance settings? 

3.  How are forms coordinated in performance? How adaptable and elastic is musical form when manipulated by different performers at a single moment in time or  over time? 

4.  How do cooperative and competitive social relations emerge in performance? 

What meanings do  these have for performers and audience? 

5.  How  do  performances achieve  pragmatic (evocative,  persuasive,  ma- 

nipulative) ends,  if  at  all? 

Environment 

1. What resources does the environment provide? How are they exploited'? What relationships exist between resources, exploitation, and the material means and social  occasions for performance? 

2.  Are there co-evolutionary patterns, ecological  and aesthetic, linking the environment and sound patterns, materials, situations'? 

3.  What are the visual-auditory-sensate relationships between people and environment, and how is this pattern related to expressive means and ends'? 

4.  What myths or models scaffold the perception of the environment? Are these related or  complimentary to  conceptions of  person, society,  expressive resources? 

5.  What mystical or cosmological associations with the environment support, contradict, or otherwise relate to the socioeconomic context of musical beliefs and occasions? 

Theory 

1.  What are the sources of authority, wisdom, and legitimacy about sounds and music? Who can know  about sound? 

2.  Is  musical knowledge public, private, ritual, esoteric? 

3.  What dimensions of musical thought are verbalized? Taught verbally? Non-verbally? 

4.  Is theory necessary? How  detached can theory be  from practice? What varieties of knowledge and activity count as musical or aesthetic theory'? How is  music rationalized? 

Value and Equality 

1. Who values and evaluates sounds'? Who can be valued and evaluated as a maker of  sounds? 

2.  How  are  expressive  resources distributed, specifically  among men and women,  young  and old? How do  stratifications emerge? 

3.  How do balances and imbalances manifest themselves in expressive ideology and performance? 

4.  Do  sounds deceive? Mystify? Who? Why? 

5.  Are sounds secret? Powerful? For whom? Why? 

6.  How  do  musical materials or performances mark or maintain social differences? How are such differences interpreted? How are they sustained? Broken or  ruptured? Accepted or  resisted?