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.