Listening without interpretation...is it impossible?


I came across an interesting quotation about texts which applies, it seems, to music listening and audio:

"We never really confront audio immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, audio comes before us as the always-already-heard; we apprehend it through sedimented layers of previous interpretations or --if the audio is brand new -- through the sedimented listening habits and categories developed by those interpretive traditions." [Paraphrased from Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious (1981)]

If this application to audio is accurate, it indicates that what we hear and how we listen are profoundly influenced by how we talk about it, argue about it, interpret it. The ways we talk about it and who we talk about it with change the very ways we “confront” or encounter it the next time.

This would apply not only to the macro impressions about entire songs or even passages of songs, but even the minute ways we describe the details. (Using “etched” to describe the “highs” or “boomy” to describe the “lows,” and so on.) It also would set aside, as obtuse, the repeated suggestion that one can ignore what people say and “just get back to listening for oneself.” There is no such way of listening. Yes, one can move away from the computer, for days or weeks or more, but the notion that one can move one’s “own” mind away from the “sedimented layer of previous interpretations” is, well impossible.

I’m not sure, personally, where I fall on this interesting question. Just wanted to share it.

128x128hilde45

Showing 3 responses by berner99

""We never really confront audio immediately, in all its freshness as a thing"

We also never really see a tree, a person, a sandwich etc.  It is the nature of being a person with a mind:  our minds filter everything we see, hear, experience, etc.  The only way out is meditation, and if only is lucky, enlightment.  Other than those few beings on the planet, everyone else experiences everything through the filter of the mind which frequently includes judgement, comparison, etc.

"I do not subscribe to the idea that mind is separate from body, that there is a "mental interface" between me and the world. That’s called "representational realism" in philosophy"

Your words here (and Allah forfend philosophy) have zero to do with what I'm talking about.

To give you an example, the odds are 100% that at least one time in your life you met a man, woman or child and they reminded you of your mother, father, first girlfriend, cousin etc.  At that moment you were not capable of accurately seeing that person who was in front of you because of your past.  You were not seeing reality, because reality was being filtered.

It is unlikely that your mind will let you see this, but perhaps this will be of use to someone else reading this.

"What is unlikely is that you have any idea what my mind will let me see."

You wrote lines and lines and lines of intellectual stuff when my whole point is that your mind filters everything.