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.

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If someone meditate and can forget when listening all his history and biases by definition, he did not listen to MUSIC anymore but to Sound frequencies or to silence...

This way of listening is very therapeutic, the more we put ourself into it...

But it is no more culturally and individually performed music which we listen to , it is communion with sound as an uncreated force...

In that silence and sound change their role, suddenly sound ressemble to silence and silence contain sound....

AUM is no more sound or silence but both...

Listening without interpretation is the definition of journalism...and also meditation.

Can you let go of your beliefs? or disbeliefs? and just listen?

That is up to the individual doing the listening, some can.... many can’t.

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For sure between a necessary interpretative engagement in music listening, and a relax listening, and all the possible variations making us able to reach complete detachment and "no interpretation" at all of what we are listening to, exist many intermediary scales and attitudes and many hearing gestures......

But in general to begin with we must "interpret" if we want to choose what we want to listen to... And a baby learn to listen by exposure to some cultural musical attitudes to which he will relate to all his life...I remember how i listened to singing very young...

Only a yogi can listen beyond any relax attitude and interpretation, pure sound and pure silence, without even separating the 2....

 

For the "words" vocabulary conditioning problem:

The situation in audio, is most of the times a negative conditioning situation, because the "words" associated to sound most of the time HIDE the acoustic meaning and the musical meaning and experience.... It is more a consumer programmation or conditioning by the market pressure to sell tube and S.S. amplifiers for example, and to gather people around their specific attributed and alleged superior sonic qualities...Same goes for dac or speakers types...

But we cannot focus on acoustic and music by focusing on amplifier, dac and speakers difference only...

On the contrary, when the audio system is chosen, then we listen to the acoustical rendering of the music in a specific room....The audio system must disapear and with it all the vocabulary linked to it: warm, cold, neutral, accurate,colored...How is it possible? By acoustic and psycho-acoustic treatment and control specifically adapted for the chosen gear and making all musical sound natural and approximating a lived event...

The micro structure "volume" of a tonal timbre playing gesture by a musician in the larger "volume" of our room, is never understandable or graspable, in solely and merely with words like "warm", "cold" , "neutral" , "accurate" or "colored" qualities so much than by musically and acoustically meaningful vocabulary linked to acoustic experiments and musical experience first ...

We cannot interpret music experience with the engineering description of an amplifier sound first and last....

It is the reason why people comparing and reviewing gear never adress the basic method by which we can optimally embed the gear in their mechanical, electrical and acoustical working dimensions... They sell a ready made material product supposed to be PERFECT not a way and a method to install it the right way...

The sound of a piano in an acoustically controlled room, is not, warm, cold, accurate, neutral....His timbre qualities are way too much detailed and complex to be reduced to this vocabulary....Same thing is true about an orchestra and the acoustic description of his manifestation in a room...

 

Srajan Ebaen of 6moons fame certainly has an ability to relate his personal experience to audio system listening. He tries very hard to give context to his listening preference, by context I mean his emotional states.

 

His writing dense, bothers some, makes me understand we don't all speak the same language. I for one like his style, although I don't generally reach so deep.