And Another Thing I Heard

The world is full of sound. This book opens your ears to it.

Most of us hear without truly listening. But what is genuine listening?

And Another Thing I Heard sets out to open your ears. Composer, artistic researcher and educator Esther Venrooij offers a rich map of the various ways we engage with sound: how it reaches the body before the mind, how it reveals space, and how it carries meaning and memory. Drawing on music, film, philosophy and fieldwork, the book moves from the reverberation of a mosque – where sound and belief are inseparable – to the echo of a parking garage, to Erich Fromm on listening as a form of love, to Spike Jonze’s Her and the intimacy of a disembodied voice, and to Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of surveillance capitalism.

The book combines theoretic reflection with hands-on exercises for artists, architects, musicians, performers, artistic researchers, educators, and anyone else who is interested in genuinely listening. Listening, as it turns out, is not a background activity. It is how we meet the world.

Prélude

MODES OF LISTENING
1 Perceptual listening
1.1 Object listening
1.2 Causal listening
1.3 Spatial listening
1.4 Somatic listening
2 Interpretive listening
2.1 Semantic listening
2.2 Musical listening
2.3 Affective listening
3 Contextual listening
3.1 Expanded listening
3.2 Intersubjective listening
3.3 Critical listening

PRACTICES OF LISTENING
1 Listening to spaces
2 Walking and listening
3 Listening with the body
4 Listening to the umwelt
5 Ethnographic listening
6 Interspecies listening
7 Surveillance listening
8 Forensic listening
9 Listening with tools
10 Diagnostic listening
11 Listening beyond human perception
12 Listening to music
13 Listening to silence
14 Listening with the eyes
15 Sacred listening
Afterthought

EXERCISES OF LISTENING
1 Objects
2 Surfaces
3 A space
4 Hands
5 The unspoken
6 Imagined sound
7 Feet
8 A silent argument
9 Silents thoughts
10 Empty space
11 Blindfold
12 Whispers
13 To wander
14 A place
15 Focus
16 A stick
17 Collective map
18 Sounding in
19 Sonic shadow
20 A room
21 Echoes
22 Sensing a space
23 Phantom sounds
24 A sound is just a sound
25 Cacti, leaves and stones
26 A signal to move
27 With my knee
28 Resonance
29 A coridor
30 A chair
31 The conversation
32 The everyday
33 Overlay
34 Juxtaposition
35 We meet on empty walls
36 A real fake
37 Sound objects
38 A window
39 After-sound
40 Static
41 After-image
42 A memory
43 At night
44 Presence
45 On the edge of hearing
46 Sound walk
47 Exquisite corpse
48 A line
49 Texture
50 Sonic perspective
51 Notation 1: space
52 A lecture
53 The unheard voice
54 A place that no longer exists
55 The song
56 Call for action
57 The interviewer’s shadow
58 A secret
59 A splash in the dark
60 A map of echoes
61 Funnel
62 A resonant object
63 A voice
64 Between the words
65 Notation 2: time
66 Stretching our ears
67 Inner space

CHRONOLOGIES
Listeners
Mediography
ABOUT
Practice
Publications
Artistic research
Listening locations

Thanks
Colophon

Esther Venrooij

Esther Venrooij is composer, artist, and educator. She is professor of Mixed Media and Audio Topography at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts in Ghent.