COMS 2005 - wk 1-4

Hearing vs. listening

Hearing is the basic reception of sound; listening involves deliberate attention, interpretation, judgment, and response. Huether links these to Aristotle's akousis (hearing) and akroasis (listening).

How do speakers and listeners each exercise power?

Speakers may hold authority and influence, but listeners control who receives attention, whose claims seem credible, and whether speech is meaningfully received. Refusing to listen can neutralize a speaker's influence.

Selective listening

Filtering a message through existing preferences or biases, often noticing only what confirms an existing view rather than engaging with what the speaker actually means.

Receptivity

Willingness to consider another person's ideas and allow them to challenge one's assumptions; a central condition of meaningful listening.

Les Back's art of listening

Listening is a learned, contextual, ethical, and political practice requiring imagination, doubt, and openness. It is not a neutral or identical process for every listener.

What does Les Back mean by hearing the world afresh?

Using attentive sociological listening to notice ordinary, background, and overlooked aspects of social life rather than concentrating only on visible or spectacular problems.

Ocularcentrism

Privileging sight as the dominant route to knowledge. Back's attention to sound and Feld's acoustemology challenge the assumption that seeing is the primary way of understanding society and place.

Why does Back question the instruction to trust our senses?

Sensory judgments are trained by history, culture, power, and prejudice. What feels like an obvious perception may reproduce racism or exclusion, so sensory interpretations need critical examination.

Xenoglossophobia in Back's discussion

Aversion to the sound of foreign languages, even without understanding their content. It shows how hearing linguistic difference can become a basis for exclusion.

Xenophonophobia

Fear or hostility toward foreign sounds; a way of understanding how acoustic difference can be treated as threatening or out of place.

What does the British politician's train example demonstrate?

Objecting to passengers' supposedly un-British sounds polices belonging through listening. Racialized assumptions determine which voices are treated as legitimate in shared public space.

Why is listening not automatically more ethical than seeing?

Listening can support surveillance, coercion, and control as well as understanding. Back's discussion of the panopticon as a listening device challenges the idea that the auditory is inherently liberating.

How can promises of dialogue become superficial?

Institutions or politicians can perform concern without genuinely receiving or responding to people's claims. Listening becomes placation instead of meaningful engagement.

What are the benefits and limits of tape recorders for sociological research?

They preserve vocal texture, cadence, and delivery that written notes miss, but reliance on recordings can distract researchers from silence, unspoken relationships, and experiences outside the microphone's frame.

Why does Back connect music with sociology?

Musical attention can help reveal social relationships and patterns. The episode highlights the musical interests or backgrounds of W.E.B. Du Bois, Max Weber, Paul Gilroy, and Stuart Hall.

Kells and Minshall's central argument about democracy

Freedom to speak is incomplete without citizens willing and able to listen. Listening is a civic skill that supports inclusion, mutual respect, persuasion, and collective decision-making and can be taught through practice.

Civic listening

Treating listening as a democratic responsibility: receiving others' claims fairly, recognizing them as participants, and remaining open to understanding and persuasion.

Uptake

Accurately receiving and understanding what someone has said before reacting. It requires separating the actual claim from assumptions or distorted versions of it.

Listening to understand vs. listening to respond

Listening to understand engages an argument on its own terms and permits clarification or changed views. Listening to respond waits for an opening to rebut, dismiss, or redirect the exchange.

Why are speaking rights and listening responsibilities connected?

A protected opportunity to speak does not guarantee meaningful reception. Democratic exchange requires both expression and an audience prepared to understand it.

What does the Athenian agora illustrate for Kells and Minshall?

Democratic speech and truthful expression depended on an audience willing to receive them. The agora was a place of exchange, not merely a stage for individual expression.

Why do silence, patience, and energy matter for listening?

Silence creates room for uptake, while time and sustained physical and cognitive effort allow understanding before response. Intensive listening can be tiring, especially when ideas challenge existing beliefs.

How can digital distraction undermine interpersonal listening?

Attention drawn toward phones, feeds, and messaging interrupts sustained engagement. Visible presence and eye contact can signal attention, while screen distraction can communicate that the speaker is not being prioritized.

Engagement logic

Platform incentives based on clicks, shares, reactions, and time spent. Kells and Minshall argue these often reward outrage and rapid responses more than patient understanding.

Caricature in public debate

A simplified or distorted version of an argument that is easier to dismiss than the original. Fragments, screenshots, and context-free summaries can train audiences to react to caricatures.

How can digital platforms weaken democratic disagreement?

They often reward emotional, declarative reactions and circulate decontextualized claims. People perform opposition rather than understand one another, reducing opportunities for persuasion and shared decisions.

What happens when people speak frequently but rarely feel heard?

Frustration grows, positions harden, and common ground becomes harder to find. More speech can coexist with less understanding and weaker collective decision-making.

Structured debate exercise for practising uptake

Before criticizing a peer's argument, restate it to that person's satisfaction. This makes fair understanding an explicit requirement of disagreement.

How can uptake be practised with an article, video, or podcast?

Pause before reacting, explain the argument fairly in terms its author would recognize, and separate the person's claim from assumptions about their motives before judging it.

Huether's central argument in Hate & Non-Human Listening

Listening is increasingly reorganized from embodied relationship and interpretation into technical processes of extraction, classification, prediction, and control. Listening can continue without human exposure or accountability.

Nonhuman listening

An infrastructural process in which technical systems capture, process, rank, classify, predict, and act on sound without experiencing it as a human listener does.

What sequence characterizes nonhuman listening in Huether's account?

Sound becomes captured data, then classification, prediction, and action. The priority shifts from encountering a speaker's meaning to making information operational.

Pre-classification

Assigning identity, meaning, or risk to a voice or behaviour before the speaker's claim can be fully understood or contested. The category can determine what subsequent listening appears to discover.

Anticipatory listening

Listening organized to identify future danger, deviation, or abnormality before an event occurs, rather than first understanding a person's claim on its own terms.

Preemption

Acting against a predicted threat before the predicted event occurs. Huether links it to listening infrastructures organized around forecasting and intervention.

How do voice-based chatbots simulate a good listener?

They use turn-taking, pacing, pauses, hedging, and supportive validation to perform recognizable signs of attention. Huether distinguishes this performance from embodied relationship, vulnerability, and responsibility.

Why does Huether distinguish simulated listening from human listening?

A human listener can be challenged, exposed, affected, and responsible within a relationship. A machine can classify and predict without undergoing that lived encounter or its moral risks.

What danger does the lecture identify in automated agreement?

A chatbot may validate users to maintain engagement instead of offering necessary critical pushback. The appearance of support can reinforce distress or harmful thinking.

Dorothy Santos on machines as listeners

Machines increasingly function as listeners, capturers, surveyors, and documenters of speech across infrastructures. This changes the meaning and organization of listening, not simply the identity of the listener.

Jonathan Sterne on listening and cultural frameworks

Listening does not provide pure, immediate access to reality. Cultural frameworks organize what becomes meaningful, intelligible, or dismissible, so listening helps construct the social world it receives.

Matt Rahaim on mediated voices

A voice's social meaning is shaped by technologies, institutions, and practices. These can make the same voice appear legitimate, intelligible, disputed, or suspicious.

Jean-Luc Nancy on listening as exposure

Listening involves resonance and openness to being affected, unsettled, or changed. Huether contrasts this risk to the listener with systems that classify without being personally exposed.

Jacques Attali on listening and governance

Institutions exercise power by determining what gets heard, silenced, ignored, or treated as disposable. Listening can help categorize and manage populations.

Henry Greenspan on testimony

Hearing someone's testimony is not automatically ethical. Taking information from a story without meaningful engagement with its speaker can reproduce harm.

Extractive listening

Obtaining information from someone's speech without a meaningful relationship or responsibility toward the speaker. It prioritizes usable content over the person and the conditions of the encounter.

Ralina L. Joseph's radical listening

Ethical listening attentive to power, difference, exhaustion, accountability, and how speakers want to be heard. It requires recognizing the listener's relationship and responsibility to the speaker.

What does Huether mean by describing listening as directional?

Listening may begin from a prior assumption that a voice is foreign, threatening, or suspicious and then search for confirmation. The direction is assumption, listening, confirmation rather than listening, evidence, conclusion.

How does Huether use the 1937 Parsley Massacre?

Dominican soldiers used pronunciation of perejil, meaning parsley, to identify people as Haitian and target them for violence. Listening sought a classificatory signal of difference rather than meaning or intention.

How can accent become evidence before evidence exists?

An accent can be interpreted through assumptions about who belongs, turning perceived foreignness into suspicion and scrutiny before any independent evidence of wrongdoing.

What is the danger of treating difference as risk?

Systems may translate linguistic or behavioural difference into deviation, suspicion, and threat. The problem can lie in standards of recognition rather than in the speaker's ability to communicate.

How does the Snowden example illustrate a change in surveillance?

The model shifts from identifying a suspect and then monitoring them to capturing broadly and identifying suspicious patterns afterward. Classification systems help produce the suspicion they claim merely to detect.

Signal and noise in Huether's analysis

They are categories established by a system's priorities and design, not simply natural divisions between useful and useless information. Deciding what counts as signal also helps define what counts as threat.

Expressive hate vs. procedural hate

Expressive hate involves deliberate communication of hostility. Procedural hate is harm or discrimination produced by standards, algorithms, classifications, or institutional procedures without requiring explicit hateful intent.

How can a threat be heard into being in advance?

A system classifies an input as a threatening signal and triggers intervention. Its categories can make someone legible as dangerous before there is an independently established threat.

Why does Huether question technological neutrality and efficiency?

Apparent neutrality can conceal the system's lack of vulnerability, while efficiency can mean removing the human encounter itself. Smooth classification does not establish ethical understanding.

Who may nonhuman listening systems be accountable to?

Often states using surveillance and enforcement or private companies extracting consumer data. The lecture asks whether people become targets, risk categories, or consumers instead of citizens in relationships.

How do platforms normalize nonhuman listening?

They continually process speech, text, media, behaviour, and interactions as actionable data. Recognition, circulation, and response can take priority over truth, understanding, and lived experience.

How do Back, Kells and Minshall, and Huether connect?

Back shows that listening is socially trained and political; Kells and Minshall emphasize its democratic responsibilities; Huether examines how automation can detach listening from relationship and accountability.

Soundscape

A sonic environment as perceived and interpreted by listeners. Contemporary approaches emphasize relationships among sound, physical space, culture, identity, and listening; Schafer's broader usage also includes constructed environments such as recordings.

Patch and Porcello's central argument

Soundscapes emerge through sound, space, listeners, culture, and social context. Listeners actively contribute knowledge and identity rather than passively receiving an environment.

How do Patch and Porcello develop their argument?

Through interdisciplinary concepts and case studies, including Dreiser's city, Feld's rainforest work, a dining hall, and retail spaces. The chapter is a conceptual synthesis rather than one controlled experiment.

Sonic environment vs. soundscape

The sonic environment comprises sounds present in an environment. Soundscape emphasizes how those sounds are experienced and interpreted through the relationship between listeners and place.

Noise

Sound experienced as unwanted, disruptive, or interfering. Whether a sound counts as noise depends partly on context, culture, expectations, purpose, and the listener's ability to control or escape it.

How did industrialization transform everyday sound?

Factories, mechanized labour, tools, engines, and urban growth created persistent mechanical sound and concentrated workers around noisy infrastructure, reshaping acoustic life alongside labour and geography.

How can scholars reconstruct soundscapes from before recording technology?

They use indirect evidence such as literature, paintings, visual art, and early photography to infer sound sources and the experiences associated with them.

William Hogarth's The Enraged Musician

An image of overlapping urban sounds, including street musicians, a drummer, and public activity, with a frustrated musician covering his ears. It provides visual evidence for historical urban auditory overload.

What do Dreiser's descriptions contribute to soundscape analysis?

His accounts depict dense urban and industrial sound. The street-preaching family competes with traffic, vendors, crowds, and reflective architecture, showing how an acoustically hostile space can prevent a message from being heard.

Henry David Thoreau's relevance to soundscape history

His writing provides descriptions of natural and mechanical acoustic environments, helping scholars reconstruct historical sound worlds that were not recorded.

Acoustic inequality

Unequal exposure to noise and access to quiet due to class, geography, infrastructure, and power. Wealth may buy buffered housing, soundproofing, or escape, while poorer communities may face roads and factories.

Why is quiet a political resource?

Access to quiet is uneven, and some people have more power to define acceptable sound or make others stop producing it. Sound management therefore involves rights, belonging, and unequal control.

Noise pollution

Unwanted or harmful environmental sound. The course treats it as a public-health and ecological issue as well as an annoyance.

What health effects of chronic noise are discussed in the course?

The materials link prolonged noise exposure with hearing damage, tinnitus, elevated stress, sleep disruption, cognitive strain, and cardiovascular effects; they also report associations with obesity and diabetes.

What does the lecture's 2011 WHO estimate illustrate?

The cited estimate of more than one million healthy life years lost annually in Western Europe illustrates the scale of environmental noise as a public-health burden.

Tinnitus

The perception of ringing, buzzing, pulsing, or similar sound without an external source. The lecture links it with possible high-noise exposure and notes that it can become especially noticeable in quiet environments.

Acoustic niche hypothesis

The idea associated in the lecture with Krause that species occupy particular frequency ranges, times, and locations for communication, helping their signals remain distinguishable within an ecosystem.

Acoustic masking

One sound obscures another, making important information harder or impossible to hear. Mechanical noise can mask animal mating calls, warnings, territorial signals, or signs of predators.

How can animals adjust vocalizations in noisy environments?

They may change frequency, timing, amplitude, or duration: shifting pitch, calling at quieter times, becoming louder, or making longer calls.

Lombard effect

The tendency to increase vocal loudness in response to background noise.

What can happen when animals cannot adapt to noise?

Communication and reproduction may suffer, feeding and movement may change, and animals may abandon noisy habitats.

Masking, distraction, and threat response

Masking hides important sounds; distraction consumes attention needed for other tasks; threat response occurs when noise is interpreted as danger and triggers behaviour such as fleeing.

What wildlife examples appear in the Outside/In sound-and-silence episode?

Sparrows change song pitch near oil and gas infrastructure, bats show reduced activity near traffic noise, frogs struggle to hear mates, and marine noise interferes with dolphin communication and echolocation.

Echolocation

Locating objects through reflected sound, as used by animals such as bats and dolphins. Competing environmental noise can interfere with the acoustic information they rely on.

Noise abatement

Reducing, containing, or eliminating unwanted sound through measures such as barriers, soundproofing, acoustic baffling, noise cancellation, zoning, bylaws, and quiet hours.

Noise abatement vs. positive acoustic ecology

Abatement mainly reacts to unwanted sound by reducing it. Positive acoustic ecology asks how communities can design, preserve, and improve healthy and meaningful sonic environments.

Acoustic ecology

Study of relationships between living beings and sonic environments, including how soundscapes might be understood, protected, and deliberately shaped.

R. Murray Schafer and the World Soundscape Project

Schafer led soundscape work at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. The WSP combined environmental advocacy, music education, field recording, and documentation of changing or disappearing sounds.

Why did the WSP record older work and craft sounds?

Industrial and technological change threatened their disappearance. Recording aimed to preserve an acoustic record of changing environments and practices.

Keynote sound

A persistent or recurring background sound that forms the acoustic backdrop of a place, such as flowing water, HVAC, distant traffic, or mechanical hum.

Soundmark

A culturally or historically significant sound associated with a community or place, such as familiar bells or transit chimes; it may be considered worthy of preservation.

Sound signal

A sound intended to attract attention or prompt action, such as an alarm, doorbell, timer, or siren.

Can one sound be a keynote, soundmark, and signal?

The categories can overlap depending on context and use. A familiar bell might attract attention while also symbolizing a place; classification depends on its role, not merely its sound.

Why is a regional music scene not automatically an environmental soundmark?

Cultural importance alone does not establish a sound's role as a recognizable acoustic landmark. Its relationship to the community's experienced sonic environment also matters.

Hi-fi soundscape

An environment with a low background noise floor, relatively little masking, distinct individual sounds, and greater acoustic depth or spatial clarity.

Lo-fi soundscape

An environment with dense, overlapping background sound and substantial masking, making individual sounds and their locations harder to distinguish.

Signal-to-noise ratio

The strength of the sound one wants to hear relative to competing background noise or interference. A clearer desired signal is easier to distinguish from the background.

What value judgments can accompany Schafer's hi-fi/lo-fi distinction?

Schafer often associates rural or natural clarity with desirability and urban or industrial density with degradation. This risks overlooking meaningful urban sound and culturally different listening practices.

What are the main criticisms of Schafer's approach?

It can romanticize the past, privilege rural nature over urban life, rely on Eurocentric and largely white male perspectives, understate listener agency, and overlook differences in identity and culture.

How can learned listening challenge a passive model of soundscape?

Experienced listeners can extract meaning from dense sound that others perceive only as noise. A car enthusiast, for example, may identify an engine model where another person hears undifferentiated loudness.

What does Soundscapes of Canada reveal about preservation?

A national acoustic portrait necessarily selects some sounds and excludes others. Defining a country's sound is a representational and political act rather than a neutral inventory.

Why can't decibel measurements fully explain a soundscape?

They describe physical intensity but cannot establish cultural meaning, belonging, safety, enjoyment, or why different listeners evaluate the same sound differently.