The Difference Between Hearing and Listening, by Pauline Oliveros

The differences Pauline Oliveros describes between hearing and listening is a good distinction because we are constantly surrounded by sounds, but we are not always actively picking out each individual sound. In psychology there is a theory called the Cocktail Party Effect, which describes how we as humans have become adept at picking out sounds that are relevant to us from a noisy environment, such as your name being called in a cocktail party.

Just as much as our context affects what we hear and listen to, I think the opposite is also true—that what we hear also affects our context. Take a horror movie like The Shining for example, subtle cues like the tempo rising in music can inform us as the audience about the story such as tension building, or something really bad that is about to happen. Even if the music is in the background and we may be distracted by what we’re seeing on-screen, it still affects us even when we’re not actively paying attention. I also like Oliveros’ literal take on the term deep listening, where their band went deep underground and recorded music playing and released it as a CD with the same title.