Listening and Voice Listening and Voice Phenomenologies of Sound SECOND EDITION Don Ihde State University of New York Press Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2007 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Michael Haggett and Marilyn Semerad Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ihde, Don, 1934– Listening and voice : phenomenologies of sound / Don Ihde. — 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7255-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7914-7256-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Phenomenology. 2. Listening (Philosophy) 3. Voice (Philosophy) I. Title. B829.5.I34 2007 128'.3—dc22 2006100232 10987654321 For Judith Lochhead, my longtime colleague and collaborator and the Stony Brook Music Department Contents List of Illustrations ix Preface to the SUNY Press Edition xi Introduction (to the Original) xix PART IINTRODUCTION Chapter 1 In Praise of Sound 3 Chapter 2 Under the Signs of Husserl and Heidegger 17 Chapter 3 First Phenomenology 25 PART II DESCRIPTION Chapter 4 The Auditory Dimension 49 Chapter 5 The Shapes of Sound 57 Chapter 6 The Auditory Field 73 Chapter 7 Timeful Sound 85 Chapter 8 Auditory Horizons 103 PART III THE IMAGINATIVE MODE Chapter 9 The Polyphony of Experience 115 Chapter 10 Auditory Imagination 131 Chapter 11 Inner Speech 137 vii viii Contents PART IV VOICE Chapter 12 The Center of Language 147 Chapter 13 Music and Word 155 Chapter 14 Silence and Word 161 Chapter 15 Dramaturgical Voice 167 Chapter 16 The Face, Voice, and Silence 177 PART VPHENOMENOLOGIES Chapter 17 A Phenomenology of Voice 185 Chapter 18 Auditory Imagination 203 Chapter 19 Listening 217 PART VI ACOUSTIC TECHNOLOGIES Chapter 20 Bach to Rock: Amplification 227 Chapter 21 Jazz Embodied: Instrumentation 235 Chapter 22 Embodying Hearing Devices: Digitalization 243 Chapter 23 Embodiment, Technologies, and Musics 251 Notes 265 Index 273 Illustrations 3.1 Core-Horizon Structure 39 4.1 Horizon of Invisibility 52 4.2 Horizon of Silence 52 4.3 Auditory-Visual Overlap 53 7.1 Husserl’s Time Diagram 92 7.2 Temporal Focus 93 7.3 Temporal Span 95 7.4 Focal Direction 99 8.1 Focus Field Horizon Structure 106 9.1 Perception-Imagination Overlap 127 17.1 Multistable Image 188 ix Preface to the SUNY Press Edition of Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound The first edition of Listening and Voice (1976), the manuscript for which was completed (1972–73) roughly a decade after my dissertation (1964), was my first systematic attempt to do an original phenomenology. I was already con- vinced that what I later termed, “generic continentalism,” that is, the brand of scholarship that focuses on some major European philosopher and his or her texts, did not promise the same excitement of a more ‘experimental,’ ac- tual phenomenological investigation. Scholarship of that generic sort does have value—my own first book, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (1971) was an example of exactly that genre. Doing phenom- enology, however, implies a research program. That was what Listening and Voice undertook; it produced the results of a multiyear research program focused on auditory experience. The origin of this program was uninten- tionally accidental in one sense: disappointed that my own proposal for a paper at an early SPEP conference was rejected, I was asked instead to be part of a panel on “perceiving persons,” with Frank Tilman and David Carr. Tilman, as lead presenter, circulated a paper that was classically “Cartesian” in that his leading example of person perception was to be found in a ques- tion about whether or not we could be (visually) fooled by a cleverly con- trived robot? Convinced on my part that much person perception occurs in listening and language, I decided to focus on auditory perception for the panel. It was not long before the questions that this line of inquiry suggested, took on their own life and became a full-blown phenomenological research program in auditory experience overall. I soon found myself engaging in and studying acoustic, psychological, linguistic and speech, musicological, and a xi xii Preface whole range of interdisciplinary contributions to audition—including some early engineering problems referred to in the first edition via Georg von Bekesy and the problem of sensory inhibition. So, even before the first edition of Listening and Voice, I had begun to publish some preliminary results. The panel on perceiving persons took place in 1966 and my contribution, “On Perceiving Persons,” with two other pieces, “Listening” (coauthored with Tom Slaughter) and “God and Sound,” appeared as early as 1970 in the International Philosophical Quar- terly, followed by, “Some Auditory Phenomena,” in Philosophy Today, 1973. Five sound studies published from 1970 to 1973 were then collected for my second book, Sense and Significance (Duquesne University Press, 1973). From this early research, while it was impossible to include all these entries in the new edition, I have included two pre–Listening and Voice examples, “Auditory Imagination” and “Listening,” from Sense and Significance. The initial reception to Listening and Voice did include some targeted usual suspects, philosophers and humanities readers, and a very large num- ber of reviews and some review articles soon appeared. But communica- tions reviewers soon also picked up on its publication as well, followed somewhat more slowly by musicologists. In short, the audience was highly interdisciplinary. I have been amused to see that citations came from per- sons writing about submarine communications and from others comment- ing on the unique acoustics in Islamic mosques! In this new edition, in which the subtitle changes from A Phenomenol- ogy of Sound to Phenomenologies of Sound, the other newly added chapters reflect an itinerary that continued beyond the initial history. “A Phenome- nology of Voice,” was originally a keynote address to a conference on mu- sical improvisation at the University of California, San Diego, and was included in my Consequences of Phenomenology (SUNY Press, 1986). By the mid-1970s I had also became interested in a new domain— philosophy of technology. Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology (1979), is often cited as the first English language work on that theme. With a shift of interest to technologies, I did not however abandon my in- terest in auditory experience, contrarily, with the inclusion of technologies in human experience, the role of instrumentation began to take on increased significance. The earliest of my musical phenomenologies of instrumenta- tion, “From Bach to Rock,” was included in Technics and Praxis and I have reprinted that piece here as well. And while my interest in the role of in- struments in the philosophy of technology often tended toward particular attention to scientific instruments, their role in the production of knowledge often could be seen in both comparison and contrast to the role of instru- ments in producing music. For example, it became obvious that the domi- Preface xiii nant trajectory in science instrumentation was one that produces visual results. And in a secondary, but important sense, most science instrumen- tation also followed a progressive development—constantly making and in- venting new instruments was the norm. Music, the dominant auditory art, utilized instruments that produced sounds. But in contrast to the practices of science, one could favor traditional, or even older instruments as equal to or even over any new ones. Indeed, “From Bach to Rock” deals with, in part, the resistance to new instrumentation. Then, moving from rock to jazz, I have taken some account of the role of the then newly invented saxophone in “Jazz Embodied: Instrumentation,” and then on to other forms of even more contemporary instrumentation, including electronic and synthesized music in “Embodiment, Technologies and Musics,” and also, moving to the experience of auditory prosthetic technologies in “Embodying Hearing Devices.” So, the added phenomenologies of sound follow a long trajectory of interest in the acoustic and the auditory that still persists. The field, too, has changed. I want to mention here, first some samples that relate closely and with more direct relations to Listening and Voice, and then move to more distant studies in recent acoustic and auditory phe- nomena. Just last year SUNY Press published Postphenomenology: A Criti- cal Companion to Ihde, edited by Evan Selinger. In part II, three of the authors refer back to and branch out from Listening and Voice. (Two of them, Lenore Langsdorf and Judith Lochhead, were former students on whose dissertation committees I served.) In Langsdorf ’s case, the empha- sis of her chapter relates to the role of an auditory ontology for communi- cation theory, in her contribution the concreteness of voice balances the tendency to abstraction by some leading theorists; and in Lochhead’s case she has moved to the role of visualizing the musical object and its relation to new modes of scoring and its importance in musicology. Both have pi- oneered in phenomenological approaches to their respective fields. Trevor Pinch relates his chapter to his own development of “sound studies,” which actually grew out of the earlier patterns of analysis in science studies. As one of the inventors of “social constructionism,” Pinch takes the history, soci- ology and phenomenology of musical technologies to the early develop- ment of analog synthesizers.