Extended Listening and Its Role in Shaping Compositional Tools. A Few Remarks on the Exploration of Connections Between Auditory, Visual, Tactile and Kinesthetic Modes of Perception
Even if listening has become an explicit subject of artistic interest relatively recently in the perspective of the history of musical composition, composers have been incorporating the aspect of music perception into their works for centuries, mentioning the composed interplay with the listener’s expectations in Haydn’s ‘Surprise Symphony’ as an example. Since modernism, with the development of numerous new compositional perspectives, new concepts of listening have emerged, including those exploiting ambiguities in sound and its perception, such as the simulacra and illusions composed by Jean Claude Risset, or even altogether questioning and exceeding sound and its perception, as in John Cage’s organ composition ‘As Slow As Possible’, or shifting compositional focus to listening and social context of listening, in the case of Pauline Oliveros. Despite a great diversity of compositional concepts and music literature created from the twentieth century until today explicitly in relation to perception of the sound or concepts contextualising the act of listening, it is only in the last few decades that listening has been considered in the entanglement with the other senses, not only in arts, but as well in research; research on perception has generally considered hearing, vision, and touch, i.e. each sensory modality, in isolation. “Although it has been traditional to study the various senses independently, most of the time, perception operates in the context of information supplied by multiple sensory modalities at the same time” (Lachs, 2024). The aim of the presentation is to point out several aspects of extended listening and their potential in shaping compositional tools.