Deep Listening, and Grön Musik
In the introduction to A Book of Noises I wrote that the book was a result of an effort to learn more about the nature of sound and the various ways in which it shapes life, but that it was by no means the end of that effort. I was aware that I was often only touching the surface of the topics I was exploring, and tried to keep my own limitations and ignorance in view. Here are two among ten thousand things I could have paid more attention to but didn’t. I hope they may be worth a few moments of your time if you don’t already know about them.
The first is ‘Quantum Listening’, a short essay by the musician Pauline Oliveros. I had listened to her musical work Deep Listening, but had not read the essay. (I am wary of works with ‘quantum’ in the title because many of them are woo.) Now, after coming upon a copy of the essay earlier this week in Burley Fisher Books, I have, and recommend it.
What, Oliveros asks, is deep listening? Part of her answer is as follows:
Deep Listening is a lifelong practice. The more I listen, the more I learn to listen. Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it and all that there is…
The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening — listening in as many ways as possible, to everything that can possibly be heard, all of the time. Deep Listening is exploring the relationships among any and all sounds, whether natural or technological, intended or unintended, real, remembered or imaginary. Thought is included…
Deep Listening includes all sounds expanding the boundaries of perception. In this concept is language and the nature of its sound, as well as natural sound and technological sound…
We need to be listening in all possible modes to meet the challenges of the unknown — the unexpected…
The essay, which was first published in 2010, includes suggestions and speculations as to what new technology will make possible. What, Oliveros, asks would you want to hear if you had a bionic [sic] ear that could let you listen to anything, anywhere, at any time?
Would you like to zoom into a waterfall to hear individual sounds of the galling drops? Would you like to hear the sound of a cell dividing in your own body? The sound of blood coursing through your veins as you monitor your own health?
There’s a mention of a prediction by Ray Kurzweil that by 2030 nanobots will be swimming through our bloodstreams and scanning our brains from the inside. This sounded like a stretch to me in 2010, and more so today.
Oliveros turns to spirituality, citing an observation by one Matthew Fox that spirituality is about ‘living deeply’:
[Spirituality] puts experience before everything else. It’s about responding with passion, awe, reverence and gratitude to everything in life — including the grief, the pain, the suffering, the injustice.
Quantum listening, she writes, follows from a quantum theory of music outlined in 1990 by the ethnomusicologist Ki Mantle Hood:
Quantum Listening simultaneously creates and changes what is perceived. The perceiver and the perceived co-create through the listening effect. All sounds are included in the field. This creates potential, cultivates surprises, opens the imagination and approaches and even plunges over the edges of perception into the mystery of the universe predicted by quantum field theory
It is, she concludes, a ‘simple’ practice, open to all, which has ‘rich and far-flung implications for bringing to our world the two conditions of…happiness and relief of suffering… A new music reflective of a new humanity with a high value on life could arise.’
The second thing I want to mention here is the existence of tree bark flutes. I greatly enjoyed learning a little more about the history of flutes for a chapter in A Book of Noises titled ‘The Magic Flute,’ but to my shame did not know about them.
The discovery, for me, is thanks to Sound Tracks: Uncovering Our Musical Past by Graeme Lawson (2024). I’m now some way into this book, in which Lawson, an archaeologist, musician and historian, explores the prehistory of music and musical instruments in fifty ‘detective stories.’ Tree bark flutes are an instance of what Lawson’s colleague the prehistorian Cajsa Lund calls Grön Musik or ‘Green Music’. I love the very thought of the possibilities of ‘Green Music’, and would like to think bark flutes can be part of our future as well as the distant and not-so-distant past.
Here’s a delightful video from Winne Clement on how to make one: