Ihde, Don. Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound.
The 2007 reprinting of Ihde’s classic 1976 text Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound coincided with the recent return of scholarly interest in sound. In the early 2000s, Ihde’s Listening and Voice—like Attali’s Noise (published in French as Bruits in 1977) and Schafer’s The Tuning of the World (also 1977)—became an important text for scholars attempting to define and create a critical canon for “sound studies” as an emerging field. Ihde shares with his contemporaries (Attali and Schafer, as well as media scholars like McLuhan and Ong), a celebratory approach to sound; he holds what many would now disparage as naïve and utopian aspirations for what scholarship on sound can provide. In Listening and Voice, Ihde proposes a departure from Western philosophy’s “latent, presupposed, and dominant visualism” (6)–the privileging of sight as the means through which we understand experience. Ihde suggests that attending to “the auditory dimension” will expose the “blind spots” of the visual bias in Western thought. In pursuit of this philosophy of sound, Ihde proposes a “phenomenology of listening.” His book’s first section employs a Husserlian phenomenology, as he describes and analyzes the directedness of auditory perception. This method leads Ihde to claim that sound is not merely temporal, but also spatial: “we hear shapes…we also hear surfaces” (68). He uses as examples echoes and the game shaking a box to discern the shape of an item inside. Sound as well as vision, he claims, enables the perception of spatial relations.[1] In his next section, Ihde proceeds to a Heideggerian “second phenomenology,” one that works toward an “ontology of sound” by pushing on sound’s limit and horizon—the enigma of silence. This takes Ihde to the “auditory imagination” and inner speech and sound, a phenomenology of imagined auditory experience in relation to (and sometimes in resistance to) the sounds in the surrounding world.
Ihde subtitles his 2007 edition Phenomenologies of Sound rather than the originally singular A Phenomenology of Sound because he includes additional chapters containing some of his other work on voice, speech, sound and listening. Of these additions, I find most interesting his chapter on the phenomenology of the “dramaturgical voice.” The dramaturgical voice—the voice of the actor, liturgist, or poet—stands in between singing and conversation, amplifying the word as sounded, as word-event (167). His writing on the voice of the liturgist could be particularly useful in my discussion of reading the Bible aloud in the nineteenth century, as I consider the listening practices demanded on such an occasion.
[1] The This American Life podcast on Daniel Kish, a blind man who clicks his tongue to discern objects in space, provides a compelling example of this observation.
