HEARING vs LISTENING

"The groundbreaking electronic music composer and educator Pauline Oliveros (...) dedicated a great deal of her life’s work to spreading her philosophy of Deep Listening, a series of practices and writings teaching the core differences between hearing and listening. 

 

Oliveros long meditated on the concept that hearing is involuntary in nature, while listening requires consciousness. 

 

This is to say, she made a strong case that the act of listening was virtually incompatible with multitasking. 

 

In the Oliveros tradition, listening is something that requires focused attention on the act of listening, to music or sound or the natural world or the person next to you."

 

Quoted in Liz Pelly, Mood Machine. The Rise of Spotify, p. 36.

 

ref: Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (Deep Listening Publications, 2005).