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The power of intentional, communal listening
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Last year, when all the shops, salons and restaurants were closed and the world was quieter, I was getting a haircut. At least, it seemed like that. The snip of cold steel scissors by my ears, the hairdryer blowing hot air on my neck.
But I wasn’t breaking lockdown rules. I was actually lying on my living room floor in the dark, wearing an eye mask and headphones, listening to a hair salon in surround sound. It felt so real I had to resist the reflexive urge to turn around just to double check there wasn’t a real hairdresser behind me.Â
It was part of The World According to Sound, a listening series that streams spatialised audio to the headphones of folks listening together, at the same time. And it wasn’t just hair salons; the series brings you immersive sounds of a deconstructed organ, Cairo in the 20s, birds, bodies and plenty, plenty more. The next series kicks off in January; you can buy tickets here.
In a time when it’s easy to feel disconnected — from each other and ourselves — what does it mean to come together to listen with intention? I caught up with Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett, the duo behind WATS, to chat about intentional listening, and how we as audio producers can reimagine how we make sound.
Why did you launch the listening series? What’s the appeal of communal listening, and how can it focus our attention?
CH: The idea for the listening series didn’t come like a bolt out of the blue. We started doing our 90-second podcast back in 2015, where the idea was to get content on the radio (!) that eschewed talking, and promoted unmediated listening — to sounds, to non-musical and non-language sound, like ants, or lightning in space, or athletes grunting, or grizzly bears eating a bison carcass.
In 2017, like 60 episodes later, we got the idea to turn these sounds into a longform piece, and invite people to listen together in a physical space. Kind of like going to a movie but with no images.
The exciting ideas for us here were: (1) playing with audio in a multichannel environment. We used eight loudspeakers and a couple subs, and we could control each loudspeaker independently. So you can move sound all around the room.
And (2) the idea of listening with other people seemed rife with potential. We’ve all gone to music shows, so the concept of communal listening isn’t new. But our show takes away the visual and you aren’t dancing or moving around. You’re just sitting there, focused on the intricate, subtle, or sometimes raucous sonic world unfolding before your ears. You become super aware of those around you: all the sounds they make, either with their voice (exclamations of surprise, laughter, disgust) or with the rest of their body as they move and fidget.
So now you’re listening to two worlds: the artificial one we’re presenting to you, but also the real world with all the people in it and right next to you. There is a power in this. I’m not quite sure what exactly this power is, but it feels like a kind of newness, like you’re using your ears in a nascent and novel way. When you feel something new or unfamiliar, I think it often has an opening-up effect. It’s in those moments when it’s possible to feel connection…or at least not alienated.
SH: The live shows are an extension of the central hope behind the podcast and radio show. We just want to create a little space for people to have their own thoughts, associations, and experiences. The idea is that sound can create that space, that is, if you don’t over mediate it.Â
Sound not only has incredible suggestive powers for people, it also offers an escape from visual stimuli, which are increasingly being used in late-stage capitalism to capture and monetize our attention. This is a big reason we have people wear eye masks at live shows and during the listening series. Denying the visual gives sound the chance to create a meditative, unmediated space. It also discourages you from checking your phone or scrolling through shit on your computer, and getting sucked into the distraction and control that are the hallmarks of modern media.Â
The hope, aside from just giving people some respite, is to cultivate a practice of intentional listening, not just to curated material, but in general. Whenever someone writes us after a show and says they are suddenly listening more acutely to the world, we really feel like we’ve succeeded.Â
CH: We toured around with our in-person live show for a couple years at art spaces, universities, theaters. Then Covid happened and our fall 2020 tour got cancelled. Out of this came the idea to try making an immersive sound show meant to be listened to on headphones. We had long thought this wouldn’t really work, as sound is just not that dynamic in a stereo environment, and if you take the communal listening aspect away, what remains?Â
But times were weird and we felt like we could make something good on the theme of quarantine, of isolation. So we started to work on Outside In, a show loosely themed around the pandemic. We made a ton of new recordings, and after a few months we had an 80-minute, almost completely non-narrated stereo show specifically mixed for headphones.Â
For the ticket price, we mailed out a program with listening instructions, and a branded eye mask. The show was not on demand, but instead streamed live at a specific time on a specific day. This was our attempt at keeping a communal vibe, despite being at home: people could chat online before the show and after during our Q&A, so it still was a little audio community, just virtual.
This new form (a) felt exciting and alive, and (b) elicited so much reaction and feedback and positivity. I (we) have only made a handful of things in our lives that actually seemed good, and by that I mean things that truly and sometimes deeply resonated with other people. That first pandemic show we made… it made me (us) feel a kind of wholeness that is rare, a genuine feeling of connectedness to others through this artifice.Â
We wanted to keep that feeling going by experimenting even more and making even more work in this exciting new form. So we made eight more shows, put them on once a week (except over Christmas), and out of that formed a small but significant new listening community.
You’ve written that there are ‘fewer places to encounter audio intended to do more’ — what more do you think audio should and could be doing?
SH: I think the most important thing is that there should be more experimentation with format. For some reason all we talk about is content. What’s being said, what’s the information, what’s the story? We don’t talk about the shape or form of the story. I believe that if you really want to reach people in the current media landscape, then form is an even more important consideration than content.Â
Media is not just an information transfer, but an experience, and that’s where form can have such an impact. If you do something in a different way, then I think you have a much higher chance of actually encouraging the person consuming that piece of medium to reflect, question, or feel something.Â
The World According to Sound is an embodiment of that idea. Chris and I realized early on that the sound actually doesn’t matter that much. Sure, it has to be compelling and interesting in some way. But the sound could be a bridge, an ant, a giant cave organ, a sound art piece. What really mattered was presenting that sound in a format where people could enter a state of intentional listening where they had their own thoughts.Â
I think that’s what we mean with audio that intends to do more. We think people should be considering the format of their work and trying to craft it in an ambitious way. What’s the point of the thing you are making? How do you want people to experience it? What’s the theory behind your approach?Â
Too often people making media just fall back on a certain set of unexamined rules and then churn out content. The format rules are not questioned. They are just accepted. There is a way to tell a story, or make a piece of audio, this is it, and we are just going to shove content into that mold for as long as it brings in money.Â
In the public radio world, so many of the formats are built to ensure the media product will infotain. I think infotainment or edutainment is the scourge of public media. The forms are constructed to ensure that the media products make people feel like they are learning something and feel good about it. Regardless of where you land on that, infotainment should not be the only game in town. Anytime you have a media landscape where everything has the same principles and goals, the same format, I’d say you’ve got a problem.Â
In our small way, we’re trying to make audio in a different mold. For us, the experiment is to control the listening experience, make sound the primary focus, and to use it to create spaces for listeners to have their own thoughts and associations.Â
The key I think is to have a clear, thoroughly examined purpose for making whatever piece of media you’re making. For me it has always been to encourage people to think and to examine their own ideologies and biases.
CH: The pervasive comments from our listening evenings were ones of relief, meditation, focus, connection, and at root: the ability to just sit and listen. This is clearly a rarity (or at least it is for those people who came to our shows), and maybe something we could have more of in the audio world.
How can audio producers be more aware of intentional listening? How might we incorporate these ideas in our work?
CH: Space. Allow for a lot of space. And ambiguity. And tangents, and tenuous connections (but still connections, or at least the guiding hand should be present). And shut the hell up once in a while.Â
There’s a lot of ways to make something worthy of listening to, and it’s not always a super polished musical score or thrilling plot or cliff hanger or moral or message or new insight or factoid or any language-sound at all for that matter (although it could be too). Sometimes just putting something small but new out there and not being told what it means or why we’re listening to it...that can go a long way too.
There are a lot of roads to meaning, and they don’t always need to be spelled out.
How do you hope to harness your community of listeners?
SH: We’re hoping to build a community that will support our approach to audio and create a place where others can try some formal invention. Our hope is that there are enough people out there who see the value in consuming a relatively small amount of media in a really focused, direct way.Â
I think a big takeaway is that to be successful we need to revalue media. It shouldn’t all just be a free flood that washes over us. We should pick and choose some things to experience deliberately. The question is, can we actually build a community big enough to financially support the work? The hope is that the live show experiences are a way to make that happen.
CH: We’ve got a body of work we believe in, which is a rarity in life. So we’re not bashful when it comes to standing behind it.
🎟 Get your tickets to The World According to Sound 2022 Listening Series.Â
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What I’m listening toÂ
🎧 Speaking of intentional listening, I was really moved by Hrishikesh Hirway’s TED talk about writing a song inspired by his late mother, and how making Song Exploder affected how he listens to people.
🎧 I also really enjoyed Brené Brown's conversation with Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman on Unlocking Us. They speak so eloquently about friendship and why the most important friendships require hard work.Â
🎧 And my final reco is something I’m reading: audio producer Sara Brooke Curtis’ newsletter Somewhere Else. Sara is so observant of the small daily moments (and sounds!) that make up a life; her beautiful writing is truly transportive.Â
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