Listening is interactive. If you are listening, you are constantly making guesses about what you are hearing and if you are hearing.
…hearing is full of doubt: phenomenological doubt of the listener about the heard and her/himself hearing it. Hearing does not offer a meta-position; there is no place where I am not simultaneous with the heard. However far its source, the sound sits in my ear. I can not hear it if I am not immersed in its auditory object, which is not its source but sound as sound itself.
Also as Voegelin points out, sound is physically touching touching your ears.
She contrasts it with vision:
Sound’s ephemeral invisibility obstructs critical engagement, while the apparent stability of the image invites criticism. Vision, by its very nature assumes a distance from the object, which it receives in its monumentality. Seeing always happens in a meta-position, away from the seen, however close. And this distance enables a detachment and objectivity that presents itself as truth. Seeing is believing. The visual ‘gap’ nourishes the idea of structural certainty and the notation that we can truly understand things, give them names, and define ourselves in relation to those names as stable subjects, as identities.
By the time we have attempted to understand the sound, it is long gone. Sound is difficult to objectify.
In what ways do we discretize, classify and objectify sound? Why?
What is Deep Listening
This question is answered in the process of practicing listening with the understanding that the complex wave forms continuously transmitted to the auditory cortex from the outside world by the ear require active engagement with attention. Prompted by experience and learning, listening takes place voluntarily. Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening. The ear is constantly gathering and transmitting information–however attention to the auditory cortex can be tuned out. Very little of the information transmitted to the brain by the sense organs is perceived at the conscious level. Reactions can take place without consciousness.
Rhythm Circle or Thought Music