Critical Sound and Listening Pedagogies: A Collaborative Inquiry With Music Teachers

• In Event: Drugs, Poetry, Music, and Care: Illuminating While Reimagining Possibilities Using Collaborative Practitioner Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives
This paper shares the findings of a collaborative inquiry with a group of music teachers into the sound and listening pedagogies of Pauline Oliveros (2005, 2013) and R. Murray Schafer (1992, 1993). We explored our own experiences as music students, and investigated the possible forms and trajectories that music education could/should take if students’ abundant knowledge, experiences, and abilities were not only recognized but also centred in music classrooms. To this end, I argue that focusing on and sharing daily sounding and listening practices can amplify and strengthen our intrinsic creative and critical interactions with each other and our worlds.

Theoretical framework
Sonic agency (Labelle, 2018), an embodied capacity to listen, not listen, sound, and resound in ways that reframe and transform our daily interactions; critical listening positionality (Robinson, 2020), which illuminates sonic privileges, capital, control, and power; and atmospheric attunement (Stewart, 2011), “an intimate, compositional process of dwelling” on “qualities, rhythms, forces, relations, and movements” (p. 445), frame the design and analysis of this research.

Methods and data sources
Three weekly “podcasts” and an online discussion forum invited music educators to listen deliberately, reflect on, collect, share, discuss, exchange, and remix the disappearing and transforming sounds of their past and current lives. We inquired about whether this work might have an effect on our own definitions of music, music education, and our teaching practices. Samuels et al. (2010) argue for the need for a sounded anthropology that accounts for the thickness, context, possibilities, and tensions of treating the sound as data. This paper shares audio excerpts and focuses on my analysis—through sound editing, listening back, and description—of an audio file that combines these teachers' voiced descriptions of an early sound memory.

Results
I consider these sonic memories to be personal musical experiences: intentional, creative, and affective interactions with and attunements to sound. Their voices and stories do the needed work of blurring the boundary between what is institutionally patterned as music and what is excluded. I place my descriptions of their early sound memories beside profiles of each teacher’s institutional music learning and the context of their current practices. The gap between these is large, This distance is central to this research. Understandings and connections between daily embodied listening and teaching practices emerged through my analysis. Desire and loss developed as themes that bridged this gap and amplified what these teachers wanted their own students to experience in their classrooms.

Scholarly significance
The practice of deep intentional listening (Oliveros, 2005; Schultz, K., 2003) has the power to (re)engage and, through the amplification of empathy (Green, 1995) and embodied intentionality (Grumet, 1989), give voice to teachers and students who have felt left out, shamed, and silenced by the systemic exclusions and racism in music education. This research project contributed to this goal by blurring boundaries and finding new possibilities between music and sound, past and present, and theory and practice.

Author

• Doug Friesen, Queen's University - Kingston