Chion, “The Three Listening Modes.”

As a current student of Sound, I find myself in an interesting position, one that shyly experiments migrating from a Causal listener to a Reduced one. For me, sound has always been a starting point to something else, a source that connects to other art forms or different dimensions of knowledge. By saying that, I mean that sound always leads me to a response, it is never something in itself. If I listen to a song, my body will likely respond in a certain way, moving according to the rhythm, melody, or harmony. In other occasions, it will bring up a memory or make me imagine a film scene that would fit perfectly that tone and emotion conveyed by the lyrics/musical arrangement. In summary, song has always worked as bridge and not as the destination itself. Even when I am exposed to acousmatic sound, when I have no other way out, but purely concentrate on the composition itself, my mind is driven to associate the sounds to its sources. When the composition is too abstract and sounds are not very identifiable, the Causal listening is even reinforced; it is almost a challenge: discover the sources.

It is curious, though, that throughout the past 8 years, I set one part of my life to exclusively analyze sound in its Reduced form. When I am tap dancing, my relation to the “listening experience” is almost a purely Reduced one. Because the source, in this case, is inherently known—my tap dance shoes—I was never driven to think of it. Instead, the listening is all about the textures, qualities of the sound produced. In other words, the listening is essentially Reduced. It is true, however, that when I tap dance, I am also concerned about the outcome and responses of the sound: how will my composition affect the audience? What am trying to convey and how to insert ideas, thoughts, and emotions into the composition? That said, one could argue that these questions change the mode of my relation to sound in tap dance, from Reduced to Causal listening. Nevertheless, these questions have their answers centered back in the composition, in the essential nature of the sound. Even though I always ask myself about the outcome and responses of my tap dance composition, which are unrelated to the traits of the sound itself, an therefore Causal, the experience of composing is ultimately Reduced.

But again, it is curious, though, that such Reduced experience has only been present when I tap dance. It has not influenced the way I listen to sounds casually, in a daily basis. For this reason, I ought to conclude that, at least for now, unless I am focused on the process of composing sound, my experience as a listener tends to always be that of a Causal one.