Listening to the Inaudible

摘要

I take listening to be an intentional stance characterized by openness to another, but not necessarily having to do with hearing and sound. In the first portion of this paper, I consider the relationship between acts of listening, hearing and sound that lead me to that conclusion. In the second part, I use as an example some experiments I conducted initially in order to understand vibrations below the range of hearing. I discovered instead the surprising behavior of steel plates that was well within my auditory range. Consistent with the first portion of the paper, that which needed to be listened to was not the sound itself, but the difference between expectation and experience. I began by listening to sound, but learned to apply the same openness and sensibility to other phenomena.