Hearing: One Sense, Multiple Listenings. Dossier’s Presentation Ways of Listening

Abstract

The act of listening, as any other human activity, is conditioned by the context and a diversity of circumstances of physiological, symbolic, and technological nature. The complexity involved in the act of listening can be translated into what we call ways of listening, defined as the different frames of interpretation in which sound perception is built. The goal of this dossier is to construct a modal approach to the sense of hearing, in order to understand how the processes of individuation, socialization, inculturation and adaptation are right in the middle of our relationship with sound, as well as to notice how the world is configurated by an audible logic. The papers integrating this dossier have been written by the members of the Red de estudios sobre el sonido y la escucha (Mexico) and, altogether, propose a transdisciplinary approach to the phenomenon of listening, placed in the crossroad of social sciences and humanities, in the aural turn of sound studies.