Listening to Others: Music and the Phenomenology of Hearing

This chapter explores listening through a phenomenological account of sound and rhythm, showing a musical structure in experience. This structure follows the rhythm of a sequence, leading the listener through an event of meaning that allows an other to appear as a self within a temporally constituted sequence of sense. While subject to such relations, listening is constitutively directed towards re-sensing, because we hear in terms of virtualities, whereby sense contains the power of new and unheard of meaning in each moment of its appearance. Such sense appears acoustically in an affective register between joy and despair, forming affective atmospheres, in which emotions are expressed in a manner irreducible to narrative context. The situation described here is characterized by a certain rhythm in which awareness is directed not so much to the corporeal boundaries of self and other but to the event of movement in which each person finds themselves.