Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound

by Don Ihde

Listening and Voice is an updated and expanded edition of Don Ihde's groundbreaking 1976 classic in the study of sound. Ranging from the experience of sound through language, music, religion, and silence, clear examples and illustrations take the reader into the important and often overlooked role of the auditory in human life. Ihde's newly added preface, introduction, and chapters extend these sound studies to the technologies of sound, including musical instrumentation, hearing aids, and the new group of scientific technologies which make infra- and ultra-sound available to human experience.

Genres: Philosophy, Music

296 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Don Ihde is an American philosopher of science and technology. In 1979 he wrote what is often identified as the first North American work on philosophy of technology, Technics and Praxis. Before his retirement, Don Ihde was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really excellent overview of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology and an important intervention in the field that prioritizes sound and listening. The sections with music (and especially music theory) though fall a bit flat and feel pretty shallow in their analyses. A philosophy text and not a musicology or sound studies one for sure.

[Zachary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ihde's phenomenological work is always very, very interesting, and his style is particularly suited to the defamiliarizing aim of such a philosophy. Here he turns his attention to sound, the most pervasive and yet perhaps overlooked sense that we have. The analyses that he performs yield some relatively unsurprising results in terms of defining or describing the structure of our aural experience, but is nonetheless fascinating in how it classifies the generalized experience that we all have with sounds. Here are things that we know implicitly about our sense of hearing, yet have rarely bothered to put into words. Thinking through these things with Ihde is thus fascinating and rewarding, even if sometimes his variations can be a bit complex even for someone versed in philosophical and phenomenological vocabulary--in some ways this has been the densest of Ihde's books that I've read. That being said, if you are interested in sound, hearing, or music, this is a fascinating read that can really help you to think about how we interact with and take in sounds, and what it can mean to be involved in the production of sounds via things like speech.

[Dont · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been sitting on my shelf for some time. I first encountered the title years back in an essay by Fran Dyson in her essay on phenomenology and Cage (from the Wireless Imagination book). With all the blather about phenomenology in recent sound studies, I have found it quite curious that no-one except Dyson has referenced this text. So I read it. The book is quite old and one of Ihde's earliest - before he became something of a premiere Riceour scholar. In the preface he describes the book as something of an experimental phenomenology -- trying to work through the ideas of phenomenology (in this case, the shift from Husserl to Heidegger) in the process of actually describing embodied experiences of listening. What's absolutely remarkable is that Ihde wrote this book without any reference -- and thus, I presume, no knowledge of -- Pierre Schaeffer. The overlaps are remarkable, particularly in how Ihde gives an analysis of the phenomenological reduction in the field of auditory experience. The book should make a useful supplement to students of Schaeffer and musique concrete; particularly given how little of Schaeffer's actual writings are available in English. Of course, Ihde falls into much of the conventional metaphysical traps of Husserlean phenomenology. There is a forceful rejection of psychoanalysis and the very notion of a split subject. This is precisely the sort of full-presence in phenomenological discourse that is at the heart of critiques by Derrida and Kristeva. When Ihde acknowledges the former, he launches into such a gross misreading that clearly helps to give him an alibi and dismiss any difficult challenges that Derrida makes to Husserlean metaphysics in particular. But that said, the book is a great introduction to the problems/practice of phenomenology within the field of sound.

[Cambra · Rating 2 out of 5]

what about the phenomenology of speaking?

[Tomas Serrien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very lucid and good introduction to a phenomenology of sound, speech and music.

[Nuno · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite interesting. Food for thought.