I’m pleased to participate in “Techniques of the Listener,” convened by the Yale Sound Studies Working Group. We hope to write a collective essay on the proceedings.
About Techniques of the Listener
“Techniques of the Listener” is a two day working group on audile techniques, supported by a Humanity/Humanities grant from Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center.
Our goal is to collectively examine, develop, and refine the notion of “audile techniques” from both practical and theoretical angles. The sessions are not public; rather they are designed to maximize conversation, exchange, and collective thinking.
We hope to approach the idea of audile technique both intensively and extensively. Intensively, we want to look at particular instances. By ranging across the disciplines, we hope to see how different cultural-historical situations are articulated and altered through the application of audile techniques. Each participant will present a short narrative of an audile technique, contemporary or historical, in hopes of building a small “sample set” of cases. By considering these cases we aim to study audile techniques both individually and comparatively. We hope to broaden and refine our understanding of what kinds of practices should be included under the heading of an audile technique.
Extensively, we seek to better understand the nature of audile techniques generally. Can we make inroads on developing a theory of audile techniques? Are current theories of audile techniques sufficient for illuminating and generalizing over individual cases? How do techniques, at once, organize and respond to the relays, successions, and recursive loops of auditory aspects of human experience? Bringing the two approaches together, we seek to clarify the structure and nature of technique, while also remaining sensitive to the specific ways audile techniques are integrated with audio technologies and other sensory techniques.
After our two day meeting, we will make public the outcome and implications of the conversations.
Conveners:
J.D. Connor (Yale, Art History and Film Studies)
Ben Glaser (Yale, English)
Brian Kane (Yale, Music)