Thick Listening: Listening in the Thick of It

Thick Listening: Listening in the Thick of It

6 days ago•13-15 minutes read

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Holger Schulze

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Abstract

This contribution introduces the concept of "thick listening" to better understand the pluriform, relational, and unstable quality of listening in everyday situations. The practice of listening has been used for therapeutic and spiritual purposes. It is currently considered a research method, a surveillance technique, a skillful assessment tool, and a way to appreciate art and consume media. Listening can be a way to indulge in pure pleasure, dance, socialize, and recreate, as well as a means of self-actualization and achieving a deeper connection with a partner, friend, or colleague. However, in any given moment, your or my listening may oscillate erratically between these neatly defined modes and applications — or perform them all at once — beyond our control.

I argue in this text that listening as an everyday listening practice means listening to the thick and pluriform, the relational and unstable constituents of a situation. Therefore, as a research listening method, thick listening includes and goes far beyond listening practices such as "reduced listening" (Schaeffer/Chion 1966/1994), "ubiquitous listening" (Kassabian 2013), or even "deep listening" (Oliveros 2005). It performs not one single and stylized, rather myopic/myauric hearing perspective. Rather, it resembles everyday listening in its highly dynamic, malleable complexity and can therefore provide more accurate insights into everyday listening experiences. This text presents an introduction to this research listening method.
“Thick listening puts all the abject, questionable, distracted, impatient and unfocused modes of listening at its centre. These are our most commonly used forms of listening, even if we might not dare to admit it.”

Introduction

This listening situation is thick. It is densely layered and deeply compressed in all its multifaceted and at times also erratic aspects. The sound events it contains are many. Their many meanings can be articulated, again and again: they are seemingly infinite. The tangible materiality of all those sounds within this one listening situation, as listened to from a wide variety of hearing perspectives (Auinger/Odland 2007) is not simply one. It is again more of an overwhelmingly rich and infinitely multiplying variety and diversity of materials: materials, that can be sensed and listened to, experienced and reflected on. I can follow down the path of the deeper history of this precise sound event or sound practice; I can discuss and question the meaning and the impact of this sound amplification or sound production technology. I can also reflect upon our role, yours or mine, as listeners and potentially co-creators, co-performers within this listening situation. How does my listening alter this very situation? How does your performance in this situation provide me with thoroughly different angles and aspects of its interpretation? What kind of sonic persona (Schulze 2018) are you or am I?

This situation of listening, like any given situation, is thick in all possible regards. Or, in the words of phenomenologist Eugene T. Gendlin, who worked on the relation of how speech and language emerge from bodily experiences and material sensibilities:

“Any situation, any bit of practice, implies much more than has ever been said.” (Gendlin 1992: 201)

As soon as we might start to list all the aspects relevant to this situation right now, we begin to encircle and to exhaust all potential hearing perspectives (Auinger & Odland 2007), sonic experiences (Augoyard & Torgue 2006), all modes of listening (Schaeffer 1966, Chion 1994), all sonic epistemologies (Schulze 2016, 2024) potentially meaningful to the understanding, interpreting of this very situation. And as soon as we might have listed all aspects and perspectives, as soon as we present them to another person, they might recognize their limited and reduced character and make us aware of further aspects, we might have ignored – being limited beings as well. And three months or thirty years later you might realize that you ignored a handful of other major aspects as well. The complexity, depth and thickness, its reach, ramifications and repercussions has no end. They are transforming and multiplying in time and with encounters and through new experiences, incessantly. An infinitely growing and transforming constellation of factors, vectors and energies. Any situation and any bit of practice is potentially infinitely connected, related, rooted and resonating.

Thick Practices

Photo credits: Jakub Neskora / Unsplash
Photo credits: Jakub Neskora / Unsplash
Thickness is a quality of many things. Walls can be thick and a slice of bread. Tyres as well as layers or strata can be thick. And, in a more recent vernacular of the colloquial kind, also sexualized body parts or a whole composure can be called thick. However, in listening to a whole situation, the term thick refers to a listener’s experience of the qualities of listening to this specific situation. So: what precisely is referred to with the thickness of what I listen to?

Thick listening and also a thick experience and its thick description are terms that are indeed used in two distinct areas: in ethnographic field research – and in a strand of care work. In both cases, the quality of thickness has to do a lot of lifting. Let me start with its employment in field research, as some readers of this text might be more familiar with this area.

In 1973 Clifford Geertz published his crucial book called “The Interpretation of Culture”, wherein he outlines and introduces the concept of “thick description” in the first chapter and exemplifies and works with it throughout the whole book. With using the word “thick”, Geertz took up reflections by philosopher Gilbert Ryle from five years prior on the very notion of this term. Therein Ryle had argued that one might distinguish thin from thick description through the amount of context and of behavioural and cultural knowledge (Ryle 1968a, 1968b, Kirchin 2013). A thin description remains an outsider perspective, whereas a thick description makes at least an effort to represent as much tacit and implicit knowledge (cf. Polanyi 1966, El Adraoui et al. 2024, Hadjimichael et al. 2024) as possible. Why has this metal moving object eaten those humanoid creatures and is now moving about while letting off steam? Why are these creatures with usually two legs walking aimlessly around, holding such weird plushy objects into the world, while wearing a set of plastic objects in their earlobes? Why am I standing here in front of a group of people, speaking in front of a large screen?

Geertz took this discussion and wrote core parts of his research as a “thick description”. He focused on specific moments, limited in time and space, including even sudden encounters within his field research. He crafted narrative vignettes from his field research in “a dazzlingly persuasive, densely detailed, dandily written account” (Titon 2015: 79): a style, replete with behavioural and cultural knowledge that resembled more the style of a novelist than a scholar. His dense, literary writing about ethnographic encounters started from the assumption that “culture is a semiotic system, so that all representation is in effect interdependent”(Luhrmann 2015: 292). Through Geertz’ thick descriptions, “some practice that on the surface seemed trivial or irrational” (ibid.), did indeed allow for insightful interpretation. The many details, contexts, aspects, and ramifications of this one practice could then be starting points for their further interpretation and understanding.

The actual thickness of these descriptions lies, therefore, again in every and “any bit of practice [that] implies much more than has ever been said.“ (Gendlin 1992: 201) The thickness of a description – and of listening –, is neither one of acoustic or grammatical quality. It is the thickness of practice.

This employment of the term thick had a major impact on the methodological reflection in ethnographic research. The second example, I wish to address, is currently employed by care practitioners, usually with a Christian background. In this case the term “thick” obtains the taint of a promise, a sort of an auditory problem solving strategy: if you just would listen much better and much more skilled, then the world, your (work-)relations, and all of your life and work would be in much better shape.

Thick listening in this understanding is a practice of better listening, framed as "a spiritual care competency [...] that is thick not only with attentiveness to the other but also concurrently with attentiveness to oneself” (Bellous & Clark 2022: xxiii). It is a mode of listening that at the same time serves as a spiritual practice intertwined with a form of self-optimisation of the listener. This interpretation of thick listening is addressing pastors or chaplains, who serve within a particular church's congregation or in secular institutions like hospitals or the army. Thick listening in this understanding is described as:

“a quality of multidimensional contemplative mindfulness that understands and appreciates the deep interfacing between everyday life experiences and thin moments, where separation brought about through differing worldviews, paradigms and filters increasingly thin and transparent” (Bellous & Clark 2022: 43f.)

The Christian proposition of a belief that transcends individual differences (“worldviews, paradigms and filters”, ibid.) is here clearly restaged as a contemporary, utilitarian practice of auditory self-optimization within care work, attaching it to the wider discourse on “mindfulness” (Siegel at al. 2009, Walsh 2016, Purser 2019). This thick practice is therefore less about a comprehensive listening to all sounds considered, from the perspective of research on sound, but much more about listening in therapeutic conversations, and care-related situations. For an advanced and politically impactful understanding of listening, this mode of listening and especially its refinement is without a doubt a crucial practice. However, its employment of the qualifier “thick” is a thoroughly different one. It focuses on understanding and engaging with the singular life situation of a client – and not on the multiple modes and pluriform presence of sounds and how to listen to them in any given moment.
A screenshot of the playlist that plays at your workplace. Intergalactic FM - The Dream Machine
A screenshot of the playlist that plays at your workplace. Intergalactic FM - The Dream Machine

Listening is Pluriform

Listening is a pluriform activity. It is not just one.

Listening to my favourite piece of music performed by my favourite artist, perhaps live on stage, is a thoroughly different experience to riding my bike or driving in traffic, or commuting on the subway or regional train while listening to a podcast or playlist. When I'm on holiday, I listen to the sounds of a city or on a train very differently to when I'm panicking to arrive on time at a meeting place with a fellow researcher. Even in conversation, listening can mean many things: it's different to listen to someone I've just met and am attracted to, to listen to someone I work with, to have a deeply intimate conversation with my long-term partner, or to engage in a problematic and challenging conversation with someone who holds grudges against me and wishes to voice their contempt and accusations.

Needless to say, listening to a text or talk like this is a very different form of listening again. The feeble word 'listening' can refer to an almost endless plethora of activities, situations, experiences, expectations, practices, and modes of attention performed at the time. Listening is an inherently multiple activity.

As unthinkable and ungraspable as such a multiplicity may sound, the process becomes even more complex when the high density of any given listening situation is included. It is not only radical, artistically crafted or extreme situations that are densely packed with references, memories, undertones or overtones. The compressed, dense richness of a listening situation is its defining feature. Thick situations of sound require thick listening. They demand it, and rightly so.

However, if you think that only professionals who specialise in listening, sound production and performance can master thick listening, you would be mistaken. Thick listening is not primarily a professional practice requiring arduous and elaborate training. In fact, it is the opposite. It is the most common, everyday — and perhaps even profane — way of listening. Every single sonic persona practices it, most of the time. Because it is such a fundamental and normal practice, most listeners do not recognise its inherent complexity. They seem to consider it a specialised skill.

One of the most prominent examples of this basic listening skill came from the performer and composer Pauline Oliveros. In her description of a practice she called “Quantum Listening”, she described this indeed very common, everyday form of thick listening.

“Jumping like an atom out of orbit to a new orbit – creating a new orbit – as an atom occupies both spaces at once one listens in both places at once. Mothers do this. One focuses on a point and changes that point by listening. Quantum Listening is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously – changing and being changed by the listening.” (Oliveros 2022: 30, 2010: 74, 2000: 2)

To some readers and listeners, this description might sound confusing. Can’t we only listen to one thing? Aren’t we simply confused and inattentive, distracted and out of our minds, when we are, in the words of Pauline Oliveros: “listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously” (ibid.)?

Actually, we are not. Because, actually, you and I and most people around us are indeed listening in many different ways not only during the day, but also in one and the same situation at once.

Does this come as a shock? Or are you relieved -- and reassessing how often you doubted your listening abilities in the past? “I need to focus more!”, “Why am I so distracted?”, “How can I get myself to really listen to this one sound or piece of music?”

Our “listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously” (ibid.) is indeed common. It is not a flaw. It is a feature.

It is a necessary, productive and versatile skill among listeners — a “sonic skill” (Bijsterveld, 2019). Not only mothers possess this skill. Also the players in a team, playing soccer, Wheelchair handball, or ice hockey; the stage performers in any musical ensemble, be it in Hip Hop or Jazz or New Chamber Music. Listening in multiple states and pluriform relational connections all at once, is a rather common perceptual habit. It is not out of the ordinary. It actually is the ordinary.

On the contrary, I would argue that reducing one’s perceptual attention to a single sound or sensory experience is an extremely challenging endeavour, if not downright impossible. Such an achievement may require years of exercise, or even decades, and may be the desired outcome of a lifetime of training. However, it is almost never a simple, straightforward sensory practice for listeners and their sensorium. This is because our sensorium is defined by its manifold and pluriform connections, which are constantly altering and reorganising, adding and renewing their networks most of our lives, incessantly (Howes 2024).

Thick listening is the default setting.
Photo credits: International Handball Federation
Photo credits: International Handball Federation

Thick Listening as Method

Thick listening is a method of listening to a given listening situation that is not explicitly experimental, detached, reduced, particularly skillful or refined. It allows you to listen in a way that more closely resembles the complex, hybrid, distracted and sometimes confused everyday listening that is immersed, entangled, tangential, superficial, idiosyncratic and erratic, and therefore thoroughly generative. Thick listening is most likely the exact mode of listening you are performing involuntarily — right now.

You might ask: what use is a research method that simply reproduces an uneducated and banal way of listening, rather than refining listening and transcending common everyday practices? The goal of transcending everyday listening is noble. It is also artistically and academically productive and inspiring. Concepts of listening such as “reduced listening” (Schaeffer 1966, Chion 1994) and “deep listening” (Oliveros, 2005) have advanced our understanding of listening in the past by challenging our everyday listening habits. Although it can often be difficult to achieve, reduced listening can indeed train one’s ability to listen to a sound “independent of its cause and meaning” (Chion 1994: 29), so without simply referring to practices and apparatuses by which it was produced. It trains aesthetic and sonic sensibilities, because: “One has to listen many times over” (Chion 1994: 30). Similarly, deep listening inspires and motivates listeners to refine their versatility and compassion when listening to one or more aspects of a sonic artefact or listening situation. According to Oliveros, deep listening is:

“learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound—encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible." (Oliveros 2005: xxiii). Its practice is, however, not limited to one singular moment. It demands actually a commitment on an existential and at times even a spiritual level: "For me Deep Listening is a lifelong practice." (Oliveros 2022: 36)

As a consequence, there is one clear flaw in these highly refined modes of listening. Inadvertently and often unintentionally, they might lead to neglect and to condescension towards the versatility of everyday listening that is untrained; allegedly unskilled; or even distracted. Such disregard would be fatal.

As researchers and scholars of sound we would simply be ignoring then the intricate complexity and stunning agility of a listening that you, I and probably all readers of this text perform on every single day. In this regard, thick listening is much more closely related to “ubiquitous listening”(Kassabian 2013): “a ‘less-than-fully-attentive activity,’ as most people rarely listen to music as a primary focus.” (Kassabian 2013: 51) The mode of thick listening implies and embraces, therefore, the mode of ubiquitous listening, when “we listen ‘alongside’, or simultaneously with, other activities. [...] It comes from everywhere and nowhere.” (Kassabian 2013: 9f.)

Thick listening embraces the pluriform, erratic, tangential, fuzzy, entangled and unstable nature of one’s listening. As a method, thick listening allows researchers to avoid fixating on highly idealised, perhaps even largely imaginary constructs of listening that no single creature on this planet ever practiced for extended stretches of time.

Thick listening puts all the abject, questionable, distracted, impatient and unfocused modes of listening at its centre. These are our most commonly used forms of listening, even if we might not dare to admit it.

Thick listening is listening in the thick of it.




    Further Reading:


  1. Auinger, Sam & Odland, Bruce (2007), “Hearing Perspective (Think with Your Ears),” in: C. Seiffarth, Carsten & Sturm, Martin (eds.) Sam Auinger. Katalog, Wien: Folio.
  2. Augoyard, Jean-François & Torgue, Henri (2006), Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press.
  3. Bellous, J. E. & M.B. Clark (2022), Thick listening at thin moments: Theoretical groundwork in spiritual care practice. Edmonton, AB: Tall Pine Press, 2022.
  4. Bijsterveld, Karin (2019), Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and Engineering (1920s-Present), London: Palgrave McMillan.
  5. Chion, Michel (1994), Audio-Vision Sound on Screen, New York: Columbia University Press.
  6. El Adraoui,Fatima Ezzahra, Didi Seddik, Mohamed Mouad, Rabah-Rabbou, Mounir & Jabbouri, Jihad (2024), “Conceptualization of knowledge as dynamic flows: Strategic pillar for sustainable competitiveness”, International Journal of Research in Economics and Finance, 1(4), 58–76.
  7. Geertz, Clifford (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
  8. Gendlin, Eugene T. (1992), “The wider role of bodily sense in thought and language”, in: Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine (ed.), Giving the body its due, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 192-207.
  9. Glaros, Angela (2018), “Teaching Music & Difference: Thick Listening”, in: AMS Musicology Now, August 27, 2018. Online
  10. Hadjimichael, Demetris, Ribeiro, Rodrigo & Tsoukas, Haridimos (2024),” How Does Embodiment Enable the Acquisition of Tacit Knowledge in Organizations? From Polanyi to Merleau-Ponty”, in: Organization Studies, 45(4), 545-570.
  11. Howes, David (2024), Sensorium. Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures (Series: Cambridge Elements: Histories of Emotions and the Senses), Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres.
  12. Kassabian, Anahid (2013), Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity, Berkeley: University of California Press.
  13. Kirchin, Simon (2013), “Thick Concepts and Thick Descriptions”, in: Kirchin, Simon (ed.), Thick Concepts, New York: Oxford University Press.
  14. Krukowski, Damon (2017), “Surface Noise”, in: Paris Review. April 21, 2017. Online
  15. Luhrmann, Tanya M. (2015), “Thick Description: Methodology”, in: International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), Elsevier, pp. 291-293.
  16. Oliveros, Pauline (2022), Quantum Listening, London: Silver Press.
  17. Oliveros, Pauline (2010), “Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (To Practice Practice)”, in: Oliveros, Pauline, Sounding the Margins. Collected Writings 1992-2009, New York: Deep Listening Publications, pp. 73-91.
  18. Oliveros, Pauline (2005), Deep Listening. A Composer’s Sound Practice, New York: Deep Listening Publications.
  19. Oliveros, Pauline (2000), “Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory to Practice Practice”, in: MusicWorks #75, Fall 2000 Plenum Address for Humanities in the New Millennium, Hong Kong: Chinese University.
  20. Parker, Ara (2023), "Thick listening at thin moments: Theoretical groundwork in spiritual care practice", in: Consensus Vol. 44: Iss. 2, Article 25.
  21. Polanyi, Michael (1966), The Tacit Dimension, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc.
  22. Purser, Ronald E. (2019), McMindfulness: How Mindfulness became the New Capitalist Spirituality, London: Repeater.
  23. Ryle, Gilbert (1968a), "The Thinking of Thoughts: What is 'Le Penseur' Doing?", in: Studies in Anthropology 11:11.
  24. Ryle, Gilbert (1968b), "Thinking and Reflecting", in: The Human Agent. Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 1966-67, volume 1, London: Macmillan, 210–226. 11:11.
  25. Schaeffer, Pierre (1966/2017), Treatise On Musical Objects: Essays Across Disciplines. Translated by Christine North and John Dack, Berkeley: University of California Press.
  26. Siegel, R.D., Germer, C.K., Olendzki, A. (2009), “Mindfulness: What Is It? Where Did It Come From?”, in: Didonna, F. (eds.), Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness. New York: Springer, pp. 17-35.
  27. Schulze, Holger (2024), “Sonic Epistemologies”, in: Groth, Helen & Murphet, Julian (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2024, pp. 355-369.
  28. Schulze, Holger (2018), The Sonic Persona. An Anthropology of Sound, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
  29. Titon, Jeff Todd (2015), “Textual Analysis or Thick Description?”, in: Clayton, Martin, Herbert, Trevor & Middleton, Richard (2015), The Cultural Study of Music, 2nd Edition, London: Routledge, pp. 75-85.
  30. Walsh, Z. (2016), “A Meta-Critique of Mindfulness Critiques: From McMindfulness to Critical Mindfulness”, in: Purser, R., Forbes, D., Burke, A. (eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness: Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Cham: Springer, pp. 153-166.


*This article is part of the project The Sonic Turn, co-financed by AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the Administration of the National Cultural Fund. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or the way its results may be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the funding beneficiary.
About the Author

Holger Schulze

Holger Schulze is Full Professor in musicology at the University of Copenhagen and principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His sonic anthropology explores how sounds and listening in the 21st century stabilize, disrupt and permeate everyday life. Artistic practices and mundane commodities are of equal concern to his sonic critique.

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