The Eye of the Ear

The Eye of the Ear

“Listening requires an attunement to sonic frequencies of affect and impact. It is an ensemble of seeing, feeling, being affected, contacted, and moved…” — Tina Campt, Listening to Images^[1]

“The first concern of all music in one way or another is to shatter the indifference of hearing, the callousness of sensibility, to create that moment of solution we call poetry, our rigidity dissolved when we occur reborn—in a sense hearing for the first time.” — Lucia Dlugoszewski, liner notes of Tender Theater Flight Nageire^[2]

“I am interested in the sensual nature of sound, its power of synchronization, coordination, release and change. Hearing represents the primary sense organ—hearing happens involuntarily. Listening is a voluntary process that through training and experience produces culture.” — Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening^[3]

What would it mean to listen without mastery? — after Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening^[4] and Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements^[5]

I. The First Frequency

The ear sits open on the body: open to the whispers of language, the wails of the land, the thrums of instruments and machines, and, before all of these, to water. The ear is, before anything else, a water-organ. It opens first in fluid, immersed within the body’s own liquid interior and the pulses and tides of the womb. In Yoruba and Afro-diasporic cosmology, Yemayá, Yeye Ọmọ Ẹja, “mother whose children are as numerous as fish”, is a water orisha, guardian of rivers, and, through the diaspora, of the oceanic depths from which life emerges. Through the violence and rupture of the Middle Passage, she traveled with those who were stolen, expanding from the river to encompass all seas. In her sacred story, Yemayá’s waters broke over the primordial earth, and from that breaking, the rivers, seas, and life itself began, with the amniotic and aquatic assuming substance in the same gesture. Across oceans, traditions have carried cosmologies of creation that begin with water, sound, and word^[6]. Was water the first sound the initial ear heard? Can we envision masses of water birthing our first organ of hearing, and imagine the secrets this organ bears? Can we see sound as spatial, serpentine, and sentient?

From these depths, where water became word, and where the first listening began, we enter. Carried by the political dimensions of deep listening—as sound experienced through the senses, breathing within the struggles of our shared stories, and released through movement, rhythm, and communion on dancefloors and in vibration—we invite surrender to the wisdom of sound, in opposition to the scopic violence of the colonial gaze and its attempts to capture, through The Eye of the Ear.

The Eye of the Earnames a field of listening that is intentional, reciprocal, reparative, and interdependent. It foregrounds the ear as a guiding organ, one often subordinated to vision. It holds that sound is necessary to attune us to currents both subtle and urgent: the vibrations and forms of communication that shape our shared perception, the social structures embedded within them, and our relations to ourselves, one another, and the world. In conditions of external violence that are structural, colonial, intimate, imperial, and chronic, the act of turning inward, and again outward, to cultivate sonic attunement, is a form of repair. To listen deeply is also, necessarily, to tend to oneself and to one another. Audre Lorde named this precisely in writing that, “caring [for myself] is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare”^[7]. The Eye of the Ear centers this sentiment at its core. To understand the body as cells daily exposed to vibration, to resonance and dissonance, to frequencies visible and invisible moving through and between us, is to acknowledge the intrinsic cacophony and polyphony of our shared existence, and to hear within it, a calling to nurse our collective becoming.

II. The Reciprocal Ear

Sound, as sound artist Nkisi declares, “is world building”^[8]. When listening deeply, doors can open towards recalibration—a recalibration against dominating forces that attempt to harden, silence, stifle, or separate us. To listen, as Lucia Dlugoszewski asserts, is to come undone and to be reconstituted: to arrive at a process that breaks through. This is possible because sound is matter, it is physical, and a form of touch. As sound travels, it touches millions of particles, and when it goes through our bodies, it is the flesh of sound and song touching us. We stand before the voice, instrument, and word as they summon the whole body into feeling and listening.

For Pauline Oliveros, the practice of deep listening drew a fundamental distinction: hearing, she insisted, happens to us; listening is what we choose to do and become with it—a voluntary process through which, with attention and agency, culture and communication are made and remade. From this experience a theory grew, that what is heard is changed by listening, and that listening changes the listener in return. Oliveros called this “the listening effect”^[9], a reciprocal loop between perceiver and perceived, between the one who attends, and the field of sonority and consciousness that opens in response. Oliveros is clear that this reciprocity has stakes, as sound is political. How we listen, and to whom, is ultimately a matter of what sustains life, and what silences it. Tina Campt extends this mode of listening further; the effort of listening, she writes, is an ensemble of seeing, feeling, being affected, contacted, and moved^[10]. Such listening attunes us to frequencies of impact that make felt the differences among us, and what, despite everything, we will always have in common.

This practice stands in opposition to the weaponization of sound by regimes of violence. From the relentless drone strikes over Palestine and its people, where acoustic terror splits the sky open; to sonic cannons deployed against protesters organizing against extraction, corruption, and imperial recklessness; to the industrial noise that saturates laboring bodies over years, eroding nervous systems, sonic harm is structural, targeted, and familiar. The Eye of the Ear opens to acknowledge a reclamation of sound as a site of possible sovereignty, towards communication and catharsis, modes of rest and repair, and tools of refusal.

To listen is to decide which sounds carry and which are sequestered. Practiced together, these actions constitute a process of re-attunement: a methodology that trains us to receive, absorb, and respond, within and without, allowing the eye of the ear to lead us. In the wake of colonial and imperial orders that wound the sacredness of life itself and seek to fracture and numb our attention, working to sever us from one another, theEye of the Ear redirects us towards restoring the ear’s innate request to meeting. It asks we locate ourselves in relation to one another’s histories, communities, and lives to invite a participatory engagement in which we welcome being altered by the sounds we inhabit, so to act upon them, and carry them with us.

III. Listening Otherwise

Starting from Pauline Oliveros, deep listening can be understood as both an expanded attentiveness to sound and a critical point of departure for decolonial sonic practices. Critical “listening” can open towards the unknown, the opaque, and the untranslatable, pushing against ethnographic modes of listening. In this sense, deep listening must be pushed further by questioning listening itself as a historically conditioned mode of perception, entangled with power, to seek ways of listening otherwise. As Landry writes in her book A Decolonizing Ear, “If colonial listening can be characterized by pursuits of recording, acquisition, and collection in the service of the empire, then decolonial listening must not only perform the opposite, but also aspire to an undoing of colonial listening.”^[11] Indigenous approaches to listening emphasize relationality, consent, and context, where not everything is meant to be heard, understood, or shared freely. Julietta Singh echoes and develops an approach where listening opens uncertainty, allowing sound to exist without control, rather than being an object of desire for oppressive structures aiming to attain and extract knowledge.

The Eye of the Ear situates listening as an embodied, social, and political practice. It unfolds across installations, sonic offerings, and dancefloor experiences, where artists call and respond to these frameworks—working in and across traditions of sound, experimental music, oral and mythological epistemes, among others—to center sound as medicine, as artist and sound healer Guadalupe Marvavilla underscores, serving as a foundation for community, and as material for social, psychic, and spiritual equilibrium. Listening is upheld as a site of feedback: a way of sensing histories held in sound, of feeling how resistance shapes rhythm and motion, and of becoming attentive to the textures within the relational totality of worlds that move through air, body, and memory.

The other methodology is one where deep listening is counter-listening, as opposed to close listening or listening along^[12], both in the veins of Robinson and Singh, where mastery and ‘perfection’ are put into question, and listening is for sensing and opening, versus the procuring or solving any given matrix of sound and its tellings.       

This listening asks for a convergence where attention expands and perception is active. It is a mode of participation, responsive to what emerges by calling to us and our calling back. Within the series, vibration is the vector and the teacher, pointing towards sounds that echo from the past into the present and ask for shared attention. It proposes listening as an attunement to the frequencies that persist despite every effort to be silenced.The Eye of the Ear holds open the questions that sustain collective listening: How do we listen in ways that acknowledge power, positionality, and history? How do we cultivate practices that value multiple voices against imposed canons that silence and erase the marginalized? And how, in attending to the technologies of sound, do we become more capable of listening to what is being asked of us by the voices of the world, spanning temporalities and geographies? Daniela Medina Poch, artist, author, and educator, relates with these questions by considering different politics of listening as well as the presence of sound in public spaces as it exists across regions, both in Pomeranian and Latine communities.

IV. The Rhythm Effect and Non-Static Listening

The Eye of the Ear, as a form of re-envisioning, moves toward strategies that engage both our bodies and the materiality of our surroundings. Movement itself, and dance in particular, reflects the intricacy of listening as a deeply reciprocal process. There is a strong resonance here with historically situated concepts of dance as a form of communal expression, as discussed by José Esteban Muñoz, in his notions of “queer futurity”, who traces how the dance floor functions as a site of collective becoming^[13], Barbara Ehrenreich who recovers the long suppression of communal, ecstatic movement as a form of social control^[14], and Alice Walker in Hard Times Require Furious Dancing^[15], insisting dance is an act of resilience that is fierce, fuming, necessary, and rebellious.

Dancing, like listening, is always historically situated. Many dance forms have emerged in response to specific and harsh social conditions, as spaces where voices could be expressed. Following Walter Mignolo, we approach the idea of “border thinking,” which seeks to delink from existing power structures, where dancefloors can be understood as such a strategy. Spaces where sound and movement intertwine with the restorative capacities of collective experience, through sonic immersion and shared activation. Within this interwoven relation, movement and dance create possibilities for delinking from given structures and the colonial matrix of power. Here, dance finds its voice in the celebration of everyday movement, where roles and positions remain fluid and in constant negotiation. Parties, understood as secular rituals, are sites where participants renegotiate categories of social belonging and their place within social structures through dance.

According to Hillegonda Rietveld, DJs play a crucial role in shaping new alliances: they convene and guide participants, facilitating shifts in collective and individual states of mind. Their roles are multiple as “party leader…auditory artist, music programmer, beatmatcher, cultural masher, creative music archivist, record collector…witch-doctor, or cyborgian shaman”^[16]. These practices can generate musical and sonic environments where such practices become tools of equality, situated wherever we choose to enact them, contributing to processes of anti-colonial listening, structures of solidarity against oppressive structures, towards necessary processes of re-worlding.

            By Agnieszka Kilian and Kelly Nayaase Krugman

Bałtycka Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej BGSW www.bgsw.pl

Project in co-operation with Nadbałtyckie Centrum Kultury in Gdańsk

www.nck.org.pl

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^[1] Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017).

^[2] Lucia Dlugoszewski, liner notes to Tender Theater Flight Nageire, CRI SD 388 (New York: Composers Recordings, Inc., 1978).

^[3] Pauline Oliveros, Quantum Listening (Pauline Oliveros Publications, 1999).

^[4] Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

^[5] Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Duke University Press, 2018.

^[6] Water, sound, and word recur as cosmogonic forces across distinct geographic and cultural traditions: Ibn Arabi’s Sufi metaphysics describes the nafas al-Rahman, the breath of the Compassionate, as the originating vibration from which all existence unfolds; for the Diné of Navajo Nation, emergence narratives tell of the Holy People singing and speaking worlds into being across primordial waters; the Mayan Popol Vuh opens with creators who think and speak existence into form, among others.

^[7] Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: And Other Essays (Firebrand Books, 1988), 92.

^[8] ​​Lain Iwakura, “‘Sound as a Portal towards Other Dimensions and Other Forms of Self’ — An Interview with Nkisi (Part I),” Struma+Iodine, June 26, 2025, https://strumandiodine.com/article/sound-as-a-portal-towards-other-dimensions-and-other-forms-of-self-an-interview-with-nkisi-part-i/.

^[9] Pauline Oliveros, “Quantum Listening: From Practice to Theory (To Practice Practice)” (1999), 1.

^[10] Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017), 42.

^[11] Olivia Landry, A Decolonizing Ear (University of Toronto Press, 2022), 76.

^[12] Close listening, as developed in sound studies and later expanded by Pauline Oliveros through her practice of “deep listening,” refers to an attentive, immersive engagement with sonic detail as an alternative politics of listening. The notion of “listening along” introduces a relational or positional stance, though in decolonial critique the preposition becomes fraught, implying potential alignment with settler-colonial frameworks or ethnographic authority. Decolonial approaches therefore call for a questioning of the assumptions of universality, transparency, and ownership embedded within dominant listening practices, working beyond a “deeper or closer” listening, towards questioning continuous with the counter-listening invoked here.

^[13] José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009).

^[14] Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Metropolitan Books, 2006).

^[15] Walker, Alice. Hard Times Require Furious Dancing: New Poems. New World Library, 2010.

^[16] Hillegonda Rietveld, “Infinite Noise Spirals: Affect and the Listening Subject,” in DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music, ed. Bernardo Alexander Attias, Anna Gavanas, and Hillegonda Rietveld (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1.