Collaboration and consensus in listening

Abstract

This article adapts a conversation on a network project, Listening across Disciplines, which brought together artists, musicians, scientists, technologists and social scientists to discuss the use, value and application of listening as a shared methodology of inquiry and communication. The discussion focuses on one of the key issues emerging from this network: the question of consensus and collaboration in the development of a shared listening methodology. This conversation brings to public consideration one of the key discussion points of the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K.)--funded network project Listening across Disciplines <www.listeningacrossdisciplines.net>: the issue of consensus and legitimacy about the listened to and the heard, which touches the core of a cross-disciplinary engagement in listening. Anna Barney, professor of biomedical acoustic engineering at the University of Southampton, and Salomé Voegelin, Reader in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, led the project, which brought together artists, musicians, scientists, technologists and social scientists, as well as scholars and practitioners from the humanities, to discuss the use, value and application of listening as a methodology of inquiry and communication. The network investigated the aesthetic, analytical, data gathering and diagnostic function of listening and debated the legitimacy and evaluation of the heard in different disciplinary contexts. It asked: How might we be able to work collaboratively on the production of sonic knowledge and its application? What faith have we in reliability and consistency of sound, what scientific gains can we make if its unseen terrain achieves legitimacy and what aesthetic and conceptual possibilities then become accessible and thinkable? To bring into discourse a key finding of the network, this article takes the form of a conversation between the two lead researchers, conducted on their way home from presenting their ideas on listening as a democratic competence at the 4th Council of Europe Platform Exchange on Culture and Digitisation in Karlsruhe in October 2017. This conversation focuses on the status and importance of consensus in science and art, where listening and sound, as invisible modalities, highlight the fragility and perhaps the impossibility of agreement. The issue of establishing consensus seemed to be at the core of our cross-disciplinary network discussions: more specifically, the need on the side of the scientist to find consensus and the desire on the side of the artist to disrupt and question its possibility.

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ORCID for Anna Barney: orcid.org/0000-0002-6034-1478

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