Listening to the In-Between Part 3: Thinking with our Ears

In the three-part podcast series Listening to the In-Between we highlight different aspects of Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening® practice. We do so by providing backgrounds, practical listening exercises, and by exploring theoretical notions connected to Deep Listening.

In part I researcher and music journalist Joep Christenhusz explored Deep Listening, together with Ed McKeon and Ximena Alarcón, who are well-experienced deep listeners. Alarcón described the INTIMAL App© that she has developed over the last years.

In the second episode, Deep Listener Sharon Stewart invited us to participate in embodied rituals of attention, a practice of listening to or sensing aspects of power and powerlessness in the world that surrounds us. This reconnected her to the ground-breaking work of Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”.

In this third and final instalment, 'Thinking with our Ears', Joep Christenhusz returns to Ed McKeon and Ximena Alarcón, featuring Sharon Stewart as well.
They consider Oliveros's Deep Listening practice from several theoretical perspectives, thereby taking into account that theory and practice are always closely intertwined in Oliveros’s work.

Starting from the Extreme Slow Walk, an exercise in sonic awareness, they navigate a fluid in-between space, where conventional binaries like theory-practice, self-other, active-passive and subject-environment start to dissolve. This outward and inward journey results in embodied knowledge about, among other things, the nature of attention and concentration, our relation to our environment and our experience of self.

The second part of this episode consists of a conversation with Ximena Alarcón on the notions of the in-between, sonic migrations, and the migratory experience, and reflections on the role of language in the presence and experience of self.