Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), Queen Mary University of London, Singing Voice interest Group.

Abstract: Humans around the world do many things in listening : they recognize the identity of the sound sources, they parse the acoustic data for significant structures, they feel human and non-human agencies and relate emotionally or spiritually to them. These abilities are probably universal, in the sense that they are available to all human beings. But can we do all of this simultaneously? We have been proposing a model for listening, which argues that humans may obtain one of three postures of listening. We call these indexical, structural, and enchanted listening. Each posture gives access to a different kind of auditory object with distinct ontological qualities. Listening to voices is a good test-case for this model, because it shows how the same auditory target can be apprehended as alternative auditory objects. The discussion proposed here will focus on the fact that the three postures are indeed alternatives (meaning that you can obtain only one at the time). The main reason for this is that although human brains are able to process various things at the same time, human awareness implies some kind of choice. Distinguishing between cognitive processes, attention and awareness is necessary in order to bridge between the empirical data of “hard” and “soft” sciences. When pondering the modeling of voices and of voice recognition, we would like to discuss especially the enchanted listening posture, which, as we assume, might be least recognized and most difficult to implement.

Our presentation is based on a co-authored paper we published in 2017-2018, so we suggest to read this paper along with its debate section in advance. It is available on-line at:
Original paper by Stoichițӑ & Brabec de Mori: https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.16418
Comments by Jérôme Dokic, Robert S. Hatten, Tim Ingold, Michel Kreutzer & Elizabeth Tolbert: https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.17547
Authors' response: https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.17579