Blind Mode/Blind Listening Techniques

Blind Mode/Blind Listening Techniques Mara Mills (bio) and Andy Slater (bio) Blind people are often assumed by the sighted to have remarkable organic listening powers, yet blind ways of listening are learned through schooling, improvisation, and community protocols for using sound to infer and hack environments built for vision.1 Scholars in sound studies have shifted attention from instruments and soundscapes to listening techniques and rigorously-tutored sonic skills, but they have mostly not considered blind students who have been subject to formal listening curricula for decades.2 Blind people have taken some elements of these lessons, rejected others, and amalgamated them with tacit blind expertise to generate counter-sounds and blind soundscapes within and around sighted architectures. Just as deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim describes her work as "unlearning sound etiquette" (Kim quoted in Weisblum), blind listening techniques—often linked to blind sound production—contravene sonic norms, even when the goal is access to conventional visual landscapes and texts. Andy Slater is a blind sound artist who records, transcribes, and otherwise documents these techniques, from the clicks and echoes of cane [End Page 297] navigation, to the "background sounds" of subways that act as keynotes for identification and safety, to screen readers like VoiceOver for converting text to speech. Mara Mills is a media studies professor and historian of electronics, electroacoustics, and disability. For this forum on disciplinary listening and new sonic approaches, we talked about blind aural discipline and "blind mode"—past and present, learned and unlearned. mara: I love the liner notes for your album Unseen Reheard (No Index records, 2020). A manifesto on blind listening! Like the passage where you describe sighted hearing people as passive listeners: When a visually impaired person listens they are employing their ears in many ways. Safety, spatial identification, problem-solving, navigation and wayfinding, and of course pouring a drink. Our hearing isn't magical, but if you ask I will tell you that it is. It is safe to say that my listening practice and routines are different from most sighted people because of how I've trained my ears. Installation artist Christine Sun Kim, who is deaf, has stated that hearing people are all passive listeners. I would like to up the ante and claim that sighted hearing people are the passive ones. Many of us blind folks are hyper-active listeners including yours truly. I use this accusation to drive the work on this album and ask that the viewer keep my magical hearing in mind. (Slater) I want to know more about your listening practices and how you document them. Your work offers such a rare instance of listening itself on record. andy: I have two modes of listening when it all comes down to it. There's the Deep Listening aesthetic which is something I learned in school, and then there's Blind mode which is intuitive. Deep Listening (Oliveros) is a practice familiar to a lot of people serious about music and soundscape experiences. It's a neutral way of exploring sound, letting it happen and accepting what you hear. Blind mode is judgmental. What is that sound and is it going to run me over? Will it bite me? Can I put it my pocket? How will it influence the rest of my day? You can't really toggle off Blind mode. Every sound is defined and requires investigating. The similarities between the two modes are things like pinpointing tiny sounds hidden in a crowd, following sounds as they move. Both can evoke emotions, but Blind mode insists that you pay attention to those emotions. [End Page 298] Both natural and built environments can be exciting sonically, but they can also be boring. One benefit that a blind person has is the permission to disrupt the soundscape. There is a phonology of the blind body. Our hands, our mouths, our feet, our canes, and our dogs create a language of mobility through touch and sound. It's choreography. A sighted person can tell that they are in a marble room with a bunch of windows just by looking around. I figure that out by moving through the space, tapping my cane...

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