Week 1: Reaction to "Quantum Listening"
This is a reaction to "Quantum Listening" by Pauline Oliveros.
Oliveros describes a process of active, consciousness listening as a way of understanding the world, rather than the passive listening which all of us engage in most of the time.
I was struck by the "musical" structure of the essay - it has a basic rhythm (the layout) and themes (quantum listening), on which she improvises and digresses (eg. microphone on mars, hearing loss, the nature of industrial sound). As such, I found the piece to be more readily comprehended by thinking of it as a song, and hence not "reading" but "listening" to it. It is a little hard to follow as a conventional essay - maybe it is a transcript of a lecture?
In India, I had some exposure to the concept of "seed mantras", sounds that represent basic aspects of reality without needing any linguistic or onomatopeic context. It seems that Oliveros is travelling on a convergent path!