This coauthored essay is an invited response to Dylan Robinson’s 2021 book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. The invitation built on his original act of holding space for settler engagement in the conclusion of the book, for which he had asked Waterman and Wong to contribute a dialogue. The authors reflect on prompts provided by Robinson and engage in an iterative, dialogical reflection on how Hungry Listening changed their approaches to decolonial practice, positionality, and being-in-relation through sound. Cvetkovich addresses the book’s impact on her approach to affect, sensory experience, Canadian vs. US vs. Indigenous approaches to affect, and the importance of listening in feminist and queer cultures. She also reflects on how Hungry Listening changed her understanding of the Vancouver and the Fraser River Valley areas. Waterman writes about how the book sharpened her commitment to listening and writing as method and cultural poesis, explored through her ongoing multisensory practice-based research with d/Deaf musicians. She considers her attempts at “attunement,” an embodied critical listening that un/decenters the settler self, and its implications for sound studies and listening studies. Wong reflects on Robinson’s challenge to liberal humanism and its implications for US-based ethnomusicology. She offers a granular example of DJing the crossfade during live radio broadcasts as a place to attempt reciprocal rather than hungry listening. All three authors reflect on the new models for listening demanded by the book and recommit to continued effort to listen differently. Each offers examples of their positioned listening practices and considers how those practices are more akin to visiting since reading Hungry Listening.
Revisiting Hungry Listening: A Conversation
Ann Cvetkovich is currently professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and professor emerita in the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University. She was previously the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and inaugural director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Duke, 2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (Duke, 2012).
Ellen Waterman holds the Helmut Kallmann Chair for Music in Canada and is professor in the School for Studies in Art and Culture at Carleton University. Her interdisciplinary research in music and sound studies engages with improvisation, performance ecologies, listening, and community-engaged research-creation methodologies. Waterman is also active as a flutist/vocalist specializing in creative improvisation, a practice that informs her research-creation. Her instructional score Bodily Listening in Place (2022), commissioned by New Adventures in Sound Art, explores an expanded concept of listening across different sensory modalities. Waterman’s books include three edited collections: Sonic Geography Imagined and Remembered, The Art of Immersive Soundscapes (with Pauline Minevich and James Harley), and Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound, and Subjectivity (with Gillian Siddall). In 2021 Waterman founded the Research Centre for Music, Sound, and Society in Canada, dedicated to exploring the complex and diverse roles that music and sonic arts play in shaping Canadian society.
Deborah Wong is an ethnomusicologist and professor emerita of music at the University of California, Riverside. She has written three books: Louder and Faster: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko (2019), Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (2004), and Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Ritual (2001). She served as editor for Nobuko Miyamoto’s extraordinary memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution (2021). Committed to public sector work at the national, state, and local levels, she serves on the board of Great Leap. Her happiest hours of the week are spent going on air with her weekly radio show Gold Mountain for KUCR 88.3 FM in Riverside. She was a member of the Taiko Center of Los Angeles for many years and still dances bon-odori every summer in Southern California Obon gatherings. She is a core member of the collaborative team that conducted the 45 interviews in the forthcoming book Riverside Women Creating Change: Stories and Inspiration from Activists and Organizers (Inlandia Institute, 2024). She is a former president of the Society for Ethnomusicology.
Ann Cvetkovich, Ellen Waterman, Deborah Wong; Revisiting Hungry Listening: A Conversation. Resonance 1 December 2024; 5 (4): 385–398. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2024.5.4.385
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