Revisiting Hungry Listening

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

Active listening · Communication · Media Studies and Communication · Psychology