Untraining the Ear:
Listening Sessions

It is a herald, for change is inscribed in noise faster than it transforms society… Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that is essentially political.

Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, 1985.

With the Untraining the Ear Listening Sessions we propose exercises to decipher sound beyond its contextual affiliation of geography, genre, and valences of identity. It is an attempt to press II [pause] to the daily storm of sonic vibrations, and voice a call to examine and explore the auditory beyond the hearing and start to listen.

In this new series of of sonic encounters, each session will involve a curated auditory experience which suggests a voyage into a specific mode of listening proposed by an artist. Artists will to take part of SAVVY’s sonic exploration and understanding of sound based exercise-performance and an allegorical conversation appertaining to the theme of choice. Collectively, in order to understand, to question and possibly contextualize how we listen to the world today we (the space, the performers, the moderators and the audience) will sonically and rhetorically navigate through the proposed theme(s) to hear beyond our ears, and to hear canons found in sound.

Each session will be a conscious inquiry into the process of listening, an inquiry into how our listening is shaped, constructed or altered through filters of society, politics, economics, cultures and narratives. The sessions become a collective exercise in which, through a discussion and a performance, we ask the artists, moderators, listeners, and ourselves – as an art space – to (un)train and (re)train, (de)construct and (re)construct the process of normative hearing and give space for non-normative listening.

The unfolding process of the series will allow us to navigate through, explore within – and reflect on various topics. We will touch upon the re-representation of the marginalized and suppressed sounds, voices and noises. We will champion her and their stories by amplifying nonlinear and non-binary sounds and noises. We will question and challenge the power and politics of sound technologies, production aesthetics and the precepts/presets within the global narratives. The sessions will allow us to re-represent and re-position musics from the world.