Listening and the Processual Experience

The other day I was thinking about written language and how it is processed in our minds. We are taught to identify letters and words visually, which has an aural associative and equivalent component through spoken speech.

Through denotative language, we have a means of processing explicit information visually and aurally, and while there is an act of interpretation that occurs, there are commonly accepted definitions for understanding the information, and standardized syntactical structures that tie them together.

Aural language is a sound phenomenon, and giving them the structure of words allows us to communicate in an explicit sense with sound. However, plenty of sound that doesn't fall into the realm of verbal language has explicit associative content, and even more specific communicative content even if we don't or can't interpret it as such.

The sound of a bird chirping, a jackhammer pounding pavement, or a car horn beeping, all are associated with their phenomenal "happening." Even the sound of ice cracking on a frozen lake is in some sense the water speaking, the sound equivalent of its physical state.

Our ability to process the explicit information embedded in sound depends on our knowledge of its underlying phenomenon; beyond knowing that a bird is chirping and being able to identify it as such, the only way to understand what it's saying is knowledge of bird calls.

We experience and understand sound processually, dependent simultaneously on an understanding of the sound that has already occurred, the sound that is currently being heard, and a sense of momentum based on the past and present that helps set expectations for the future.

There's a sense when approaching any subject that is culturally embedded since birth, be it religion, language, or even our sense of what is or is not musical, that we have to first unlearn what we believe we know before we can start to understand the broader context of what it is or can be.

Oftentimes there is a quite steep curve of unlearning that must take place, but how can you learn to unlearn? Assuming unlearning is a positive development, how do we avoid the negative aspects of conditioned learning in the first place?

What would a negative theology of music look like?

These are the questions that keep me up late at night.