Listening Talks

Listening is the act of paying attention to sounds. While often described as attention to sound, listening is increasingly understood as an interpretive process shaped by context and prior experience. It includes listening to the sounds of nature, listening to music, and perhaps most importantly, interpersonal listening, i.e. listening to other human beings. When listening to another person, one hears what they are saying and tries to understand what it means. Despite its broad applications, discussions of listening in interdisciplinary fields such as sound studies and art remain underrepresented.

Interpersonal listening involves complex affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes. Affective processes include the motivation to listen to others; cognitive processes include attending to, understanding, receiving, and interpreting content and relational messages; and behavioral processes include responding to others with verbal and nonverbal feedback.

Interpersonal listening is a skill for resolving problems. Poor interpersonal listening can lead to misinterpretations, thus causing conflict or dispute. Poor listening can be exhibited by excessive interruptions, inattention, hearing what you want to hear, mentally composing a response, or having a closed mind.

Listening is also linked to memory. According to one study, when there were background noises during a speech, listeners were better able to recall the information in the speech when hearing those noises again. For example, when a person reads or does something else while listening to music, he or she can recall what that was when hearing the music again later.

Listening can function rhetorically as a means of promoting Cross-cultural communication. Because listening is not only a cognitive or behavioral process but is also shaped by social, cultural, and relational contexts. Contemporary approaches emphasize that listening involves interpretation influenced by identity, experience, and power, rather than being a neutral or purely receptive act. In this sense, listening can be understood as a form of recognition that shapes how meaning is received and understood. Krista Ratcliffe (author of "Rhetorical Listening and Cross - Cultural Communication") built her argument upon two incidents in which individuals demonstrated a tendency to refuse the cross-cultural discourses. Listening also involves processes of recognition and misrecognition, where meaning may be affirmed, questioned, or dismissed depending on the listener’s expectations and assumptions.

From Listening on Wikipedia