Ways of Hearing is a misleading title, at least it misled this reader to expect it to do with hearing, the sense, the faculty humans possess. And it is marketed in the category LCSH: Music — social aspects. Nor is it about music as such, but only about “folk-rock” as told by one of its performers. The aspects are mainly about Krukowski’s views of the production of that in his experience. Offered to be a pendant to, inspired by, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, be that as it may, neither in any way a match for Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking. In fact, this very slim paperback is a transcript of a podcast series, a miscellany of autobiography, brief interviews and quotations, in street and shop talk language, illustrations [sound effects refs in square brackets], divided into six instalments titled Time, Space, Love, Money, Power, and Signal & Noise. Krukowski’s discovery, aka his message, is that the passage, much in the day’s winds, from the ‘analog [recording] studio’ to the ‘digital era’ has decisive impact: a choice “between a world enriched by noise and a world that strives toward signal only,” (p. 133). In that the former included ambient and contextual noises, while the latter isolates selected pure signals only. (Maybe he means the gap between acoustic and amplified/recorded rock). Roll over HiFi. Purity and tone quality are not normally depreciated, rather considered an improvement. We sure miss the coughing and sneezing in the parterre, the puffing and foot shuffling on the dance floor, (the canned applause no one would miss). Noise an enrichment?

True, transmissions do distort; almost everyone is now familiar with the difference between voice and phone voice, with hearing their own voice reproduced, etc., but even if digital implies compression, and it may be easier to transmit small data packets (p. 62), by happy contrast Krukowski also holds that recipients supply the missing, the filtered away parts (p. 67) much like Gestaltists held.

Krukowski aims to make the installments flow together; yet, what money, his notes on folk-rock performers’ compromised income (p. 72), or power, his notes on “major label record companies” (p. 88), have do with hearing is less than clear; these are aspects, however social, of neither music nor hearing, but mere commentary on his chosen industry. That industry went online, in consequence he makes the curious statement that sound (music) is not tangible, is in the air, and therefore can’t be property (p. 78), “after all, it’s hard to sell something immaterial,” (p. 76). (Bypassing all ‘services’ such as psychology, counseling, etc.) Which he indirectly confirms by adding with bravura “my band Galaxy 500, we ripped off the Velvet Underground way more than you did! And we didn’t have to pay them a dime,” (p. 8). Love appears included in order to introduce expression and communication of, you guessed it, feeling, another digital deficit as it has no “proximity effect.”

However, unless you also subscribe to some such dictum as “our ears are so full of things that prevent us from hearing properly” there is in Krukowski’s ways no indication, still less argument or theory, causal, mental or other, of how these production changes affect (anybody’s) hearing.

That said, there’s a couple of remarkable propositions that bear some reflections.

Krukowski makes much of ‘latency’ (p. 14), the latterday digital version of the old, since Ole Rømer observed light’s hesitation, time-lag conception, namely here “digital communication introduced the time it takes a computer to process,” (p. 14). But there are no direct or instant transmission — except a kiss — and Krukowski overlooks that even analog processing takes time. So one hears it a little later than it was emitted, yet one hears it when one hears it, not sooner, not later. What does this difference come to? Acc. to Krukowski it comes to not “sharing” the same space — but who’d want to “share” anything, space or otherwise, with, say, a record player, an amplifier, a computer? or with a far away or far gone performer? It still strikes one as a peculiar use of ‘share’: to maintain that receiving (brief) messages or signals from someone (or many) can hardly be said to share time and space.

“[M]ics are like our ears — they hear everything.” (p. 127 — immediately contradicted cum qualified by “All microphones, if you speak closer to them, exaggerate the bassier, chestier tones in our voices,” p. 53). One shall hear much before the ears fall off. What pricks my ears here is the proposition that microphones hear. Do they? What’s between the ears is not between the mic and processor/comp, nor in the latter. Do mics hear anything? A microphone is a device. A device transforming acoustic vibrations into electrical oscillations (to pass further thru the grinder of transformations, now via files and on). Plainly mere registration. Is the ear also a device? While ears hear, mics register. A faltering analogy, hearing and registering have different logic: hearing is a capacity, you need not do anything, listening is an act, something you do. Between hearing and not hearing (deafness) is a rainbow of ways: listening in, overhearing, listening carefully, i.e. not missing a single iota of form, content, over or hidden tone, allusion, I can hear you now, hear this!, lend an ear, keen ear, sharp ear, all ears, deaf ears, etc. One may speak of a sensitive mic, but not of a phonophobic mic. But does a mic, a totally indiscriminate receptor (oblivious as a cash register to goods), register whether it transmits melodic, out of tune, bumbling performance, ragged attack, tell a singer from a shouter — it’s entirely unmusical (and hears nothing for its inner ear). How can one expect to play music with a tone-deaf (device)? (Do deaf people hear silence? implying something similarly paradoxical to the claim that you can’t see in the dark, yet of course you do see the darkness). It may be a perfect registrar of noise, sure. Does it make sense to “listen” to noise? is that what mics do? what do they make of silences? quit functioning, become torpid, wait? Music listeners meanwhile hear them, wouldn’t do without them, indeed they do appreciate pauses.

The rub is in the ‘re-‘ with every recording, reproduction, remastering, registration, one that has been debated from at least Plato’s to this day, and one might adapt Th. More: why shouldn’t a fake give you as much pleasure, if you can’t, with your very own ears, distinguish it from the real one? It makes no difference to you whether original or not — any more than it would to a deaf man. Given the forced entertainment ubiquitous in the elevator the globe now is, replete with all those transmissions practically speaking no one actually ever heard in original. People are now accustomed to digitalized audio equipment, loudspeakers, headphones, earbuds, and the like, in fact accustomed to only hear reproductions, even so-announced “live” performances, concerts, are all electrically manipulated to sound like, alas to reproduce, recordings. All you get is repro, machined tones subject to the regulations of machinists, the ‘sound man’ at his mixer. Nor should it be forgotten that those devices are man-made, including therefore the limitations they intentionally or unintentionally build into them. Krukowski is rightly pointing out that such “filters” are, in technology, driven by sales ambitions, (p. 76). But then, so is folksy and other rock productions. An episode in the man-machine entanglement.

© 2019 Lars Aagaard-Mogensen

Lars Aagaard-Mogensen, Wassard Elea