The Hearing Place: Hearing the Unheard for Place Dialogue
Overview: Sponsored by the University of Missouri Center for Humanities, the Hearing Place Studio Lab is a faculty working group involved in developing interdisciplinary approaches for hearing andlistening to place through research collaborations and campus/community-facing sound performances and installations.
The project of hearing and listening has long been at the core of humanistic study. The Hearing Place StudioLab is based on the idea that an other—a different person (human or nonhuman), or a text, a painting, a piece of music, even a place— communicates in a way that is potentially, at least partially, accessible to the listening, but by means that may not yet be fully represented in the listener’s pre-existing system of signification. Listening depends on a general receptivity to a soundscape whose significance emerges in specific encounters with places. An ensemble of such encounters constitutes a “place dialogue.” This sort of dialogue, in which participants must learn how to construct models of others through listening practices that register the unheard, is how the relations of coexistence are worked out. Our StudioLab engages MU scholars, students and staff, and human and nonhuman communities in central Missouri to address key problems in this task of hearing place.