De la escucha atenta a la escucha visual. Aproximación teórica a los modelos de percepción de la música

Abstract

From various branches of knowledge we have wondered about the where, when, what and who of listening to music, but we have done little research on how we do it. It is only since the 1980s, with the so-called "auditory turn", that we have been trying to build an account that has listening as the focus of its analysis. In order to give an answer to how the listener listens, we must not only pay attention to his attitude and predisposition based on conventions and fashions, but also to his own subjectivity, to the cultural baggage as a sedimentation of experiences that form the body of knowledge, traditions and rituals, sound ecology, the use of technologies, and the study of history from a social and geopolitical perspective. Some solutions to the how of listening are found in the analysis of perception from the phenomenological approach, in social and cultural history, in sound studies, in musicology and ethnomusicology, anthropology, in the history of technology, cultural studies, philosophy and even in political history. One of the major problems of these interdisciplinary approaches is the absence of a theoretical framework and a methodology that shares epistemological elements. To a greater or lesser extent, this thesis draws on these branches of knowledge in order to propose a theoretical framework and a method for the analysis of music listening. To this end, I extract the factors that affect perception and that are shared both by the different (and few) histories focused on listening and by the classifications that provide typologies of listeners and aural models. After applying these factors to aural analysis, I propose five models of listening: physiological, socio-cultural, technological, syntactic-semantic-structural, and subjective-psychological. Finally, after commenting that these categories can be poured into an attempt to historicize listening, I observe six aesthetic periods from 1750 to the present, which, in turn, can be reduced to two major paradigms: the bourgeois construction of attentive listening around 1800, which reaches, not without a few crises, until the 1970s, when what I consider the second paradigm, distracted listening, emerges: effect and consequence of the renewal of the ideals of liberalism as well as the global use of new digital technologies.