Summary of Chion Listening

! Late ! Thought we just had to read and we'd discuss it in class with no reflection.

Causal sound is more of a sound that we base off direction, pressure, depth, etc. The causal sound can be relative to something we find familiar, or it's something that's taken out of context even though it has a familiar pitch and frequency, if we hear it somewhere we make an assumption that's what it is even though it may be out of it's own content. In this case we are identifying even unnamed sounds, and putting associations and faces to them. This causal type of listening is also most important to distinguish between human and animal sounds, or between mechanical and nature sounds. The way we interpret these sounds is how we put them into boxes that fit our descriptions of those images/sounds we associate each with.
Semantic listening is more to do with language and how the organization of these noises are varying in pitch, tone, and repetition, etc. It's about how the collection of these sounds creates a story, rather than what the sounds are itself. Semantic listening is the most expanded upon study of listening, because there are so many formulas and variations of communicative language all around the world that it's impossible to pinpoint a singular sound to a meaning unless it is connected with another sound to make a rhythm that is passed down and understood over time.
Reduced listening was the most interesting, because it was the one that most responded to me as an artist. You basically strip the sound of all it's prior meanings and associations and take it as a whole of its own. There are sounds that we take for granted, like the sound of rain or the sound of traffic on a crossing cross walk. These sounds have meaning and they come from somewhere, but sampled in a song or turned into a sample for a project can change the meaning to an individual completely. This is why music is so personal yet so much of a semantic in its own way. Musical artists study the past sounds of greater artists gone, and they take their meanings and experiences and relate it to their own, sometimes even reflecting similar sounds and gestures in their composition. This creates a language in it's own, but it's not stoic in it's meaning. It's constantly changing and being added onto, creating a whole other generation of collective memory to those singling out the sounds they find most resonating.