{"id":7345,"date":"2021-05-04T08:23:58","date_gmt":"2021-05-04T06:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/?p=7345"},"modified":"2021-05-21T11:57:46","modified_gmt":"2021-05-21T09:57:46","slug":"ludek-certik-dar-naslouchani","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/ludek-certik-dar-naslouchani\/","title":{"rendered":"Lud\u011bk \u010cert\u00edk: The Gift of Listening"},"content":{"rendered":"

The art of ecological or broad listening is nothing new. All natural peoples knew that those who do not listen attentively to the world around them are doomed to destruction. It is simple: acoustic sensations convey to us the message of changes in our immediate surroundings, and therefore of impending danger. We will have to reassess our role in the great planetary orchestra, become more in tune with it and respect individual voices and instruments.<\/strong> The text was originally written for the magazine Sedm\u00e1 generace (2\/2021).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his humble memoir Silences So Deep<\/em> (named after a line from a poem by Alaskan poet John Haines), the American composer John Luther Adams outlines the difference between listening to music indoors and listening to music outdoors, outside a concert hall. Inside, Adams argues, we are separated from the outside world and our attention is riveted to a carefully curated compilation of sounds\u2014so our listening is somehow internalized, turned inward, directed inward. Listening to music outdoors (or at least in spaces where the hall is open to the outside), however, leads to a very different kind of listening awareness; Adams calls it ecological listening<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outdoors, human attention expands beyond the boundaries set by the musical work to the sparkling multiplicity of the world's voices: the chirping of goldfinches, the fluttering of aspen leaves, the patter of raindrops on tin windowsills. When listening outdoors, it is difficult to distinguish where a musical work begins and ends; everything audible, everything resonating and resonant, inevitably becomes part of it. And so we, the listeners, are forced to adapt to this new situation and listen further, to a greater distance and breadth: open<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This broad, integrative way of listening reminds us of how acoustically boundless, constantly surprising and delightful the world lies beyond the sphere of our culture and artistic endeavors \u2013 all those millions of intertwined voices, all those singing, calling, all that hiccups, whining, squeaking, rattling, chirping, growling and howling, but also the wailing of glaciers, the roaring of oceans, the incantations of rivers. In short, that not only human music and human speech, but the entire world is worthy of focused listening-immersion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, however, it brings us to a number of very urgent questions. Every adept of ecological listening sooner or later cannot avoid pondering how we humans fit into this more-than-human polyphony as unique and versatile acoustic beings, what our part is in it. Or also: What does our acoustic niche<\/em>And inevitably also, in what state this vast sound field is today and whether our diverse acoustic expressions, our most tender music and the most harsh noise, are, so to speak, in harmony with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Noise and commotion<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Nowadays, it is difficult to find a place in the world whose acoustic character is not marked to one degree or another by anthropogenic noise pollution. The sky is crisscrossed by airliners, the landscape is crisscrossed by highways, and the asphalt streams of commerce. Marine sonars echo beneath the sea, shock waves accompany seismic testing in the search for dwindling oil deposits. Quad bikes race through the sad, lifeless fields outside the city, and the crunch of harvesters echoes through the forest. In the mountains \u2013 traditionally temples of silence and seclusion, the last refuge of loners, mystics, saints, and shy deities \u2013 forms of shallow, self-centered tourism are growing uncontrollably. Colorful human columns form on built-up peaks, more and more cyclists pass more and more runners with headphones on \u2013 being in the mountains means conquering, performing. Silence (as the absence of the aforementioned disturbing influences) has become a valued rarity, a treasure of sorts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This colossal assault on our shared soundscape is understandably taking its toll. Both on our own people (for example, on the overall health of residents of large cities, where virtually everyone is exposed to high levels of stress from living in noisy, sound-numbing environments), but also on the countless lives of our non-human neighbors, especially their ability to communicate with each other. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One study showed that traffic noise affects crickets' ability to choose a mate based on their vocalizations. Another found that songbirds exposed to traffic stress (the study was conducted with zebra finches) experienced significant cognitive decline and had difficulty finding food. The problems aren't limited to land-dwelling animals, however. There have been documented cases of mass strandings of sperm whales (Ziphius cavirostris<\/em>) on land are directly related to the use of military sonar, which makes it impossible for sperm whales to navigate using their own echolocation - at least, that's what all the evidence suggests so far. And there is also a classic example of military maneuvers, which we can find in the wonderful book The Great Animal Orchestra<\/em> by the prominent figure in acoustic ecology, Bernie Kraus. He describes the incident with a population of falcons from California's Mono Lake, which use collective singing as a defense strategy against voracious predators. But when the military began conducting training flights with fighter jets over the lake, the deafening roar of the passing aircraft meant that the falcons were unable to synchronize their singing for long periods of time, making them easy targets for local carnivores, great horned owls and coyotes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, we are witnesses (and unintentional co-creators) of a sad paradox. Hand in hand with the increase in mechanical, human-produced noise in the world around us, the voices of wild creatures are decreasing in the wild. Whether the blame lies with poaching, illegal trade in exotic species, overfishing, clearing and burning of old forests, draining of wetlands, urbanization, damming of rivers or chemical agriculture, it is clear that the wild music of the world is today seriously threatened by the escalating pressure of human civilization, its insatiable demands and appetites. The consequence is a stealthy impoverishment of the world's sonic diversity (its living sound manifestations) and also a transformation of the acoustic mood or signature of specific places, their sonic flattening, homogenization. Perhaps the saddest is the recently published case of the Australian yellow-black honeyeater (Anthochaera phrygia<\/em>), of which there are so few left in the area of their original distribution that the young ones have no one to teach them how to sound correctly - and therefore they gradually forget their own singing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can ask: Is the savanna still a savanna when it loses the trumpeting of elephants and the barking of hyenas? Is the Arctic still an Arctic when it loses the voices of polar bears, arctic foxes, and snowy owls?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We increasingly feel that visual perceptions (from which most metaphors of knowledge are based) are not enough for us to understand the world, and can even be misleading in many ways. A typical and often cited example is the overwhelming contrast between a photograph of a seemingly untouched forest and a continuous audio recording of the same place. Where everything appears idyllic and pristine in the photograph, the recording can tell a completely different story: a story of a sky full of noisy airplanes, the incessant hum of a nearby highway, the clanking of circular saws and chainsaws. And the same story of invisible death and species impoverishment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than ever, it is therefore necessary to cultivate forms of listening and auditory sensitivity that would, in the long term, lead to the healing (silencing) of our shared sound environment and at the same time to a deepening of the relationship with the non-human enlightenment, the expansion of the acoustic self. By listening purposefully and openly to a place or another being, I not only express my interest in him\/her (and in general to that which transcends and transcends me as a finite being), but also reveal if something is wrong; only the one who listens attentively will realize the frightening absence of the common bird voice in his\/her surroundings and will ask what is behind this creeping loss. Silent spring will come quietly only to the one who is not deaf to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listen to the needs of others<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The art of ecological or broad listening is certainly nothing new. All natural peoples knew that those who do not listen attentively to the world around them are doomed to perish. It is simple: Acoustic sensations convey to us the message of changes in our immediate surroundings, and therefore of impending danger. But the view of the lives of non-human creatures was necessarily different. Indigenous cultures believed that animals and plants could hear them, that they listened to what we did, how we thought about them. But all this presupposes one important thing: to recognize that animals and plants also listen. That animals and plants also have their own ways of knowing and experiencing the world, independent of us. Because these people listened, because they were extraordinarily skilled listeners, they also knew that whales or ravens had their own intelligence, their own cultures and languages \u2013 and therefore they considered them equals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This view has been slowly gaining ground in the natural sciences in recent years: not only creatures with complex social structures (chimpanzees, parrots or killer whales) but also, surprisingly, many species of insects are now considered cultural beings. This raises an acute need to understand what and whom<\/em> I am listening, but also that we need to reflect more deeply on the ways in which we intervene on the acoustic plane in the lives and cultures of our nonhuman brothers and sisters. Our actions on the acoustic plane of reality also reveal our prevailing relationship to the world and to nonhuman life. In other words, we will need to reassess our role in the great planetary orchestra, to become more attuned to it, and to respect the individual voices and instruments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just as we usually do not interrupt each other and listen carefully to what the other person is saying before we react, it will no longer be possible in the future to arbitrarily disrupt communication and the lives of other species: for example, to flood the ocean, where sound waves travel three times better than in the air medium, with the noise of ship propellers, sonar and underwater explosions, which have been proven to lead not only to the disruption of non-human cultures (the ability of underwater creatures to recognize each other and pass on knowledge and knowledge), but in the extreme case also to a complete loss of orientation and a painful death. Our own moral integrity depends on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we are to strive for a more life-loving, alert, and revitalizing society, and indeed to preserve the diversity of terrestrial life as we know it (with all the Bengal tigers, all the orangutans, karanchis, manulas, and spiny moles), we must move to a more considerate way of being. One that is, among other things, more art-based. wide listening<\/em>And part of that is \u2013 as ecologist and writer Carl Safina would say \u2013 listening to the needs of other creatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, in order to reach this healing point, we must first step out of our tight acoustic shell. We must open ourselves both as humans and as listeners; begin to perceive lives outside ourselves, attune ourselves to their vibrations, frequencies, melodies, rhythms, and heartbeats. To say to ourselves: the song of a blackbird or a blackbird, which at dawn transforms an austere courtyard into a Persian garden, is as important as our own sound creation, and I want to preserve it not only for future generations, but especially for myself \u2013 for the emotions and stories it carries, for the beauty, history, and needs it expresses, for the imprint of a specific place contained within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Lud\u011bk \u010cert\u00edk and participants of the listening workshop. Author: Ond\u0159ej Tichota<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A short way home<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Although Western culture considers sight to be the dominant human sense (just open Plato), it is primarily auditory sensations that give us a sense of anchoring in space, that make the space around us present, tangible, and alive. Even the best photograph or painting cannot transport us to a place in the way that a high-quality audio recording can. All we need to do is close our eyes, put on headphones, and we suddenly find ourselves in an Indonesian rainforest, on the Alaskan coast, at the bottom of a sandstone canyon, near the sacred mountain of Uluru. Sound gives us a sense of being surrounded by a material and living environment, anchoring us in the world \u2013 making even distant things tangible and imaginable. What good is that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have long believed that all human relationships are preceded by a relationship to the land or to a particular place; a relationship to a place is the imaginary anchor of our fleeting existence. The absence of this relationship, the loss of awareness of it, leads to a certain form of homelessness \u2013 to a life without roots. A homelessness that \u2013 no matter how hard we try \u2013 cannot be silenced in the human throng.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is disturbing how shallow and unconsciously so many of us live today. In the place we live, most of us do not even recognize the most common tree species. We know absolutely nothing about the geology of the place, let alone the composition and properties of the soil. We do not recognize the voices of the birds that permanently live in our place of residence or at least spend the fertile spring and summer months. The names of flowering plants are fading into oblivion and their place is taken by brands of clothing, cars, and consumer electronics. There is a lack of greater sensitivity to living forms. Most of us do not even talk about second lives in the animal kingdom. In the morning we find fox tracks in the snow and say: something<\/em> there was, something<\/em> visited us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ecological listening subverts this trend. Listening brings us to the world: to its fundamental, material dimension. Listening makes present, places<\/em>It is a form of exploration, of penetrating the secrets of the place we inhabit (or \u2013 perhaps more accurately \u2013 we think<\/em>, that we inhabit). By learning to recognize the individual instruments and voices in the orchestra of a certain place (this forest of rubble, this spray-painted cobblestone rock), by listening to their belonging, that place becomes closer, more tangible to me \u2013 and the more I gravitate to it as a human being, I belong to it. It is the same as when we listen to other people, their narratives and stories; through our stories, our songs, our chants and the unique experiences present in them, they become a kind of extended family for us; through them we can sympathize with them and coexist with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When, on my wanderings, I listen to a flock of chattering thrushes or the splashing of waves on the shore of a pond, I know with absolute and unwavering certainty that I am home. That is to say: at this moment, in this place, in this sensitive and fragile body, on this wildly blooming planet. In those moments I have everything I need to live: nothing is left over or missing. Every single sound is home, or at least an invitation, an introduction to it; a home shared by me and the gentle barbarian bumblebee and all the other restless forms of the sun.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I firmly believe that ecological listening (and in general all forms of listening free from the desire to control or possess) can be one of the ways to reconnect, strengthen the bond with the superhuman world and put our existence into a proper (humbler, decentralized) perspective; one of the imaginary way home<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I listen, therefore I am silent.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The main reason why most people today are not very good listeners is simply that we cannot stand silence. Every act of focused listening presupposes the ability to pause, to quiet down. And that in turn presupposes the ability to stop, to cease all extraneous activity. However, neither of these are virtues of modern man. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that relies on a continuous flow of information. We have become accustomed to the fact that it is normal to constantly comment on everything, to convert everything into statistics and numbers, shorthand data, and diagrams. When we walk in the forest or outside the city, we unconsciously carry this habit with us and immediately analyze whatever we see or hear. Ecological listening counteracts this prevailing tendency because it naturally leads to the cultivation of silence and, therefore, a deeper appreciation of silence. As acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, the author of the project, says One Square Inch of Silence<\/em>, silence represents the poetics of place \u2013 everything that it means to be in a place, in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like other types of mindfulness, listening naturally leads to slowing down. And similarly, it leads to refining the ability to perceive previously unsuspected details around you; it makes the experience of reality more nuanced, richer. Example: A winter foothill landscape early in the morning. The peaks of the highest mountains are drowning in fluffy snow clouds. Here and there, pale sunlight shines through a crack in the clouds and illuminates white pastures, roads, sunken roofs of houses. It would seem that this landscape is perfectly silent. But when I listen more carefully, I discover a series of small, but all the more distinct sound events in it; the white silence of the winter landscape is like a canvas against which every sound is rendered in perfectly polished contours. Here I can fully enjoy the beauty of every single sound \u2013 the crunch of winter boots in the snow, the soft contact voices of bullfinches picking, the snapping of branches, the static of falling snowflakes, crashing into each other, carving out new worlds. And a microphone immersed in the snow can reveal sounds and movement that I wouldn\u2019t otherwise hear: the lively life of voles under the driftwood, for example. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Concentrated listening often leads to many surprising revelations. What may seem uniform, heterogeneous at first hearing, becomes differentiated and gains diversity with concentrated listening. It is enough to concentrate and after a short while we will discover that the seemingly uniform murmur of flowing water consists of an inexhaustible amount of splashing, sloshing, bubbling, gurgling: that the sound of a stream or river \u2013 and indeed every imaginable sound \u2013 is polyphonic, of a multi-voiced nature. And that is just a small step away from us starting to notice how the quality of sound changes according to the context in which it is set, in which it operates. There are places where the river is less vocal and places where, on the contrary, it is more. The volume of the flow is influenced by the relief of the riverbed, the complexity of the riverbed, the amount of water in the river (and therefore the strength of the current, which depends on whether there is a dry season or heavy rainfall) and, of course, the number of obstacles that the water has to overcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it doesn't end there. Long-term ecological listening also allows us to perceive the dynamic quality of the sound environment; how it changes acoustically with the seasons, during a single day, under different atmospheric and hydrometeorological conditions (for example, high or low air humidity), during the period when trees have leaves and the sound in the landscape is muffled (while at the same time producing its own soundscape), and in the winter months, when sound, on the contrary, travels more freely through the landscape, carrying it to greater distances. No place sounds the same, each has its own specific music, which begins to form somewhere near the geological bedrock and parent rock and ends high in the Earth's thinning atmosphere. And this music includes all the voices of living creatures and the sounds of mountain-forming processes, rocks, stones - the bleating of goats grazing on a steep slope, as well as the dry rumble of a sliding slate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listening to the sounds of the world, its living and life-giving music, is therefore a peculiar form of meditation on changeability, transience. Each sound reveals the passage of time. Each sound says: Even galaxies die<\/em>. Now I hear the chirping voices of long-tailed millerbirds, now the drumming of a spotted woodpecker (and perhaps a black and white tail feather that arcs down to the coniferous ground, perhaps a tiny mite on it), now the barking of an excited dog in a village below the mountain. Listening leads to greater alertness to the fleeting, changing nature of this world. It brings us face to face with the transience, the fluidity of all existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the border<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

And now to what is probably the most important aspect of ecological listening. It is one thing to perceive everything separately when listening, to learn to recognize individual species, objects, and materials by sound. But it is another thing to perceive all sounds as a complexity of relationships: as patterns, an indivisible unity, a mixture. The first way sets firm boundaries, atomizes, the second is permeable and does not insist on unchanging categories and ideas, it perceives the world as flowing and merging together like mixing colors on a painter's palette. The point of ecological listening should not be to simply recognize a certain sound (now I hear a blue nightingale, now a wood warbler), but it should lead to a deeper (or rather wider<\/em>) understanding: to greater empathy, if you will. It should allow us to see the lives of other creatures and the nature of any place on a whole new level; in the fullness of their being, their radiance. In the words of Henry Beston: \u201ccomplete and whole\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However useful the precise identification of a species according to the Western taxonomic tradition is (the ability to distinguish, after all, counts among the traditional attributes of wisdom), it carries with it the danger of becoming stuck in overly general, empty encyclopedic categories. When I successfully identify and identify a rock wallflower or a bloodsucker, I have arrived at a certain type of knowledge, a connection. But what does a successful identification tell me about their inner life \u2013 about WHO they are and how they feel right now and what they need? <\/em>I believe that ecological listening should be able to go beyond the mere pursuit of correct identification and classification, however beneficial that may be in itself; that it should make a deliberate effort to recognize individual vocal beings not only as indistinguishable members of a species, but as sentient individuals and at the same time as members of a synergistic collective: an interconnected whole. When asked if you are listening broadly enough, answer this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ecological listening, if practiced over the long term, leads to the recognition of how permeable and close our worlds are: mine and the world of the wild fox, badger or long-eared skunk. That the border is always illusory, somehow permeable, no matter how much we wish nothing could pass through it under any circumstances (after all, what penetrates us across the border does not necessarily have friendly intentions). The whole world, we discover through listening, is one big ecotone \u2013 a transitional habitat. When we come to this realization, we can no longer believe that the fates of sperm whales or caracals, although distant in space and time, do not directly affect us \u2013 just as it is short-sighted to believe that my life is in no way connected to the victims of the Syrian war or the cultural genocide orchestrated by the Chinese communist government in Tibet and Inner Mongolia. The ideas and beliefs from which these ways of relating to the world grow also control and influence our own lives in the place we live in. No one stands outside, no one is ever born anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Open<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In recent months, we have experienced firsthand that isolation is perhaps the best way to prevent the spread of a malignant disease, but that it can also lead to subtle decline and stagnation, the extinction of the inner spark. In extreme cases, isolation contributes to intolerance and unwillingness to share living space with other people - and yes, even with non-human peoples and beings. To distrust of anything different, alien, distant, little-explored. I am deeply convinced that listening can be one of the practices to bridge - if nothing else - interspecies isolation; to stop languishing away from the sun, to lead a fulfilling existence in connection with the wider community of coexistence, without fear and in openness - with the ability to accept the non-human world with understanding and consideration. And who knows, through the wider world, perhaps a new harmony will eventually come with our own generation, with our indomitable (and often problematic) desire to be heard, to be recognized, to have a voice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In connection with the poem by Amanda Gorman The Hill We Climb,<\/em> which the young poet delivered at the inauguration of the current US President Joe Biden, the prominent American poet Jane Hirshfield wrote that the words of this poem turn us to what connects us, which, according to Hirshfield, is also the basis from which poetry grows. Poetry is truly deeply ecological in that it reveals how everything is connected, how everything is related, how it sounds \u2013 and therefore it is also a suitable tool (albeit criminally unused) for communicating ecological themes, awakening ecological awareness. And I have also learned something similar from long-term listening to the world around us. The main lesson that emerges from listening is ultimately not that we begin to notice the individualities more, but much more how they are connected and related to each other, how they address each other, just react to each other \u2013 that they are part of the same living continuum. And if there is anything we need today, it is precisely this revived awareness of connection, unity, connectedness. The path to it is open to everyone. All we have to do is go out and\u2026 open up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Author: Ond\u0159ej Tichota<\/figcaption><\/figure>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The art of ecological or broad listening is nothing new. All natural peoples knew that those who do not listen attentively to the world around them are doomed to destruction. It is simple: acoustic sensations convey to us the message about changes in our immediate surroundings, and therefore also about impending danger. We will have to reevaluate our role in the great planetary orchestra, become more in tune with it and respect individual\u2026 Continue reading Lud\u011bk \u010cert\u00edk: The Gift of Listening<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[23,60],"class_list":["post-7345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texty","tag-ludek-certik","tag-zvukova-ekologie","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7345"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7398,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7345\/revisions\/7398"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/potulnauniverzita.cz\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}