Philosophy and History of Listening

The project focuses on a phenomenon that has persistently eluded historical description: the history of music listening, a subject only recently (re)introduced into the canon of the humanities. The aim of the project is to take actual listening experience, as far as it can be reconstructed, along with music theorists' and philosophers' ideas about listening, and testing them against one another, while at the same time overcoming both the traditional psychometric approach and recently developed social- and cultural-historical approaches to listening. Such an interdisciplinary method will enhance our understanding of the divergent rational and ontological forms that listening assumed from the enlightenment to the present day.