The Study of Acousmatic Listening Behaviours

Abstract

In 1989, after ten years of research, François Delalande presented for the first time the idea of ‘listening behaviours’, distinguishing several ways to listen to the same piece of music. The methods did not allow for many conclusions, but the approach started a new field of research, where diverse listening behaviours could serve as a basis for diverse, exclusive (or even contradictory) analyses of the same work. Furthermore, Delalande’s preliminary research based on an extract from Pierre Henry’s music is still one of the few instances of research into acousmatic music listening that addresses actual listeners. The last 20 years have seen the reproduction and extension of Delalande’s results, as well as a growing interest in listening in musicological circles. For this reason, it seemed necessary to review research about listening behaviours to evaluate their operational validity and to propose a robust theoretical framework for their study and description. This paper addresses this problem using the elicitation interview for the description and interpretation of listeners’ testimonies. Drawing on testimonies from five listeners about a single extract of acousmatic music, it seems that, for Delalande’s model to be able to describe various listening experiences, it should be further detailed and completed with attention management processes. Further investigation is needed to allow the model to include some listening behaviours which were not recurrent enough here to make sense of them.