Listening as a Shared and Social Practice is a open educational resource (OER) edited by Lindsey French and Kate Joranson. In the Introduction to the book, they write:

“An understanding of listening as deeply relational frames the materials gathered here, which grew out of a Great Lakes Association for Sound Studies (GLASS) conference held in October 2022 on the theme of “Listening as a Shared and Social Practice.” Responding to a turn in sound studies toward a greater attention to the role of listening, the conference call invited presentations, workshops, and performances that considered the co-constitutive nature of listening, which we embrace in this volume.

Rather than compiling the entirety of the conference proceedings, we offer here a collection of materials that help us to think about how the conference’s theme might shift and change when activated by different groups of learners, whether in or outside of a classroom. The materials gathered here are not meant to be understood as a totality, and we don’t look to provide an exhaustive collection of essays from the 2022 gathering. Rather, we hope that this can be a place for generating, building, and maintaining relationships through acts of listening, and that the activities and essays that form this book offer starting points for listening and noticing more deeply, through different frameworks and lenses.

Listening guides us toward a plurality of ideas and perspectives, challenging dominant, Eurocentric cultural binaries such as human/non-human, expert/non-expert, male/female, music/noise, and teacher/student. Steeped in academic traditions that can promote binary expectations such as these, we initially felt an urge to offer best practices for teaching and engaging with these materials, yet our dialogue with one another guided us away from offering prescriptive ways of being and doing. We committed instead to the kind of slowness required for shifting awareness and attention through the perceptual process of listening.”