Blind Mode/Blind Listening Techniques

Abstract

Blind people are often assumed by the sighted to have remarkable organic listening powers, yet blind ways of listening are learned through schooling, improvisation, and community protocols for using sound to infer and hack environments built for vision.1 Scholars in sound studies have shifted attention from instruments and soundscapes to listening techniques and rigorously-tutored sonic skills, but they have mostly not considered blind students who have been subject to formal listening curricula for decades.2 Blind people have taken some elements of these lessons, rejected others, and amalgamated them with tacit blind expertise to generate counter-sounds and blind soundscapes within and around sighted architectures. Just as deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim describes her work as “unlearning sound etiquette” (Kim quoted in Weisblum), blind listening techniques—often linked to blind sound production—contravene sonic norms, even when the goal is access to conventional visual landscapes and texts. Andy Slater is a blind sound artist who records, transcribes, and otherwise documents these techniques, from the clicks and echoes of cane Blind Mode / Blind Listening Techniques