“Hearing with the eyes” visual hearing in (a trio) music rehearsals

ABSTRACT Making music together relies, among other things, on the mutual hearing amongst co-performers and on the visual monitoring of each other’s actions and gestures. This is better facilitated when musicians share a mutual visual space where hearing and seeing play a primary role. However, drawing from workplace studies, linguistic anthropology, anthropology of the senses and multimodal interactional studies of sensoriality, we observed how mutual visibility was (tacitly) more important for coordination among musicians than they themselves were willing to admit. Thanks to the video recording of trio rehearsals, by experimentally suspending the sense of hearing, often regarded as a predominant sense in the playing of a musical instrument and to make music together, we realized that mutual visibility not only enables musicians to notice pertinent/relevant visual cues and professional gestures, but also to make sound visible and then audible, activating what we call visual hearing, a specific hybrid sense, that we captured in action.