Excerpt from Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening
BY ELIZABETH ROSNER
Portal, An Introduction
You could say that hearing is a science and listening is an art. Hearing depends on signals received by a functioning apparatus; hearing is measurable and verifiable. But listening is so much more than gathering information with the paired portals of our ears, those supple appendages flanking our faces. We also absorb with heart and skin, our elaborately nuanced nervous system continuously networking.
For an imperfect comparison with the filtering, processing, and discriminating involved through your other senses, consider the distinctions between looking and examining; touching and palpating; tasting and savoring a flavor; smelling and identifying a scent. When we are truly listening, signals are not merely accepted but are fluently interpreted. Transformed into meaning.
Dialogue is happening all around us: over our heads, under our radar, beyond the horizon. Whether or not we decide to call it language, we can call it listening—when elephants respond to news from their miles-distant family members, details they’ve taken in through acoustic sensitivities in their feet. When the searching roots of trees grow toward the energetic flow of water, sometimes tangling themselves in underground pipes—isn’t that too a kind of listening? What about when hummingbirds return to the specific vibration of nectar-drenched flowers? When whales share songs across oceans and recognize the pauses made by one another’s breathing?
Hushed or amplified, implausible yet audible, everything is humming—from quantum to cosmic, from the inner life of electrons to the membranes of outer space. The entire universe is sonic.
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Theodor Reik, protégé and colleague of Sigmund Freud, developed a method he called “third-ear listening.” He credited Friedrich Nietzsche with the origins of the phrase, although Nietzsche was referring to ways of listening to music.
“The analyst, like his patient,” wrote Reik, “knows things without knowing that he knows them. The voice that speaks in him, speaks low, but he who listens with a third ear hears also what is expressed almost noiselessly, what is said pianissimo. There are instances in which things a person has said in psychoanalysis are consciously not even heard by the analyst, but none the less understood and interpreted. There are others about which one can say: in one ear, out the other, and in the third.”
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In at least one Indigenous culture, comprehending with a quiet, respectful awareness known as dadirri (an Aboriginal word for deep listening) is a way of being that has been practiced for more than sixty thousand years. Like third-ear listening, dadirri focuses with patience and stillness both externally and internally. “One of the peculiarities of this third ear is that it works in two ways,” Reik explained. “It can catch what other people do not say, but only feel and think; and it can also be turned inward. It can hear voices from within the self that are otherwise not audible because they are drowned out by the noise of our conscious thought processes.”
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As the daughter of multilingual parents, I learned early to attune myself to their sounds and silences, even when they weren’t necessarily doing the same for each other or for me. Within their whispers, I detected spaces between clamor and consolation, between foreign and familiar. Maybe this prepared me for a life of eavesdropping on the world, listening with all of my senses, reaching toward sources of interconnection.
Reflecting on some of my most profoundly transformative experiences, I note that they have centered on the flowing back and forth of sound—whether occurring in childhood or adolescence, in leaving home or returning home. In a lifelong search for sanctuary and awareness, deep listening has become my way of leaning closer, opening wider, taking more responsibility for honoring the music of everything.
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Every time the resonant world enters us, we have an opportunity to reaffirm our relatedness. Today, for instance, a murmuring podcast entices me with the latest studies of complicated, gorgeous sounds too high and too low for my meager human range. The more I learn about acoustic windows in the feet of elephants and in the skulls of whales, I imagine my body reverberating in cellular empathy. These compositions and collaborations taking place among birds, insects, and cetaceans remind me that I belong to a sonically interwoven web. That includes sounds still echoing toward us from the distant past and sounds we are attempting to decipher in order to co-create a future. It includes frequencies connecting galaxies and microbes, connecting the dead with the living, connecting the beings we might yet comprehend with the beings yet-to-be-born.
I hope that this book can serve as another kind of portal, with a sequence of spaces shaped by its author’s curiosity, questions answered and also sometimes unanswerable. In these pages you will find references to mammals on land, mammals who returned to the depths of the oceans, songs of the air, the forest, the soil. I believe that third-ear listening can offer solace for my/our existential ache of loneliness. With our ancestrally related bones offering and receiving the news, we can lengthen and strengthen the golden thread stitching together a broken world.
First Sounds
My earliest memory of listening: I was about three, pretending to be asleep in the green canvas hammock stretched above the slab of concrete that I had recently learned was called a patio. In the drowsy quiet of this summer afternoon, my father and mother were murmuring to each other in phrases I wasn’t supposed to overhear. “Hon air soot,” something like that. Even though I didn’t know what the words meant (and would not discover for years), I somehow understood that these were private sounds, shared only between the two of them. They were talking about me, but I was not allowed to know my parents thought I was cute, sweet, adorable, adored. Such secrets were for my benefit, to protect me from the harm inevitably poised to strike me down, the way they had both been struck. It was dangerous to speak praise aloud, dangerous to hear it. They whispered all kinds of mysteries to each other, and I was not to know them. But I wanted to.
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Listening begins in utero. Anne Karpf, who—like me—is a daughter of Holocaust survivors, writes in The Human Voice that in fetal development our ears are beginning to form as early as two months. By five months, our hearing structure is anatomically complete. The amniotic sea of sound in which I floated would have held an array of my mother’s languages: the Russian she used with her own mother; Polish and Hebrew with her best friends; English with my sister and with the American neighbors; Swedish with my father. Even before I was born, my world was a symphonic mother tongue.
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Elephants, growing in utero for nearly two years, are listening and learning too. With the soles of their feet pressed against the throbbing pulse of the womb’s lining, they are becoming familiar with the rumblings of their mother and their matriarchal relatives. Pitched at infrasonic levels inaccessible to our ears, these deep vibrations will be the same sounds that greet the newborn elephants upon their release from a watery interior world. Prodded upright by the gentle nudging of mother’s trunk, audibly instructed not only to stand but also to start walking (Let’s go, Follow me, Stay close, I’m here), they begin their new life on land.
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Humans practice empathy and understanding as early as twenty minutes after birth, not just with sound but with our body movements and what has been termed “interactional (or behavioral) synchrony.” Those voices we heard in utero remain for quite a while in our physical memory, rhythmically threaded into the flexible reach of our limbs. We speak before we speak, nodding and twisting in the vocal dance of our mothers and our cultures.
Born hungry to be heard, we are wired to make the very sounds we are designed to receive. Just as we push sound waves out of our bodies to vocalize, our ear drums vibrate in response to those waves, resonating at the same frequencies. Infants express a range as nuanced as a mother’s ability to decipher the code and to respond accordingly. Using volume and pitch, we signal our needs for food, warmth, contact, and relief.
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In an essay about lullabies and language, Kristin Wong writes about the seemingly universal practice of singing to infants, who are described as “impressively sophisticated listeners.” It’s as though certain patterns have been inscribed in us, encoded and memorized. “Brains of babies who heard a specific melody just before birth reacted more strongly to the tune immediately after they were born and at four months.”
Sally Goddard Blythe, director of the Institute for NeuroPhysiological Psychology, is an expert in early child development. Noting studies of the effects of listening in utero, Blythe explains that the mother’s voice “is particularly powerful because it resonates internally and externally, her body acting as the sounding board.” Research keeps demonstrating the depth and continuity of this bond, as “a mother’s voice provides a connection between respiration, sound and movement, an acoustic link from life and communication before birth—to the brave new world after birth.”
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As Anne Karpf explains, attunement and reciprocity are two key features of early childhood development that involve listening skills in both parent and child. The rhythmic patterns of pre-verbal vocal exchanges between babies and mothers are “remarkably similar to the timing of verbal dialogues between adults—not for nothing are they known as ‘proto-conversations.’” From our first phases of feeling listened to, nonverbal signals are provided by a silent acknowledgment from the receiver of one’s words and stories.
Nonverbal factors such as nodding, eye movements and facial expressions are used to indicate that a reciprocal relationship between speaking and listening is being played out. As the listener “rewards” the speaker with non-verbal feedback, “a societal level ritual and regulation” is established. The speaker is encouraged to continue, confident in the belief that his message is being received and understood. Even when the facial expressions are perceived by the speaker as being negative or confused, there is still the silent agreement that the ritual of dialogue is taking place as the speaker receives the unspoken message “I’m listening.”
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A variety of species, including female greater sac-winged bats and adult male zebra finches, have been recorded using so-called baby talk. A recent report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal reveals that dolphins, much like humans, use a ‘baby voice’ to communicate with their young, compared to the pitch they use while swimming alone or with adult dolphins in the rest of their pod. After recording the distinctive sounds of mother bottlenose dolphins in the wild in Sarasota Bay, Florida, researchers found that “all 19 of the mothers changed their tone when they used their signature whistle to speak to their baby.”
A co-author of the study, Laela Sayigh, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution marine biologist, explained that the signature whistle is understood as a way that dolphins keep track of one another’s whereabouts, “periodically saying ‘I’m here, I’m here.’“
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Babies hear an even wider range of frequencies than adults, especially in the high-frequency ranges. It turns out that humans across a wide spectrum of cultures have, accordingly, evolved a universal vocal pattern of interacting with newborns using “exaggerated, simplistic sentences in high-pitched, sing-songy tones,” writes Kristin Wong.
Despite how much it makes adults cringe, Parentese is good for babies. One study found that it helps them learn new language skills and develop a larger vocabulary. Parentese also makes babies feel safe. When they hear baby talk, babies babble back, which some research even suggests is a way of processing stress. And that’s important when you’re pulled out of the womb and thrown into a world that’s unpredictable and blurry. You need someone to translate adult human speech to baby talk. You want someone to tell you it’s all going to be okay. To say things like, ‘who’s got the chubbiest thighs?’ to distract from the fear of not knowing when your next meal will be.
Wong writes about her own experiences of learning this new baby language as a mother—and also about learning to hear the words of others, even strangers, with newly sensitive ears. As if all listening is a form of translation.
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We are born with the ability to hear the sounds of all languages, says Dr. Viorica Marian, professor at Northwestern University, whose research specializes in neurological studies of bilingualism and multilingualism. She is referring to something that researchers call “a window of universal sound processing,” a built-in capacity to listen that facilitates our earliest learning about and connecting with our primary caregivers. And yet, Dr. Marian says, by the time we reach the age of one, our brains are tuned in to our native language. She points out that this doesn’t mean we are born tabula rasa, but more accurately it means we are born without nationality. Studies have shown that this window stays open longer for multilinguals than for monolinguals.
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One Sunday afternoon when I was six, my mother and father were sitting on faded lawn chairs in the backyard, discussing the overgrown vegetable garden they had inherited from our house’s previous owner. Pointing into an open space, my mother said she wanted to plant an apple tree, or maybe a pear.
“For baking,” she explained.
My father said, “Trees take a long time to grow,” adding that even the maples we planted last year in the front yard were barely taller than the children, who helped dig holes for their roots.
Sharon, a friend from the neighborhood, was with me. When we asked permission to go for a bike ride, my parents smiled and waved, told us to have a good time. The year was 1966; our town had streets safe enough and wide enough for us to practice riding with no hands. We could go anywhere we want.
“Your parents talk funny,” my friend shouted into the wind as we took off. “They have accents.”
I didn’t respond, pretending to assimilate her announcement like it was a fact. But in that moment, some design in my awareness began to rearrange itself. I knew Sharon’s father worked for General Electric, the same company my father worked for; her mother wore dresses not unlike the ones my mother wore. She had a brother and a sister just as I did. Our houses on the street looked nearly identical, except for the color of the front door and the type of curtains hanging inside the windows. But now it occurred to me that my friend and I didn’t inhabit the same country.
That evening, sitting at our Formica dinner table, I heard in a new way how my father pronounced the number three as “sree,” how my mother said, “You’ll pass with swinging colors.” I’d been a fish in water, not noticing it wasn’t air. To someone else, these two voices sounded entirely different than they sounded to me. To “talk funny” and to “have accents” meant stranger, meant foreign, meant not like us. After a while, I would wonder if what Sharon really meant was not American.
I had crossed a dividing line in my life. Listening for accents everywhere, my ears were newly tuned to catch some exceptional lilt or word coming from deep in the throat, a signal from places I might have known, but didn’t. I began focusing on my mother’s intonations during phone calls and over coffee with friends in town whose tongues were shaped in Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Israel. Eventually I found out that Russian was her favorite; it was the one in which she wrote poetry. German, my father’s native tongue, was “the language of the murderers.” Swedish was the language of exile, refuge, and love—hon är söt. It was the one she shared with my father, for secrets.
Copyright © 2024 by Elizabeth Rosner. Excerpted from Third Ear Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press, an imprint of Catapult LLC.
