Focused Listening: The Aesthetics of Parallax

James Wierzbicki

Focused Listening: The Aesthetics of Parallax

James Wierzbicki

Abstract

Even though Slavoj Žižek has written many words about music without really saying much about it, his work nevertheless contains much that for the philosophically minded musicologist, or for the musically minded philosopher, can stimulate thinking. For the author of this article, for example, some of the ideas presented in Žižek’s 2006 The Parallax View have stimulated thinking about the possibilities of taking a comparable approach—that is, a metaphorically ‘parallax’ approach that involves considering an object of attention alternately from more than one perspective—not just to music but to sounds in general. Along with summarizing Žižek’s views on music per se, “Focused Listening: The Aesthetics of Parallax” explores various ways in which persons in the presence of a single ‘sound object’ might listen to, and thus perceive and hear, that sonic phenomenon.

Keywords

Parallax; Jouissance; Musical Analysis; Listening/Hearing; Perception

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