Platform for Listening Protocols and Vocabularies

This is a ‘prototyping’ space to display, interact and learn from LxDII’s work with Listening Protocols and Vocabularies.

Listening protocols were developed with our partners in workshops, interviews and in discussions. They aim to observe, understand and ultimately to compare how different disciplines listen. Through coding and interpretive analysis of these protocols, the LxDII team then derived a set of keywords, some of which were mirrored in the protocol, some not. Partners were then asked to respond to these keywords to evaluate their importance and to provide definitions and explanations.

Rather than treating protocols and vocabularies as separate research strands, we have found that protocols help to locate vocabularies and vice versa. The two are closely related, one informing the other, and connect as entangled parts of the research process. The representation and interactive functionality of this page therefore aims to hold onto and make thinkable such complex interdependencies and relationships . by focusing not on one or the other but on their co-generativeness. We hope that this format of presentation can engage the user in listening vocabularies as contingent and lived, rather than as lexical. They do not provide a universal reference but formulate in relation to praxis contingent meaning. Therefore, while they are called vocabularies they do not build taxonomies but encourage thinking about the relationships between different approaches to listening.

The user can choose to view a protocol-vocabulary relationship by clicking on one of the fields below. Each reveals aural processes, methods and languages deployed across disciplines, and retains a sense of epistemological uncertainty in their non-resolved and practical nature. We hope they inspire curiosity and allow others to reflect on how they listen, and how they articulate their listening, what words they use and what these words do.