The article analyses the genre of listening scores – texts written in a natural language that provide the readers with instructions to listen in a certain way or to a certain kind of sounds. Belonging to the broader category of text scores, they are instrumental texts that are at the same time often poetic in their form and/or evocative in their language. As such, listening scores can be thought of as monomedial and intermedial at the same time. On the one hand, their material form is that of a written text, not augmented in itself by any other media. On the other hand, the reading of a listening score is necessarily transitory, oscillating between the aesthetic experience of the text itself and the aesthetic experience of listening induced by the text. Although originating in 1970s, the genre has been growing in prominence in recent years, as exemplified by the project A Year of Deep Listening that collected 365 listening scores by a diverse group of artists to commemorate the 90th birthday of the composer Pauline Oliveros.
Drawing on selected case studies from A Year of Deep Listening, as well as Oliveros’ own Sonic Meditations and a number of works by other artists, the article discusses listening scores as a form of intermedial poetry, focusing on two notions that run across the domains of poetry and sound art: defamiliarisation and subjectivity. First, I consider how the poetic defamiliarisation of language is utilised by the artists to break from the habitual and inertial modes of listening. Second, I analyse how the listening scores employ lyric subjectivity to destabilise the reader’s subject-position and challenge the anthropocentric frame of perception.