Tag Archives: listening

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A No-Cost Offer to Explore Your First Sense

The Sonic Imperative: Sound in the Age of Screens is free as a download.

“Every chapter provides entertaining and illuminating information about the centrality of hearing and sound to human experience.” 

  • Can infants in the womb hear their parents?
  • Why is permanent hearing damage so common?
  • Why should hearing be known as the first sense?
  • What is a “sonic gun,” and how does it disrupt communications?
  • Why are restaurants so loud?
  • What is the relationship between brain “plasticity” and language learning?
  • What kind of sound is an ingenious way some convenience stores discourage loitering?
  • How did Motown create their unique sound?
  • What does an ideal listening space look like?
  • How is baseball’s Citizen’s Bank Park in Philadelphia made to be loud?
  • What is the sonic “mode” of a room, and why does it matter?
  • Who owns the rights to the song, “Happy Birthday?”
  • What is the most common complaint of residents living in New York City?
  • How long does it take for sound to travel the length of Notre Dame Cathedral?
  • How did Barbara Streisand help revive interest in movies shown in theaters?
Sun Records Studio in Memphis where Elvis         Presley and others recorded early hits.

This example-filled project is an accessible exploration of the central role of auditory experience in American life, building from two core themes: that sound is the newest of our senses, having been reborn in twentieth century audio technologies; and that we vastly underrate spoken language and music as vital portals to the culture. The Sonic Imperative offers a compelling counter-narrative to the bias for the visual in our screen-obsessed age. (320 pages, 4.1 MB PDF)

Gary Woodward argues for the central importance of human hearing and celebrates our auditory prowess. Woodward, a specialist in communication theory, ranges far afield here, covering anatomy, technology, psychology, and culture and shedding light on topics from sound recording to film scores to the weaponizing of sound.” Amazon Reviews

Download the free and complete book below  

https://theperfectresponse.pages.tcnj.edu/files/2025/07/Sonic-Imperative-final.pdf

Also available at Amazon.com, 320 pages

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Is “Feedback” Genuine Listening?

We should not assume that a group asking for “feedback” is really listening. Listening is a cultivated and individual skill.  Feedback is typically less refined and subject to organizational filters.   

Recently I noticed that the New York Times seems to have stopped publishing letters in its Sunday Magazine and Book Review. Not an earthshaking change maybe. But it began to strike me that this deletion of reader’s opinions was odd when juxtaposed with the paper’s fall-over-backwards requests for feedback after doing something as simple as reporting a missing paper. The single checkmark notification is a nano-second act, yet it provoked a request to know how satisfying or difficult  the experience was. It seemed that their priorities were upside down. Why dismiss reader’s comments while keeping a useless exercise about a simple matter? I suspect this is a kind of irrationality that grows out of an automated system which doesn’t know what matters.  We are on the midst of similar requests for feedback from CX (Customer Service) teams responsible for designing the “customer journey” in retail. They can satisfy themselves by signaling concern for customers without setting up the tools needed to fully follow through. Listening is a demanding intellectual exercise; responding to an set of a-priori questions is not.

It’s worth remembering that the term “feedback” arose as a name for noise or interference produced by an electrical circuit back onto itself. The deafening growl of a public address system is an example. We get a double dose of aural unpleasantness if Uncle Fred gets his karaoke microphone too close to the speakers.

To be sure, I’m an outlier for still expecting a newspaper to be in the driveway each morning. But this simple example suggests a growing trend in how we are asked to interact with agencies, businesses and organizations. Our communications with these entities seems less about the specifics of a response, and more about creating a running tally of stock complements, complaints, or experiences that can be processed into data-driven marketing. “How did we do?” asks the online store. “Did we answer your question?” a tech website wants to know. The answers will only need a simulacrum of listening, without anyone knowing enough to learn much from the answer.

With some exceptions the idea of “customer care” now amounts to the creation of a digital interface between an increasingly impatient live body on one end, and a digital “bot” with a set of closed-option questions on the other. Companies like Bizrate specialize in setting up such systems for clients. But rarely do organizations allow a customer with a specific question to frame their issue in their own way. Speaking broadly, as a culture we are under the paradoxical impression that we need to appear consumer-driven, but we don’t need to hear that much. Surely customer comments can do some good. But we are already so overtaxed with incoming messages that these pre-formed exchanges seem like they hardly matter.

More often than not, the organizations repertoire of a group’s “answers” cannot easily match the particular variables embedded in a question. Hence, no one is really “chatting.” We have all ended up at the top of a phone tree when none of the options seem good. To change metaphors, more than I can count I’ve ended an exchange with a chatbot feeling like I got pushed onto the wrong train. Try dealing with your cable supplier, and you will likely conclude the experience feeling like you ended up going to Duluth rather Dallas.

What is both ingenious and perverse in these end-of-transaction questions is seemingly how much an organization pretends that it is listening. The problem, of course, is that prompts generated by algorithms cost practically nothing to produce. And they may actually yield some data that can satisfy the performance expectations of management. It seems like the marketing department is growing, but the service department has been hollowed out. Odds are that an organization really doesn’t want to hear you on your terms.