ABSTRACT
The global COVID-19 pandemic influenced many to change, lastingly, how they listen – how they attend to their surroundings, consciously or not, through the sonic. This chapter presents a notion of listening informed by the hybrid auditory realities that the pandemic has amplified: the sonic blend of events from the virtual and the physical worlds, as physical matter, in our ears – described using the metaphor of the sonic window through which the world leaks in. While this modality of listening is not new, this chapter investigates how it is increasingly gaining importance during and after the pandemic because of its affordance to attend to, and provide information about, the multidimensional hybrid auditory collages many spend their everyday with when using digital communication tools. The author’s art piece #otherbeats is described as an explanatory listening device that takes this idea of the sonic window to a website. Users navigate a window full of sounds: an archive of participatory location rhythm performances illustrates the effects of sonic leakage, mediation, temporal, and spatial distortion. The website gives its users a tool to practice more consciously their hybrid everyday listening, emphasising that such listening will lastingly gain in significance from the pandemic forward.
