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The emphasis on and valuing of seeing over listening in the Western tradition of thought forms a central topic of discussion in various fields that examine the auditory dimensions of subjectivity and human existence. Especially phenomenological sound studies, psychoanalytic music research, soundscape studies and audiovisual music research have critically scrutinized the persistent tendency of science and philosophy to associate seeing with knowledge and hearing with emotions, and to consider sound and hearing as something vague, unreliable and less valuable in contrast to visual information and seeing (e.g., Cavarero, 2005; Chion, 1999; Ihde, 2007; Schafer, 1977; Silverman, 1988; Sterne, 2012; Truax, 1984). Often this prejudice has been tracked down all the way to Aristotle (2004, p. 980a25), according to whom sound did not have solid, stable and material substance in order to function as an object of reliable knowledge; sound seemed to be invisible and time-bound, and thus ever-changing, transitory and futile to concentrate on.
In addition to acoustics and audiology (see, e.g., Jauhiainen, 2010), one of the most influential sources of critique against this underestimation of the auditory sphere of being has been psychoanalysis, both as a therapeutic practice and as a critical theory of subject and culture. Psychoanalytic practice is based on the art of listening (Fromm, 1994). It has invented the method of attentive listening, in which the psychoanalyst listens to the speaking subject in a setting that emphasizes the auditory sphere of communication and diminishes the visual (for example, in the classic psychoanalytic setting there is no eye contact between the analyst and the analysand during the “talking cure”). Moreover, as a reflexive theory, psychoanalysis scrutinizes, from the point of view of unconscious dynamics, the shortcomings of Western science and its ways to understand knowledge.
Another active standpoint of criticism against eye-centrism has been pheno