Imaginal listening: a quaternary framework for listening to electroacoustic music and phenomena of sound-images

Discussing listeners and their listening process in electroacoustic music has always been a difficult task because of the apparent subjectivity of listening. If we understand, however, that listening is a phenomenal process, the subjectivity of listening should be considered an important and crucial factor that can be discussed and explained by phenomenological approaches. This paper first conducts a brief survey of some electroacoustic music and observes primary sound-images – body, place and their negations – that emerge from the phenomenological approaches. The observation of the emergence of these primary sound-images then leads us to consider two listening processes, perceiving and imagining, that act as the main correlates of the listening process in which listeners engage with electroacoustic music. This paper also discusses the phenomena of sound-images, the product of the two listening processes, and explains what we as listeners imagine and how we imagine when we listen to electroacoustic music. Finally, the paper examines the properties of body and place as sound-images and how these sound-images are negated in imaginal listening of electroacoustic music.