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Recherches sémiotiques
Semiotic Inquiry

Nine Modes of Listening to Music

Lucia Santaella

Volume 37, Number 1-2, 2017 Article abstract

Listening has become a major issue of musical composition from the middle of
Sémiotique et musique. Tome 2 last century on, since Pierre Schaeffer inaugurated with concrete music one of
Semiotics and Music. Tome 2 the trends of what would be established under the name of electroacoustic
music. The classification of the modes of listening to music that will be
URI: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1051474ar presented in this paper is not concerned with the chronological study of
listening by means of musical examples from historical periods and their
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7202/1051474ar
respective social context. As my classification aims at the processes of
reception and in a broad sense, I found its foundation in the different
See table of contents interpretative levels formulated by Peirce in his classification of the
interpretants.

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Association canadienne de sémiotique / Canadian Semiotic Association

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0229-8651 (print)
1923-9920 (digital)

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Santaella, L. (2017). Nine Modes of Listening to Music. Recherches sémiotiques /
Semiotic Inquiry, 37(1-2), 51–60. https://doi.org/10.7202/1051474ar

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 Nine Modes of Listening to Music

Lucia Santaella
São Paulo Catholic University

In his book What is Music, J.J. de Moraes (1983 : 63-70), in a chapter
under the title “Ways of Listening”, divides these ways in three broad
levels : (1) to listen emotionally; (2) to listen with the body; (3) to listen
intellectually. There is here an obvious analogy of these three modes
with Peirce’s phenomenological categories : Firstness, Secondness and
Thirdness respectively.
Although well known, these categories can be summarily understood
from the following correspondences : Firstness or Monad corresponds to
the notions of chance, uncertainty, vagueness, possibility, irresponsible
and free originality, spontaneity, freshness, potentiality, presentness,
immediacy, quality, feeling. Secondness or Dyad is determined, termi-
nated, correlative, needed, reactive, being linked to the relative notions
of polarity, denial, matter, reality, crude and blind force, compulsion,
action-reaction, effort-resistance, here and now, opposition, effect,
occurrence, fact, vividness, conflict, surprise, doubt, result. Thirdness
or Triad is the medium, becoming, that which is in development, it
is generality, continuity, growth, mediation, infinite intelligence, law,
regularity, learning, habit, sign.
The categories are ubiquitous and therefore they are always inter-
twined. Similarly, the three types of hearing are entangled; they are
inseparable because we are at the same time emotion, body and intel-
lect. There is, however, a principle of dominance which may characterize
the prevalence of a mode of listening over the other two. Since listening
implies the psychological peculiarities and preferences of particular in-
terpreters it is not possible to establish or classify a priori which types
of music would fit into each of these modes. A trained musician, for
instance, may have a much stronger emotion when listening to Boulez’s
Pli selon Pli than a layperson will have when listening to Tchaikovsky’s

RS•SI, vol. 36 (2016) nos 3/vol. 37 (2017) nos 1-2 © Association canadienne de sémiotique / Canadian Semiotic Association
52 Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry

Concert for Violin and Orchestra. There are, moreover, intellectual emo-
tions which may be as intense as the emotions triggered by any other
types of experiences. Even so, one cannot deny that certain types of
music are more likely to produce certain emotions over others.
The classification of the modes of listening to music that I will present
in this paper, will take as its starting point Moraes’ tripartite division.
It is not concerned with the chronological study of listening by means
of musical examples from historical periods and their respective social
context, as the well known Listening to Music, by Crayg (2008), is. As
my classification aims at the processes of reception in a broad sense,
I found its foundation in the different interpretative levels formulated
by Peirce in his classification of the interpretants. In a panoramic view
that can be supplemented by a more detailed study (Santaella 1996),
the interpretants – which Peirce calls immediate, dynamical and final or
normal – are studied by him in the light of the logic of the three catego-
ries. Hence, the immediate interpretant is Firstness; it is the potential
to mean inscribed in the sign itself. “It is the range – always vaguely
circumscribed – of the interpretant-generating power of the sign in a
given time” (Ransdell 1983 : 42). Therefore, this interpretant is inside
the sign, it objectively belongs to the sign, and is independent of its
encounter with any interpreter. It is only when this encounter happens
that at least a portion of that potential will be put into action by the
interpreter. The dynamical interpretant is Secondness; the interpretant
that is effectively produced in the mind of any interpreter. It is therefore
the empirical, existential, and in the case of the human interpreter, it
is a psychological fact. When the sign reaches any interpreter, an effect
will be produced in that mind. This effect has always the nature of a
sign or quasi sign which may find its translation into an external sign.
The final or normal interpretant, the interpretant in itself is Third
and corresponds to a final, ideal limit of interpretation, which is never
actually attainable. It would be the ultimate realization of the interpret-
ability of the sign, the ultimate realization of the potentiality to signify
inscribed in the immediate interpretant. “It is the idea of the sign as it
would come to be regularly and completely interpreted in an ideal long-
run course of semiosis” (Ransdell ibid.). It is the empirical performance
of the dynamical, singular interpretants which is responsible for the
growth of the power of the sign to be interpreted. If it were possible to
reach the ultimate limit of the sign’s interpretability, the final interpre-
tant would be fully realized. As this is impossible because we are never
in a position to say that such and such a dynamical interpretant is the
final one, any dynamical interpretant is always in medias res of the final
interpretant which is permanently in a state of becoming.
Listening corresponds to the effect that any music is able to produce
in the act of perceiving of particular listeners. However, before meeting
any listener, the sign in itself is endowed with the potentiality of the
 Nine Modes of Listening to Music 53

immediate interpretant, that is, the potential effects that music as a

particular type of sign may produce in a listener. As soon as any music
finds an effective listener, then we come to the level of the dynamical
interpretant, the real effects that it actually produces in the perception
and mind of the listener.
Based on the recurrence of his three categories, Peirce segmented
the dynamical interpretant into three more classes : the emotional, the
energetic and the logical interpretant (CP 5.475-476). The correspondence
of these three classes with the three modes of listening seems obvious.
To listen emotionally is the first effect that music is able to produce in
the perception of the listener. Listening with the entire body corresponds
to the energetic interpretant, since it concerns a certain type of action
that is performed in the act of reacting to a semiotic process. To listen
intellectually means incorporating logical principles and knowledge that
guide the comprehension of music.
When I reaplied these three interpretative classes within each level
of Moraes’ tripartite division, I came to a subdivision in nine modes of
listening to music : three modes of listening with emotion, three modes
of listening with the body and three modes of listening intellectually.
These nine levels allow us to penetrate into the subtle layers of the
process of listening that operate within each level.

Listening with Emotion

In the first level of emotion (1.1), what appears is nothing else than
a simple, positive and pure quality of feeling. In situations like this, the
listener is very close to turning into a mere capsule of feeling as if floating
outside of time and space. Not a few musicologists and philosophers have
called attention to this aptitude, which is proper to music, to produce
states of feeling. These states are certainly more or less exceptional. It
is not at just any moment that someone can become a kind of bubble
or vague cloud of pure feeling. But according to the state in which we
find ourselves, when our perception and mind are in a candid, porous
state, when our sensitivity is frayed, if music comes to our perception
in moments like this it turns us into a pure quality of feeling. These
are fleeting moments which are deprived, detached from any object of
attention, when feeling in itself is magnetized in the evanescence of the
sound that comes and vanishes. This state of feeling resists definitions
or explanations, since it is what it is, unrelated to anything else. In
these privileged moments, we come very close to the vulnerability that
is characteristic of the feeling of love. Love in its purest form, love that
does not ask for return and which is best expressed in the simple, open
and gratefull love for life.
In this mode of listening, we become capsules of feeling because
our self is passive, uncertain, wandering, a self that does not interpret
and does not judge because, in those rare moments of pure listening,
54 Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry

our consciousness is just a whole indiscernible quality of feeling that

is nothing else but feeling. Speaking of poetry, but something that also
holds true for music, Borges calls this experience an aesthetic fact or a
kind of happiness : “Something as obvious, immediate and indefinable
as love, or as the taste of fruit, the vicinity of the sea, the proximity and
skim of a beloved body” (1983 : 126).
While this first mode of listening is uncertain and vague, emotion
without a self, since the self is loomed by feeling, the second mode
(1.2) is the one of commotion, by which I mean that which moves us
inwardly. It is therefore an internal momentum, a feeling that is set in
motion, in a state of commotion, when our bloodstream heats up, our
pulse accelerates and our heart quivers. Each person is attached to a
certain kind of music capable of producing this effect of commotion, an
effect that acts as a kind of fingerprint of our sensitiveness.
In the third level of feeling (1.3), we experience the so-called emo-
tion, a kind of feeling that presents general characteristics. That’s why
emotions can be named : joy, surprise, anger etc. In this case, we can
name what we feel because it is a sort of encoded feeling. It is at this
level that we can say that a certain music is cheerful, another one is
sad or otherwise melancholic, etc. For sure, music in itself cannot be
reduced to those labels. In most cases our habits or cultural conventions
are the reasons why we attach such labels to music.
However, at this point some complicating factors arise. There are,
indeed, musical modes that are linked to a certain pathos and even a
certain ethos. The Greeks attributed moral effects to each of the musi-
cal modes. Similarly, the indications of movement as ‘allegro’, ‘piano’,
‘moderato’, etc. relate to certain moods. These expressive forms evoke
emotions probably because different cadences and rhythms, bass and
high tones, the different colors or timbres of the instruments have
correspondences with vital rhythms, with the visceral sensations and
biological pulsations that are also different, faster or slower, depending
on whether we are feeling joy or grief, excitement or boredom, placidity,
etc. In this regard, music provokes what I call instinctive emotion, reso-
nances that are raised by pulse similarities. In short, there are sound
rhythms that have correspondences with biological rhythms that ac-
company different states of feeling. Thus, cultural labels of emotion that
we usually stick to various types of music are not entirely arbitrary,
but find motivation in the similarities that can exist between music and
biological pulse.

Listening with the Body

In the second mode of listening, listening with the body, we enter
into the dominance of the rhythmic universe, of music percussion, when
listening is not limited to the ears but expands into a kind of listening
that takes charge of the entire body. In this first form (2.1), there is a
 Nine Modes of Listening to Music 55

sort of dissipation of the frontiers between body and sound as if the body
itself were the source of rhythm. This is very common in the collective
ceremonies that the African-Brazilian forms of religion knows well. But
this experience can also occur in people who have tremendous flexibility
and body plasticity. Even when someone is not a trained dancer, this
merging of sound and body is something that results from the ability to
incarnate rhythm, as if music were coming from inside the body.
The second subdivision (2.2), on its turn, establishes a relation of
contiguity between music and body. Music sounds and the body, even
unknowingly, already begins to stir. This experience is also very familiar
to Brazilians. It is just a question of listening to one of the variations
of samba for the body to begin to speak for itself. This body duality
reacting to a stimulus is under the dominance of the energetic character
of listening.
The third subdivision (2.3) refers to choreographed dance when cho-
reography functions as a plastic translation of the musical movements
and rhythms. Every dance is a conversion of sound into a plastic, visual
reality. In dance, the body convulsions give visible form to rhythm. In
the case of choreography, certain conventions of visual representation
function as indications for the position and movement of bodies in space.

Listening Intellectually
When we come to the intellectual modes of listening, we enter into
the realm of the educated ears, I mean, of listeners sensitive to the most
imperceptible subtleties of music. It is the universe of those who know
music, and from this knowledge are able to extract an unsuspected
pleasure from listening, an active, interactive and productive mode of
listening of which laypersons are unaware.
In the first sub-division (3.1), the intellectual apprehension has a
purely hypothetical character. The listener, however trained he(she) may
be, stands before an act of reception in which his(her) intellect can only
make assumptions. Of course, this is the case of musical pieces which
broke with any pre-set reference system and thereby in the experimenta-
tion with sound materials unusual shapes are found, in the interstices
of sound and noise. This puts the listener into a situation of uncertainty,
unpredictability and continuous conjectures while accompanying the
development of a work or composition.
The second subdivision of intellectual listening (3.2) is that of a
relational listening when the listener is able to accompany the games
of overlapping sound lines, the input and output of voices, instruments
and materials, the progression of movements, the reversions, textures
and conglomerates. In short, it is a listening ear that is able to visualize
the structures and forms of the music.
The third sub-division (3.3) belongs to the expert who knows all the
56 Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry

musical systems of reference, in time and space. From this expertise

he(she) derives the capacity to assess music as a peculiar form of think-
ing and to have a musical experience that only knowledge or erudition
can bring.
Classifications of types of music listening became frequent given
the importance that sound perception began to play as a key element
of the composition itself in electroacoustic music (see Menezes 1996).
Some of these classifications will now be discussed below.

Listening as the Pivot of Electroacoustic Music

Listening has become a major issue of musical composition from the
middle of last century on, since Pierre Schaeffer (1966, 1973) inaugu-
rated with concrete music one of the trends of what would be established
under the name of electroacoustic music. Since then the development
of this kind of music has been impressive. Its multiplicity and diversity
is not restricted to one single genre but it is rather a nexus of numer-
ous genres, styles, and subgenres, divided not only geographically
but also institutionally, culturally, technologically, and economically
(Demers 2010 : 5). In this context, Demers even develops a topic on the
contemporary state of the art of listening to signs in post-Schaefferian
electroacoustic music.
What is clear is that the point of departure for this emphasis on
listening first comes from Schaeffer. Because it starts from the record-
ing any kind of sound, including noise, as a potential element of a
composition, concrete music depends on a form of qualitative listening
Schaeffer (1966) called “reduced listening”. It is reduced because it im-
plies listening to the sound for its own sake, that is, as an object that
is a sound, dismissing its source and the meaning(s) it may otherwise
convey. Being faced with sounds from all possible sources, the com-
poser should be able to judiciously choose the sounds that seem more
appropriate for handling and combining sound recordings with the help
of electroacoustic techniques for mixing and composing. In this context,
it is not surprising that Schaeffer (ibid.: 116) came to establish a table
of listening functions into four types. To hear : emission of a sound – a
sound event is presented to us; to listen : sound perception – crude
perceptions of the outlines of a sound; to understand : selection of cer-
tain particular aspects of the sound – qualified insights of a qualified
sound object; to comprehend : sense of values, signs, emergency of a
sound and reference content – confrontation with extra-sound notions
(cf. Chion 1983. See also 1991).
When he went deep into the phenomenology of listening conceived
of as comprehension, Schaeffer (1966 : 150-153) established three
musical situations and four listening attitudes or behavior. The three
musical situations are : the acousmatic situation, when the listener has
a specific intention concerning the sound itself, the proper sound quality
 Nine Modes of Listening to Music 57

(unrelated to its mechanics) or to any intention of any other origin. The

second situation is that of the player who interprets according to what
he(she) can understand. The sound acts and the player understands
and judges it by aiming at the success of his(her) intentions. The third
situation is that of normal listening, which is more complicated because
it combines, in a way, something from the previous two situations. It is
passive, but not acousmatic, with some degree of curiosity turned toward
the source constituted as a real other. But at the same time, this kind
of listening cannot understand the other unless it simulates its activity.
The four listening attitudes or behavior lie on two oppositional axes :
banal/practitioner, natural/cultural. The banal attitude is sensitive to
the sound manufacturing conditions, but does not give the sound object
particular attention, providing an automatic response. The practitioner
is more skilled, better informed. The natural behavior responds to the
sound’s purely physical causes, while the cultural faces the cultural
purposes of sound.
As mentioned earlier, the major importance of concrete music de-
rives from the impulse that it was able to give for the development of
electroacoustic music. With the advent of studios equipped with sophis-
ticated computer technology, this kind of music mixed the techniques
of concrete music with electronic music.
In the tradition of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM),
founded by Schaeffer in 1958, Michel Chion (1993a and 1993b : 33-
39) established three different listening attitudes that point to different
objects: causal listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening.
The coincidence with Peirce’s categories jumps to view. However, in the
presentation that will follow I inverted the order so that the correspond-
ence with the categories appears more clearly : (1) reduced listening, (2)
causal listening, and (3) semantic listening.
Coined by Schaeffer, ‘reduced listening’ refers to listening which
affects the qualities and forms of sound, regardless of its cause and its
meaning, and it takes the sound – verbal, instrumental, anecdotal or
any other – as an object of observation rather than using it to look for
something else which can be reached through it. The term “reduced”
was borrowed from the phenomenological notion of reduction in Hus-
serl. For the descriptive inventory of a sound in reduced listening one’s
sole aprehension is not enough. That is why sounds have to be recorded
so that they can be listened to repeatedly. Recording is also necessary
because a player or a singer cannot repeat exactly the same sound in
two different occasions. They can only reproduce the height and general
profile, but not the specific qualities that particularize a sound event
and make it unique. Reduced listening therefore implies the fixation of
sounds and this brings them to the status of real objects, sound objects.
Causal listening refers to the recognition of the source which causes
the sound. Sometimes, the precise cause or individual (in the case of
58 Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry

someone’s voice) is recognized (as in recognizing the voice of a familiar

person). However, causal listening can have multiple levels, which relate
to the sound itself and its context of origin. In ambiguous situations,
and more frequently than we might think, what we recognize is just
the nature of the source, that is, the sound of the agent, whether it is
something mechanical, or the sound of an animal, or else a human-made
sound, etc. These are signs that are used to deduce the nature of the
cause. But we can still follow the precise causal history of the sound
itself, for example, when we follow the sounds we thus associate with
rubbing (accelerated, precipitated, etc.) and feel its pressure changes,
speed and amplitude, but not knowing at all, the ‘what’ or ‘how’ of that
rubbing.
Semantic listening refers to a code or language through which
messages are interpreted. Verbal language is an example of this kind
of listening attitude, along with interpreting the sounds made by Morse
code and other sonic manifestations of codes. This listening is a very
complex operation and is studied by linguistics. It is a purely differential
listening, because language is structured as a system of oppositions.
A phoneme’s place in the system of language cannot be defined for its
positive acoustic characteristics, but only through its distinctive (or dif-
ferential) features as established in relation to all the other phenemes.
Also in the tradition of GRM, in the context of what he calls “acous-
matic” music and inspired by the phenomenology of C. S. Peirce, François
Bayle (1993 : 103) has proposed an ingenious trichotomy of the significa-
tion of listening, described as follows : three states of experience, First-
ness, Secondness and Thirdness, put into action, respectively, hearing,
cognition and music education, which in turn respectively bring into
play qualities, objects and scenarios, with a view to presentification,
identification and interpretation.
At the level of presentification all that is linked to the outbreak of
sound is present : the call, the disappearance, the beat, the start-up,
the scrub, the windstorm, etc. The second level, that of identification,
designates the gesture and the resistence of the sound material : shock,
compression, torsion, stretch, fragmentation, etc. The level of interpre-
tation, finally, concerns everything which refers to a world, including a
topsy-turvy world of poetic, abstract relations, echoes, values, colors,
brightness, aura (ibid. : 187).
Although Schaeffer, Chion and Bailey are “practitioners” (to use the
term coined by Schaeffer) belonging to the same tradition or school, their
classifications are, to a certain extent, quite diverse. On the one hand,
there is a diversity in the sources of inspiration that served them. Thus,
while Schaeffer develops his listening types in reference to Husserl, Bayle
owes his to Peirce. Yet, there is something in common in both classifica-
tions : both Husserl and Peirce were phenomenologists. As for Chion, he
establishes a triad which, although not directly based on Peirce presents
 Nine Modes of Listening to Music 59

nonetheless a perfect match with his categories, taking as the key axis
for his classification the behavior of the listener in the act of listening.
At this point, one can readily see what distinguishes these three
listening classifications from my nine modes of listening. Also based
on Peirce, as well as Bayle’s classification, my nine modes of listening,
as already discussed, find their source much more in Peirce’s theory of
the interpretants than in his phenomenology. It is true that semiotics
is not separate from phenomenology, but differs from it in the sense
that the phenomenological (or phaneroscopic) categories are vague,
while the semiotic conceptions provide us with a ready set of analyti-
cal distinctions operative in accounting for existing processes of signs
or semiosis. Thus, the nine modes of listening were extracted from the
types or degrees of the interpretant, a scaled set of interpretative levels
guiding the emergence of the various modes of hearing.
Although Chion’s classification is not based on Peirce, the fact that
it is turned more specifically toward the act of listening makes it the
closest to my nine modes of listening, as long as one takes into account
that the nine modes of listening incorporate the body of the listener, an
issue that is absent in all the other classifications. It is Peirce’s energetic
interpreter that leads us to realize that hearing depends not only on
our ear and mind, but also, invariably depends on our body. This is
why, when we listen to music, our body goes into action along with the
feelings, commotions and emotions that speak in it.

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60 Recherches sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry

Abstract
Listening has become a major issue of musical composition from the middle of
last century on, since Pierre Schaeffer inaugurated with concrete music one of the
trends of what would be established under the name of electroacoustic music. The
classification of the modes of listening to music that will be presented in this paper is
not concerned with the chronological study of listening by means of musical examples
from historical periods and their respective social context. As my classification aims at
the processes of reception and in a broad sense, I found its foundation in the different
interpretative levels formulated by Peirce in his classification of the interpretants.
Keywords : Music; Listening; Interpretants; Concrete Music.

Résumé
Écouter est devenu un enjeu majeur de la composition musicale depuis le milieu
du siècle dernier, alors que Pierre Schaeffer inaugurait avec la musique concrète
une des tendances de ce qui s’établirait sous le nom de musique électroacoustique.
La classification des modes d’écoute de la musique présentés dans cet article n’est
pas concernée par l’étude chronologique de l’écoute au moyen d’exemples musi-
caux historiques et de leur contexte social respectif. Comme la classification que je
propose ici vise à analyser les processus de réception, au sens large, j’ai trouvé son
fondement dans les différents niveaux d'interprétation formulées par Peirce dans sa
classification des interprétants.
Mots-clés : Musique; écouter; interprétants; musique concrète.

LUCIA SANTAELLA is full professor at São Paulo Catholic University (Pucsp),

PhD in Literary Theory (1973-PUCSP) and in Communication Sciences (1993-São
Paulo University). Director of Cimid, Research Center on Digital Media, one of the
honorary Presidents of the Latin-American Federation of Semiotics and member of the
Argentinian Academy of Fine Arts. She was President of the Charles Sanders Peirce
Society, USA (2007). She was Visiting Professor at Frei Universität-Berlin (1987);
Valencia University (2004); Kassel University (2009 and 2011); Évora University
(2010); Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Buenos Aires (2013-2014); Universidad
Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, México (2015). She has published 42 books,
organized 14 books, and also published around 300 articles in journals and books
in Brazil and abroad. She was awarded with the Jabuti Prizes (2002, 2009, 2011,
2014); the Sergio Motta Prize in Art and Technology (2005); and the Luis Beltrão Prize
(2010). She is a CNPq researcher 1-A.