Decolonising Listening

Decolonising Listening: A Provocation

Our listening, defined as the conscious interpretation of sound, is colonised. This is a provocative statement, Listening itself (as a physiological phenomenon) is not colonised—but our interpretation, value systems, and practices around listening are^[2]. What we think of as listening has been shaped by hundreds of years of extractive human development. However, our physiological response to sound, evolved over many millennia, and including entrainment with sounds of the natural world, is where we can break our conditioning and remember our relationship as nature.

This process of unlearning and remembering aligns with broader movements of reclaiming embodied knowledge. Audre Lorde writes about black, ancient and non-European ways of being as part of reclaiming our lived experience – “we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes.”^[3] Similarly, as we rewild the way we listen, the knowing we have in our bodies becomes the DNA for change on a fundamental level.

Listening as a Colonised Practice

To reclaim this embodied wisdom, we must first understand where colonised listening comes from, confronting the historical forces that have shaped and constrained us, and realising how deeply it permeates our shared ways of thinking. Over the last 12,000 years we have separated ourselves from nature in a number of social and energy transitions including agriculture, Colonialism, fossil fuel extraction and unbridled exponential Capitalism^[4]. We’ve taken from our environment, and our fellow humans, to the extent that we are now in polycrisis^[5] – multiple crises that are environmental, economic, social, technological and geopolitical – that overlap and unfold at the same time.

This crisis is not just external, but also internal—an erosion of the imagination, of the stories and narratives that shape our sense of possibility. We have an opaque understanding that we have lost our way, but with no pathway to change, even as it gets harder to survive in increasingly volatile times. This is no accident, as dominant narratives impede any progression from an extractive way of life to an ecological one, in what Anne Stoler describes as “colonial aphasia”^[6]. One could suggest that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationships with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of a trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths”^[7], and they are destroying us.

Who Defines Listening?

In this context, it’s crucial to ask: who gets to define knowledge, and whose ways of knowing are silenced? We’ve never been given the means with which to re-imagine; part of the problem is that we thought that knowledge based on a system of extraction was true knowledge in the first place^[8]. Dominant structures tend to extract from the lives, labor, and creativity of everyday people, while simultaneously controlling the narratives through which those lives are interpreted. As part of this, our institutions tend to privilege Eurocentric epistemologies, gatekeep access through class and language, and abstract lived realities into theories that benefit researchers more than the communities studied^[9]. The metrics of legitimacy—peer review, citation counts, institutional affiliations—often exclude and devalue non-Western, Indigenous, and community-based forms of knowledge.

With listening it is no different. A 2017 UK study collecting definitions of listening from 1925 to the present day contains 19 definitions, almost all of which present listening as a cognitive and behavioural skill—a linear process that can be utilised by an individual listener^[10]. This reflects a general historic tendency within Western epistemologies to frame listening as mainly an intellectual and cognitive act, divorced from embodied, relational, and ecological contexts. For example Theodor W. Adorno talks about listening as an intellectual, analytical act tied to the structures of musical form and social critique^[11], Gilles Deleuze talks about listening as individual conceptual becoming^[12], and Jacques Derrida’s focus is on language, meaning and political metaphor^[13].

Even within the work of influential pioneers such as Pauline Oliveros, Murray Schafer and John Cage—who have opened profound new pathways in sound art and consciousness studies—there are limitations. Their framing, though innovative, remains part of Western imaginaries, secular, and often individualist, even when it borrows from or parallels ancestral, land-based, or sacred listening systems. Without foregrounding shared ecology, and instead being rooted in and uplifted by colonial power structures, there is the risk of aestheticised mindfulness—vapid tranquility without relational accountability. Similarly, the highest considered forums of listening can also be the most exclusive, the most homogeneous, the most intellectualised. This is part of the fetishisation of listening in the Capitolocene, which includes listening as commodity, listening as spectacle, listening as wellness, and listening as technological masturbation. As we move further into polycrisis, it will be harder and harder to defend listening as a soothing way to bypass the suffering of the world, avoiding grief and responsibility while injustices scale and children burn^[14]. 

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Non-Western and Indigenous Listening: Relational, Embodied, and Ecological

If the Western model risks aestheticising listening, non-Western traditions moralise and socialise it.   Reframing listening as a relational, embodied practice highlights the stark differences in these worldviews. Take for example Dadirri^[15], a concept from the Ngangikurungkurr people of Australia. It means “deep listening”—not just to speech, but to land, spirit, silence, and the subtle rhythms of life. Or consider Ubuntu^[16], an African philosophy where listening is about moral and relational responsibility, and about sustaining the social fabric. Across Native American, Māori, Andean, and East Asian traditions, listening is treated not as an individual skill but as a relational practice. It’s embedded in ceremony, shaped by landscape, and informed by ancestors. Listening is often multi-sensory, embodied, and spiritual—something you live, not simply do. These ways of listening are bolstered further by practices in traditions such as Nada Yoga (sound and vibration as a path to self-realization and inner transformation), Buddhism (where listening cultivates understanding around non-self, transcending duality and transforming perception), and Sufi / Shamanic traditions (breaking down the ego and union with the divine).

Challenging the colonial project by redefining the way we listen

The above perspectives challenge the very foundation of emphasis on form, separation, and categorisation inherent in the colonial project. The benefit (or need to to change) for people and planet are clear (as we move further away from democracy, our human rights are eroded, and we continue to exceed our planetary boundaries), but how do we, people in different stages of our own journey of decolonisation, learn from this knowledge without co-opting it?

The first step is to understand listening as not simply the physiological act of hearing and processing auditory information, but a cultural, relational, and epistemological practice shaped by historical forces, power dynamics, and worldviews. How we listen, what we value in sound, and whose voices are heard, is positioned in systems of knowledge, power, and culture. Within this one could reintegrate existing ideas of listening as responsibility, listening as respect to land, and with current areas of harm and injustice in the world, listening as solidarity and resistance.

The second step would be to bodily understand that the power to uphold these values comes not just from intellectualising a sense of responsibility and accountability, but from the relational space that listening is on the level of non-form, and non-self. This is a space where we find that we can question and redefine mental structures that have been inherited, colonised, designed to oppress or call something an “other”. Because these structures no longer serve us.

Beyond Form, Language, and Separation

I would argue that in the Capitalocene ours is a problem of otherisation inherent in modern forms. Where can we have the confidence of knowing, being and ethics in a way that doesn’t subscribe to form? The answer is in recognising the power of listening as a decolonised act. The truth is that we already listen as part of everything, it’s just we’ve been taught to only recognise a small part of what listening actually is. Sound is universal to all of us, it pre-dates not just colonialism but all organised societies^[17], reflecting our deep evolutionary and cultural connections to soundscapes shaped by nature. We journey beneath language, form and separation, in a vibrational realm where there is no “other” and we are listening as, not listening to. This is not a new concept, but one that is found in traditions across the world, almost all of them using sound to understand interconnectedness, non-duality, and animistic perspectives^[18]. Such perspectives remind us that sound is not just an object to be perceived, but a medium through which we experience our unity with all things.

We Are Nature Through Sound.

Understanding sound as a universal primer for connection may lead us to new vocabulary beyond the limits of language^[19]. As children, when we first discovered our favourite songs – the way we then listened to music was with our bodies. We weren’t listening consciously; we became the music, the boundaries between self and sound dissolved, allowing us to inhabit a space of pure being and active becoming^[20]. The same thing can be said for the way we listen to the birds, the forest, the oceans, the voices of people, in fact, any sound at all.

When we experience a sound we are nature witnessing itself. We understand that listening is something that can be deconstructed, rebuilt with decolonised perspective, and that it can be our guide for shared ecology and challenging myths in the Capitolocene. Lastly and most importantly, it feels good. Our bodies know the difference, the joy in being part of nature as opposed to something outside it^[21]. We realise we were never apart in the first place, and once our bodies know this they will never go back. We are nature through sound.