Improvisation - Why We're Listening

In my first post on this blog, investigating the process of creative listening, I finally gave form to ideas that have been stewing in my brain for quite some time. This new shaping of old ideas got me thinking more about my development as a listener, and the scope and content of Oblique Acoustemologies.

To find the roots of my relationship with listening, I must go deep into my own sonic history. Before my relatively recent encounters with ethnomusicology and the academia of the avant-garde taught me showed me the pathways to expressing and understanding my ideas about experimental listening and music in an accepted grammar, I always felt the music and sounds in me. They were there, but I understood them more viscerally, just outside my zone of intellectual comprehension but imbedded in my sonic consciousness.

The zone of disconnect between the visceral and intellectual zones of consciousness is a place toward which I continually gravitate. In it lies the metaphysics of the music making experience, where a synthesis of listening and soundmaking combine to create singular happenings - ephemeral moments in which the music seems to inherit a will of its own.
This brings me back to the core of this blog - why we're listening, and why we're listening in the way we do.

I listen because I'm an improviser. 
Music has always been a phenomenon of spontaneity for me, a nexus of actions and reactions interfacing sound and the mind, unfolding in a malleable but somehow intangible process. I see improvisation as investigation, bound up closely with listening. However, it is difficult for me to reflect on my improvisatory process - I am hardly conscious of what exactly I'm doing, bound up as it is in a lifetime of music listened to, learned and assimilated, familiar patterns and frameworks, and quick harmolodic reasoning. Yet I improvise to make sense of sounds, to contextualize them, to reflect upon their old and new meanings. The greatest feelings I get while improvising come from spontaneous connections to the soundworld or to other improvisers, where something just "clicks" and the result is life-affirming, meditative, and transformative.
I listen because the inspiration for the connection is always there, always changing, always fleeting.
I listen because inspiration occurs in unexpected places, from unknowable sources.
I listen because the meaningfulness of a sound experience is inextricable from its impermanence.
I improvise to experience these elusive moments of meaning.

Moreover, the process of improvisation is so central to my life that it informs the way I understand human existence.
The improvisational process, with its focused listening and quick, almost unconscious reactions and adaptations, is vital to the survival of the human species. The great improvisers have an evolutionary advantage - sharp senses and quick reactions allow them to pick up cues from their environments and turn signals into meaningful information. Just like the musical improviser, the life improviser draws upon a lifetime of experience with every (re)action. As a life improviser, you have a library of responses to environmental and interpersonal stimuli that you access without conscious thought. You know from experience that fire is hot, to use a common example, and that excessive heat is damaging to the body - so when you move too close to a fire, you are repelled by your body's time-honed reflexes. 
Improvising musicians operate by channeling the consciousness of their idiom (or lack thereof), the fundamentals of their instruments and physicality, and their musical pasts and presents to create the sonic future.
Improvisation and being-in-the-world are process, journey, destination, (re)action, working within and without infinite subtlety, microstructure and macrostructure.
In Improvisation I find the meaning and joy of life, as one phrase within the joyous collective improvisation of civilization.