Exploring the Future of Listening
8.8 Exploring Future Disciplinary Perspectives on Listening to the SONG of Life
Listening to the SONG of life is a magnanimous and inclusive listening perspective that embraces multiple academic disciplines.[1] I illustrate how different disciplines can creatively approach exploring listening to the SONG of life in the future. This is a sample of academic disciplines and not an exhaustive compendium of all disciplines. The ideas are suggestive, heuristic, and meant to be modified, edited, and changed. Refer to Table 2 for a sample of academic disciplines and their associated listening topics.
Table 2
A Sample of Creative Disciplinary Contributions to Listening to the SONG of Life: Listening to Self, Others, Nature, and Goddess-God-the Divine
Academic Listening As…Discipline
Accounting |
Discovering credits that add to, and debits that detract from, the ability to listen for each SONG context. |
Botany |
Exploring the possibilities of humans listening to plants. |
Communication |
Investigating the impact of using different mediums or channels of communication when listening, e.g., Face-to-face, Facetime, Discord, Zoom, Podcasts, Twitter, and YouTube. |
Consciousness Studies |
Describing how listening with conscious awareness, attention, and intuition provide information for decision-making and problem-solving. |
Counseling |
Therapeutic insights into how the family of origin creates perceptual filters when listening to others in and outside the family system. |
Creative Writing |
Exploring the self-healing efficacy of journaling, poetry, short stories, novels, and blogs about listening experiences in the SONG contexts. |
Education |
Creating and testing the value of listening activities for each of the SONG contexts at different grade levels. |
Geography |
Identifying the characteristics of soundscapes in different environments describing the qualities of places that create calm and reduce stress, and considering how these qualities might become part of the architecture of schools, homes, and offices. |
Music |
Discovering the musical rhythms of thinking, listening to others, nature sounds, and the silent music of the Divine. |
Psychology |
Developing methods for cultivating awareness using multiple modes of self-reflection. |
Sociology |
Examining the influence of sociodemographic variables such as age, education, income, political affiliation, ethnicity, and religion-spirituality on listening to the SONG of Life. |
Theology |
Cultivating spiritual listening to the Divine in contemplative meditation and prayer. |
Zoology |
Exploring the dynamics of human listening with insects, reptiles, fish, birds, and animals. |
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Listening to the SONG of Life
The preceding disciplines and listening topics illustrate the multidisciplinary nature of listening to the SONG of life. Yet to be explored are the interdisciplinary aspects of listening to the SONG of life. One term that conveys the interdisciplinary nature of listening to the SONG life is biopsychosociospiritual.[2] This term suggests potential interdisciplinary connections between biological, psychological, sociological, and spiritual aspects of listening to the SONG of life.
There are some disadvantages to adopting this term in conjunction with the interdisciplinary study of listening to the SONG of life. First, biopsychcosociospiritual is not inclusive of many other disciplines.[3] Second, the term does not specify the relationships between the disciplines other than suggesting a primacy for the biological and mental phenomenon by positioning bio (Biology) and psycho (Psychology) at the beginning of the term. Third, the term is cumbersome when writing and in conversational discourse. Unfortunately, I do not have a better linguistic term[4] to indicate the comprehensive interdisciplinary nature of listening to the SONG of life.
While interdisciplinary research is highly desirable,[5] there are several reasons why interdisciplinary research is challenging. First, there are few professional forums where scholars from different disciplines intentionally meet to collaborate on a given academic topic. I wonder if many scholars will collaborate with other scholars from different disciplines to engage in interdisciplinary research about listening to the SONG of life. I cannot think of a professional convention I attended in the last thirty-seven years in the discipline of Communication that is devoted to creating interdisciplinary collaboration around a single topic like listening to the SONG of life. Even on my college campus, individuals from different departments rarely meet to collaborate on an interdisciplinary project. Many of our disciplinary and departmental academic units are still in protected silos with thick walls. I envision a day when we leave our silos, meet under a big tent in a natural setting, dialogue about listening to the SONG of life, forming friendships and collaborative teaching and research projects. Second, the institutional academic regulations and privileges fueling the tenure and promotion process place tremendous pressure on young scholars to publish sole-author pieces to prove their competence and credibility. Thus, interdisciplinary research between multiple authors in different disciplines is often a low priority for those pursuing tenure and promotion.
But I do have hope. [6]. I suspect that scholars who engage in interdisciplinary listening research will be personally and professionally immersed in listening to the SONG of life. That is, interdisciplinary listening research will gain momentum from scholars’ lived experience in listening to the SONG of life. Another factor influencing scholars’ engagement with interdisciplinary listening research is their willingness to relax their discipline-specific assumptions. It will be challenging to temporarily disengage from the ego-conditioned years of education, training, and research in a specific discipline. I invite scholars to see with open eyes of curiosity and wonder. These eyes are child-like, playful, and appreciative of listening to the entire SONG of life. The eyes of curiosity present a view of listening beyond the normative view of listening to other humans and envision a broader view of listening to self, nature, and the Divine.
Further, the new interdisciplinary listening agenda requires genuine dialogue with others from different disciplines. The talking part of a dialogue is relatively easy for most academics as they are interested in promoting their own research agenda. The difficult part of dialoguing with others from different academic disciplines is listening with empathy.[7] This will take effort and courage because it may mean that scholars will need to change their beliefs, and teaching and research agendas and practices, based on the dialogue.
I hypothesize that scholars who experientially live the SONG of life will contribute to making the lives of others more wonderful by transcending their personal research agenda for the sake of a common vision. That vision acknowledges and moves toward collaborating among multiple disciplinary perspectives organized around the contexts of listening to the SONG of life. Time will determine if my hypothesis is prophetic or not.
- Worthington and Bodie argue that "Listening" is a field of study and not a discipline (e.g., there is no academic department of listening). Moreover, they suggest that listening research and theory is multidisciplinary and not, for the most part, interdisciplinary. They provide examples of multidisciplinary perspectives on listening in architecture, audiology, interpersonal communication, language learning, linguistics, management and leadership, media studies, musicology, philosophy, psychology, and sound studies. Debra Worthington and Graham Bodie, The Handbook of Listening (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2020). ↵
- Sperry originally coined the term biopsychosociospiritual. Len Sperry, "Integrative Spiritually Oriented Psychotherapy," in Spiritually Oriented Psychotherapy, eds. Len Sperry and Edward P. Shafranske (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2005), 307-329. ↵
- For instance, listening to others in the Communication discipline is not represented in Sperry and Shafranske's term. There is also a need to represent additional disciplines. For example, refer to Table 2 for other disciplines not represented in the term biopsychosociospiritual. ↵
- There is a dynamic tension between representation and ease of use. By "better term," I mean more representative and inclusive of academic disciplines and less cumbersome to use in writing and discourse. As more disciplines are added to the term, the usage of the term becomes more cumbersome, but in the process of subtracting (omitting) disciplines from the term, the term becomes less inclusive. For instance, the term biopsychosociocommuniomusicopolitcalspiritual is more inclusive by representing additional disciplines. However, the term is still cumbersome and does not include all of the disciplines relevant to the study of listening to the SONG of life. ↵
- For a rationale on the importance of interdisciplinary research, refer to E. James Baesler, "Exploring Interdisciplinary Prayer Research in a Health Context," Journal of Communication and Religion 31, no. 1 (March 2008): 24-53. While this article is about interdisciplinary prayer in a health context, the primary arguments for interdisciplinary research also apply to interdisciplinary listening research. ↵
- Interdisciplinary research on listening to the SONG of life may be catalyzed by the 2025 International Listening Association's (ILA) convention. Thanks to colleagues at the ILA, the proposed theme for the 2025 International Listening Association (ILA) convention is "Listening to the SONG of life." ↵
- Creating Kline's "thinking environment" for another person to fully express their ideas about listening is paramount in the interdisciplinary dialogic process. Nancy Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind (London: Octopus Publishing, 1999). ↵