not so long ago, listening to music was a passive activity. you turned on the radio or put a record on the turntable, and you listened while the music played. but now attitudes are changing and listening is becoming increasingly interactive, as more and more people remix the world around them.

each week on Active Listening / The Act of Listening, host stAllio! will feature work by remixers, sound collagists, and others who choose to play their records in ways they weren’t meant to be played—as well as perform active listening experiments in the studio, shining new light on old records by playing them in nonstandard ways.

tune in to Active Listening / The Act of Listening on numbers.fm every sunday night at 9:38 eastern / 8:38 central!

stAllio! will be hosting a brand-new net radio show called Active Listening / The Act of Listening starting this weekend. the show takes its name from an essay by john oswald:

As a listener my own preference is the option to experiment. My listening system has a mixer instead of a receiver, an infinitely variable speed turntable, filters, reverse capability, and a pair of ears.

An active listener might speed up a piece of music in order to perceive more clearly its macrostructure, or slow it down to hear articulation and detail more precisely. Portions of pieces are juxtaposed for comparison or played simultaneously, tracing “the motifs of the Indian raga Darbar over Senegalese drumming recording in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950′s (a sonic texture like a “Mona Lisa” which in close-up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal.”)

each week stAllio! will play music and sound art somehow related to this theme (glitch, remix culture, prepared records, etc) as well as do some active listening experiments in-studio, shining new light on old records by playing them in nonstandard ways.

tune in each sunday night at 9:38 pm eastern on http://numbers.fm/! if you’re good, we may even archive old episodes.