The first movement of a phenomenology of sound
and listening has taken its first step in what may
be regarded as a preliminary survey of the auditory terrain. It began
with first approximations and the center of focal listening. It moved
from that listening to the voices of things "outwards" and from there
to the listening for the silence of the relative and open horizon of si-
lence. This survey has been attentive to the voices of the World.

This is phenomenologically appropriate, for there is a primary
listening which precedes our own speech. This is whether one con-
siders the matter as an issue of personal history--I hear the voices of
others, of things, of the World long before I speak my own words--
or as a matter of the correct phenomenological procedure which begins
with noema before taking up noetic acts. Phenomenologically the
"self" is modeled after the World which takes primacy in its first ap-
pearance.

The movement toward a more detailed review of the auditory ter-
rain is a movement which accelerates the approximations to existen-
tial significations. The sounds which we hear are not "mere" sounds
or "abstract" sounds but are significant sounds. In the first instance
listening is a listening to voices, the voices of language in its broadest
sense.

Existentially things "speak." Heidegger has pointed out, "Much
closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the
door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even
mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away
from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly." ¹ The

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