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 inter