Treasuring listening: near-ear training for pronunciation work

clip art: Clker

Good TED talk by Julian Treasure. For enhanced interpersonal listening he ends with the acronym RASA (Receive, Appreciate, Summarize, Ask), your basic attending skills--and even world peace! What is worth "listening to," however, is how he gets there, what he terms "savouring, mixing and listening positioning." In essence, "savouring" is focusing for a period of time either on one sound in your environment---or silence--for a couple of minutes; "mixing" is focusing briefly on the sounds in your environment, one after another for maybe half a minute each; "positioning" is the process of intentionally listening with a purpose or conceptual "filter" in mind (for example, to very consciously, listen empathetically or critically or sympathetically.) Now i'm not quite sure how you do the third (positioning) in our work, but the first two forms of auditory attention management, savouring and mixing, are intriguing. Those appear to be apt, applicable analogs for what is involved in "training the body first" to attend to the felt sense of movement and somatic resonance (good vibrations in the vocal track and upper body.) I have not systematically worked with such pre-pre-listening such as that described by Treasure but it sounds like a perfect fit. First chance I get I'll "embody" some of it in an upcoming EHIEP session and report back. Hear, hear!