Sonic performances are NOT just confined to music but rather an aesthetic of imagining new futures and care for one another which can come in different forms for disabled people. Foreclosing these forms of relationality reinforces an ableist “hearing line” that turns all their offense.

As a young person, Kim was “taught to believe” that sound was “not a part of her life,” as she explained in her 2015 Ted Talk “The Enchanting Music of Sign Language.” Yet deafness contains a spectrum of acoustical and sonic experience, spanning those who hear some to those who do not hear, and those who have always been Deaf to those who experience gradual or sudden hearing loss. Regardless of one’s individual cochlear ability, Deaf and HoH people experience sound both physiologically and socio-culturally, including physical vibrations and through the biased cultural values (and resulting barriers) that define and enforce norms of sound-making and listening in public and private space. Despite cultural presumptions that Deaf people live in a silent world, few are likely to consider sound, noise, and the politics of listening as carefully as Deaf and HoH people, whose lives are circumscribed by barriers to acoustical information. Kim’s works, such as (LISTEN), portray the complexity of Deaf life—and Deaf culture—in and beyond society’s ableist sonic infrastructures and ideologies, envisioning encounters with listening through memory, affect, and non-acoustical perceptual modes that integrate sight, touch, taste, and smell. In this process, they activate sound as a category unbound from a single aesthetic or social modality and challenge ideologies that privilege certain ranges and abilities of hearing over others.

(LISTEN) subverts dominant histories and theories of sonic art that center the experiences and values of hearing people. Rethinking the soundscape as a site for social critique, this article critiques modes of soundwalking that perpetuate oppressive systems of power, especially those that naturalize and normalize hearing and/or interpret sonic environments as neutral spaces of perception and consumption. Engaging contemporary soundscape theory in a consideration of deafness, power, and control, this article frames (LISTEN) as a critical soundwalk, challenging the discursive and phenomenological barriers that constrain contemporary sonic art theory and history. These barriers, such as embracing socially-constructed values of normalcy in hearing, are identified by Christopher Kentz as reinforcing a broader “hearing line,” theorized as an “invisible boundary separating deaf [sic] and hearing people” in society (18).32

Kim’s (LISTEN) reinterpreted Listen (1966) by sonic artist Max Neuhaus (1939–2009), an early example of soundwalking (within colonialist trajectories of Western art and music).33 In this practice, listeners move throughout a dynamic acoustical environment, or soundscape, in search of aesthetic meaning. A soundwalk aims to activate one’s perception of sonic space, creating a sense of place in which active listening offers compelling acoustical information about spatial environments typically interpreted visually. Neuhaus realized Listen many times between 1966 and 1974. For the first iteration, he asked participants to join him at 14th Street and Avenue C in Manhattan, “where the street bisects a power plant,” the same location as Kim (Neuhaus 63). Neuhaus—like Kim, who realized her version on the original’s fiftieth anniversary—led them through the area to transform the sounds of the street into avantgarde environmental music.

Neuhaus’s Listen represents a detachment of sound from conventional musical categories, and the formation of “sound art” as a discrete genre of “dematerialized” postwar art. But what mode of listening develops in this framework? Who is allowed to creatively engage and interpret the soundscape? What manner of soundwalking emerges from Neuhaus’s epistemology of listening, where the local soundscape is acousmatically mediated as raw sonic material, detached from the community and observed from the outside?34

Rather than observing the soundscape and larger sensory environment from the outsidein, Kim deployed an inside-out perspective that emphasized a non-cochlear and multisensory approach to listening that centered community relationships using an expanded definition of sound. Developing a route (see fig. 5) based on her personal experiences and social position, Kim redefined the soundscape from a Deaf cultural position, inviting participants to consider: What does “temperature rising” sound like? How do we feel fluorescent lightbulbs “moan?” Which noises convey the concept, or event, of “darkness manifesting?” (LISTEN) foregrounded the many affordances that deafness and Deaf culture provide to sonic art practice and scholarship, a paradigm that prioritizes cochlear perception over other modalities of listening. And by enclosing Neuhaus’s original title in a caption—(LISTEN)—Kim expanded the formal boundaries of soundwalking to include more than sound itself.