"I Will Be Your Standing Stone":  Multimodal Listening on Zoom as an Ethic of Care

Kim Hensley Owens

Northern Arizona University

As meetings and concerts and conferences continue to move into online spaces, listening within those spaces takes on new meaning—listening to and with different communities requires a different kind of listening, and a deeper awareness of what listening is and can be. Listening itself seems like a simple concept, yet it is not. Steph Ceraso argues that listening is “a multisensory act” (102). She notes that while listening is often taught as “the practice of attending to audible words or sounds in order to make meaning of them” (102), that definition and teaching focus miss necessary attention to the crucial embodied, affective experiences and inputs that fully comprise the act of listening. In-person listening requires attention to more than words and sounds. Listening in a remote-meeting environment, such as the Zoom environments academics and others around the world suddenly found themselves inhabiting as the pandemic spread, also requires attention to more than spoken words and sounds. While Ceraso’s focus is on creating a form of multisensory listening that “approaches sound as a holistic experience” (105), my focus here is on approaching the Zoom environment as inviting a multisensory and multimodal listening experience—listening as a bodily practice that invites listening beyond sound, listening through and with technology. 

In this piece I examine how listening practices manifested and evolved on Zoom, using Threshold Choir (TC) as a specific site of inquiry. The choir typically sings for people on hospice; the quiet palliative service it performs requires careful attunement and specialized in-person listening among the singers as well as between the singers and their audience. When the choir, like so many groups and classes across the world, moved suddenly from fully-in-person rehearsals to fully-Zoom rehearsals and had to stop in-person singing altogether, the choir’s already multimodal listening practices had to adapt to the new digital context. My analysis of changes wrought by this shift ultimately reveals how Zoom, particularly with its chat feature, fosters new models of multimodal listening. Further, in the context of TC, that iteration and evolution of multimodal listening practices is inextricable from the choir’s ingrained ethic of care.

Carol Gilligan (2014) posits that the “ethic of care guides us in acting carefully in the human world and highlights the costs of carelessness” (10). She explains that an ethic of care is “grounded less in moral precepts than in psychological wisdom, underscoring the costs of not paying attention, not listening, being absent rather than present, not responding with integrity and respect” (10). Gilligan here focuses on defining the phrase not by what it is, but by what it is not—less in x than in y, underscoring the costs of not—which invites readers to view the ethic of care as “better than.” Psychological wisdom is placed above moral precepts; paying attention, listening, being present, and responding with integrity and respect are placed above their opposites, even as only their opposites are named. Gilligan’s definition of an ethic of care glides alongside Krista Ratcliffe’s definition of rhetorical listening. Ratcliffe defines rhetorical listening as a “stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” (p. 17). Both authors suggest that acting ethically involves listening in specific ways.     

Listening to the Chat

While Zoom is principally an audio-visual virtual environment, the chat box is an important component of the technology, and one which invites a specific kind of listening: listening to the chat. The Zoom chat box, opened with a click of an icon at the bottom of the Zoom interface, is typically visible to the right of the stacked black boxes of Zoom faces. The Zoom host can determine whether participants can type messages visible just to the host, visible to everyone, or visible only to one other participant. I argue that listening to the Zoom chat, while not “listening” in the traditional aural sense, is also a form of listening—a multimodal, “multi-sensory practice” (Ceraso) that is both transformed and transformative because of the layered foci it requires and the layered understandings it enables. Applying Ceraso’s framework for sonic listening to typed text may seem to revert “listening” back to the linguistic content she seeks to help others move beyond, but in the context of a Zoom rehearsal or a Zoom meeting, listening to the chat enables a holistic experience. 

Multimodal community listening in the “localized context” (E. Stone 16) of a Zoom meeting comes with significant benefit, but also increases the cognitive demands on the listener as one shifts among listening aurally, watching Zoom faces and documents, speaking, and attending to the chat box. While this listening method may not available to every person, when it is possible, it is an expansive listening stance that enables a broader awareness of the community’s needs. As Jenn Fishman and Lauren Rosenberg explain when theorizing community listening, specifically, they note that such listening is not just “about paying attention, … [but] an active, layered, intentional practice… [that] also demands alertness to different interactions and openness to being changed by them. (1)

Listening to the chat exemplifies multimodal listening, too, as “an active, layered, intentional practice” (Fishman and Rosenberg 1). To listen to the chat, participants often simultaneously look at others and themselves, speak as well as listen aurally, and read and write messages. Mutlimodal listeners are alert “to different interactions” and stay open “to being changed by them” (Fishman and Rosenberg 1). The chat thus broadens the concept of holistic listening. Including attention to the text chat—along with its concomitant embodied and affective effects—within the rubric of “multimodal listening” expands the theoretical affordances that phrase offers and enhances scholarly understanding of listening in a digital-meeting context. 

Consciously practicing community listening in a Zoom meeting involves not only traditional auditory listening, but also intentionally focusing on the extra-auditory communication in a remote meeting: namely, here, what is shared via chat. Chat interactions and interjections are often interwoven with the ongoing oral/aural conversation—sometimes a speaker responds to a question posed in the chat, for example, or vice versa—and therefore require simultaneous, in-the-moment attention. The modes of listening required to listen to the chat align with those Jon Stone identifies for the “sonic register” required to listen to music: “modes not generally foregrounded in scholarly discourse: simultaneity, dissonance, and multiplicity” (J. Stone, para 6). Applying these perhaps unexpected or traditionally underutilized modes of listening in the Zoom space is, I argue, multimodal listening. 

Listening to the Zoom chat involves “‘fostering a listening stance amid distributed rhetorical activity’” (Feigenbaum qtd in Fishman and Rosenberg 34). Listening to the chat while participating audio-visually in a meeting enacts a multimodal community listening practice that further expands “how we think about and practice listening as a situated, full-bodied act” (Ceraso 103). The full communicative value and meaning of a Zoom meeting becomes available when one pays attention to the conversations and provocations presented in that little white chat box as well as to what one hears and sees in the video or black boxes. Ceraso’s definition of listening “amplifies the ecological relationship between sound, bodies, and environments” (105). In-person environments for community interactions are fundamentally different from technologically mediated interactions over Zoom, demanding a very different kind of attention and inviting different kinds of listening. 

In what follows, I first provide background about Threshold Choir and the broader study from which this analysis emerges. I then position myself autoethnographically within the context of a “typical” Zoom meeting and within my local chapter before describing and analyzing two distinct but representative rehearsals. For the first Zoom rehearsal context, I describe how an incident of multimodal, multisensory listening in the localized context of a choir rehearsal held over Zoom demonstrates how Gilligan’s notions of psychological wisdom—akin to the practical wisdom rhetoricians know as phronesis—make listening to the Zoom chat part of an ethic of care. Enacting that ethic of care is critical to fulfilling the goal of listening and responding with integrity and respect. For the second Zoom rehearsal context, focused on the planning process for a “community sing” also to be held over Zoom, I examine how in the context of preparing for non-choir members to participate, the choir chose not to use or enable the chat. The choir determined that limiting the ways the attendees could engage with (in my framing: could/had to listen to) the technology would allow them to listen in a more emotional and embodied manner to each song, their own singing, and their own response to the song. I argue that in some Zoom contexts, specifically a “community sing” or concert context like this, listening to the chat might preclude a different instance of multimodal, multisensory community listening—one that allows a listener to fully focus on their own emotional and embodied responses to song in a community context. In other words, the ability to listen with various senses at once is limited, and this type of multisensory listening in a zoom context requires deliberate avoidance of or refusal to listen to the chat. 

While these points about the importance of listening to/not listening to the chat over Zoom may seem to contradict to one another, I demonstrate that each illustrates a unique facet of multimodal, multisensory community listening in the Zoom context, and that each instantiation ultimately supports the other. Further, examining Zoom contexts where listening to the chat would be antithetical to an immersive emotional and embodied experience—rather than imperative for an immersive experience, as it is in rehearsals and other meeting-like contexts—also extends the concept of listening to include a specific focus on the ethic of care. While the two contexts encourage divergent listening choices, each emphasizes a unique instantiation of ethic of care, each with its own attendant benefits for its community of listeners, as I describe in the analysis section. I connect these two forms of community listening to deepen understandings of the ethic of care each enables.

Threshold Choir Context

This piece relies on my two-plus years of field notes as a participant-observer in a long-term IRB-approved auto/ethnographic study of my local chapter of Threshold Choir, an international choir whose main purpose is to provide palliative care by singing in small groups for people who are on hospice and dying—at the threshold between life and death. The practice is called “singing at the bedside.” The choir operates with an explicit ethic of care, aiming to have a palliative effect on listeners—both on the direct audience of those on hospice as well as the indirect audience of nearby careproviders, friends, and/or family: the goals are tied up as much with the act of listening as with the act of singing. TC is “part of a growing movement to bring music and the arts into health care and hospice settings for the purpose of easing, or palliating, the dying process for patients and their families” (“Singing” 2013, p. 30-31). 

This community choir’s focus is simultaneously on providing a musical listening experience for those in pain, listening to the needs of those being sung to—not only aurally, but also by listening to body language and the mood of the room—and listening intently to one another via gestures. Because TC seeks to create a calming, caring environment where the sole focus can be on the songs and on soothing the self, members singing at bedside don’t orally discuss what song will be next, when they’re switching from unison to harmony, from lyrics to “oos,” ending a song, etc. Instead, the songleader uses specific gestures to indicate these shifts, and it is incumbent on the singers to “listen” to and act on those gestures, so that each song’s performance proceeds smoothly without interrupting the audience’s ability to absorb the sounds and emotions of the songs. The signs enable silent, unobtrusive communication in a quiet, often solemn rhetorical situation. TC can be described as a community of singers who depend on listening to practice, perform, and serve. 

Every variety of listening the choir engages in—the listening experience the choir seeks to provide as well as the types of listening the choir enacts—can be considered a form of community listening the choir enacts asis part of its everyday practice and ethic of care. As a researcher for this project, I am cultivating my own listening practices across all contexts, and I’m listening to a community already steeped in its own complex listening practices and already engaged in its own change-focused actions—although they may not frame them quite that way themselves. 

Threshold Choir grew out of the intense interpersonal interaction Threshold Choir founder Kate Munger had after sitting one day with a friend who was dying of HIV/AIDS. Munger found herself spontaneously singing to him. She discovered that the singing experience dramatically soothed both her friend and her. That experience inspired her--first to become a music teacher and organize “community sings,” and later to found Threshold Choir in 2000 (“Singing” 2013, p. 30). As of 2021, chapters number over 200 worldwide (“Threshold” n.d). The TC website describes the chapters as “One Choir, Many Voices” (“Threshold” n.d). Threshold Choir chapters are usually all-women groups who volunteer their time to sing; the choirs are active within their broader communities, singing not only at bedside, but for events such as annual hospice memorial services. Each choir chapter itself is a small community of singers dedicated to service, singing, and one another. 

Threshold Choirs regularly hold “community sings” for their local communities. My local chapter organizes one each season. A “community sing” is a concept with a long history in religious and choral traditions—such as that of the Shakers—of gathering people to sing together. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a community sing is a pseudo-religious practice. A TC community sing, however, is not religious: it is essentially a free concert in which the community is invited and encouraged to sing along with several songs the choir has prepared. Because the songs are short, simple, and always repeated several times, participants are able to join in after a few rounds of listening. My local choir has held community sings in places like meadows, an outdoor meditation maze, and in the sanctuary of the church where the choir holds rehearsals. 

Threshold Choir rehearsals follow a set pattern, including a choir director leader or occasionally others stepping in to lead, to open the session, determine the agenda and timing, to call on those who wish to speak, etc.: the structure of a rehearsal is similar to a meeting. TC rehearsals are typically conducted in person with singers arranged in a circle, so singers can easily see and hear one another, and the choir rehearses biweekly. In March 2020, when Covid lockdowns began in the US and across much of the world, the choir suddenly had to adjust to a remote-synchronous model for rehearsals and, sadly for all, a complete caesura of in-person bedside singing. The switch to remote rehearsals happened just after news broke about a super-spreading Washington church choir rehearsal, where over 50 choir members contracted Covid and two died (Hamner 2020). From this point onward through the first 18 months of the pandemic, singing together in person in a circle, with all singers facing one another, was no longer a safe or appealing option.  

Although safe, a Threshold Choir rehearsal over Zoom was a fundamentally different and far less satisfying experience than an in-person rehearsal, as multiple choir members lamented at every Zoom rehearsal. While the structure was similar in terms of songs being led, and while every participant still sang, the critical elements of listening to the community of singers and blending voices in song was almost entirely lost. Because of audio delays (because of how sound works and because of technological limitations), people’s voices cannot come through Zoom at the same time. In a Zoom rehearsal, everyone except the song leader muted their microphones. Each singer could only aurally listen to themselves and the unmuted songleader. Each member of the choir still sang, of course, but did so alone in their home, facing a screen—a context in which  the choir could not function as a listening-reliant community in the same way it could in person. I couldn’t lean closer to the soprano next to me to catch how the harmony differs from the melody in a tricky spot mid-song; no one could hear if they were singing at the right pitch, taking a breath at the right time, or following subtle changes in dynamics, all of which would be critical aspects of an in-person choir rehearsal. While at an in-person rehearsal singers are energized in part by listening to one another, over Zoom choir members mentioned feeling drained by listening to just themselves and the songleader, trying to keep up on screen, and missing the in-person experience Zoom attempted to replace, but could only somewhat approximate. Despite the disappointment inherent in the situation, the singers who came to Zoom rehearsals preferred the simulacrum of a rehearsal on Zoom to the alternative: no rehearsal at all. (Fewer local singers came to Zoom rehearsals regularly than to in-person rehearsals, but farflung former members attended, so the number of singers didn’t change dramatically overall.) When abstracted through a digital platform like Zoom, listening as a practice of attunement and interpersonal energy exchange was altered: it was both more difficult and less satisfying, twin disappointments compounded by a backdrop of pandemic realities. Listening on Zoom is, simply put, not the same. That said, though, the Zoom environment provides new and different opportunities for multimodal listening, affordances that aren’t available in person.

Listening to the Chat to Animate an Ethic of Care

As a person who became unexpectedly entrenched not only in Zoom-based research, but also Zoom-based teaching and meetings early in the pandemic, I was constantly thinking about how to make Zoom work well for me and others, which included careful multimodal listening. Even now, in Zoom meetings I’m not running, or Zoom classes I’m not teaching, I focus on building community through the chat. I pay attention to the chat as much as to the oral interactions. As explained above, while paying attention to the chat could be considered “reading,” I think of it as listening because of the simultaneity and how it is interconnected with the oral conversation. I listen, carefully, to what’s being said off to the side, in writing, and I often unofficially take on the chat. I might type an answer to questions posed in the chat while the meeting leader or teacher is busy answering other questions orally. I might post links to resources that someone in the meeting has mentioned, type what someone has said into the chat to prevent someone else having to repeat it orally, or offer tech tips when someone doesn’t know how to (un)mute or annotate—acts which help the community conversation stay on track, and which might reduce friction in interactions. Like many scholar-teachers in my field of rhetoric and writing studies, I tend to gravitate toward helping people, and listening to and participating in the chat in this way is a contribution I can make, a multimodal listening service I can provide and model. 

I gained Zoom literacy quickly because I had to—I led some 70 hours of synchronous online training for new teachers in the summer of 2020 before fall classes began, so I often have known more about both the nuts and bolts and bells and whistles of the platform than most in a given meeting since. Because of that intensive practice, and because my job required that I train and mentor teachers who in the early pandemic context were all teaching almost entirely over Zoom—who in turn were also always training and mentoring me—I was in a rather constant feedback loop of Zoom tips and tricks. As a result, I sometimes noticed—then and now—happenings on Zoom others are missing. For example, I might see something urgent in the chat and interrupt orally to bring it the attention of a meeting leader, whether in a work meeting or a choir rehearsal. An analysis of one such occasion in a Threshold Choir rehearsal illuminates the specific form of multimodal listening it exemplifies and demonstrate what such listening makes possible. 

About 15 minutes before the end of one rehearsal, the leader asked, as she usually does toward the end of a rehearsal, if anyone else would like to lead a song, and/or whether anyone had anyone in mind we should sing for. Sometimes requested songs are recorded and sent over text or email to the intended recipient; sometimes they are just sung “into the universe”; sometimes they are sung to the person who brings up the “intended recipient”—the concepts of audience and listeners are, in the context of this choir, quite multiple and fluid. 

Before and during that particular rehearsal, which took place about a year into my study of the choir, I had been considering whether I should finally “graduate.” In Threshold Choir, “graduating” requires learning at least 30 songs by heart and then leading the group in song—selecting a song, singing it once alone from memory, and using established TC gestures to guide the rest of the singers to know when to sing the shared melody line, when to sing in their respective harmonies, when or whether to shift to a final round of “oos,” etc. I’d known well over 30 songs for months, but had yet to volunteer to lead. For months I’d thought during rehearsal, “I should really prepare to lead a song and graduate next time!” only to be overwhelmed by home and work responsibilities in the interim, entering the following rehearsal without having reviewed or practiced a single song. That evening was no exception; Covid-era administrating and teaching and parenting and online-school supervising had left little energy for anything extra; even making it to the biweekly Zoom rehearsal was a feat. The director asked if anyone else wanted to lead, and I found myself gripped with a low-level panic. All the songs I knew flew out of my head; all desire to sing and be heard likewise dissipated; and yet I was simultaneously flooded with guilt. I can sing. I knew the songs. I wanted to be a full-fledged choir member. I wanted to graduate. I wanted to sing at bedside. But with Covid restrictions preventing anyone from actually singing at bedside in person, the inertia the pandemic had wrought within me (within everyone) beat out that guilt and sense of urgency, and I did not volunteer.

The chat in Threshold Choir rehearsals is often pretty quiet, in stark contrast to university meetings with graduate teaching assistants or department meetings where sometimes more occurs via chat than via the aural-video conversations. I keep the chat open in choir rehearsals, though, just in case, because while the space is not as deeply interactive as it is in other contexts, it is not wholly inactive, either. Further, because the choir’s leaders aren’t always necessarily tracking both the aural and the textual content, I can enact a listening stance that includes the chat space to help ensure nothing is missed. At that rehearsal, I had the chat open, as usual, listening for what might come through that text box as I was also wrestling with my small-scale anxieties and listening aurally to songs and the leader’s commentary.

While the director was finishing up collecting lists of those we’d sing for, including all the lonely “people in assisted living” and a choir member’s dying mother, a sentence burned itself into the chat. Briefly defying citation conventions to illustrate its blistering quality, I separate it here with extra line breaks: 

“I’ve been evacuated into a shelter because of abuse.” 

The member who had shared this in the chat had had her video off for the whole rehearsal. She typed that sentence, and I thought—I knew—I was the only one who’d seen it. I’d been listening to the chat as usual, but no one else was, whether because they didn’t know it was there yet or because little tended to happen in the chat in these rehearsals. And yet that is where this woman felt safe to share this information. I read the sentence three times and checked the director’s eye movements to see if she was looking at the chat. She didn’t seem to be. I rather unceremoniously unmuted my mic and interrupted rehearsal to ask the director if she’d seen the chat. I asked if we could pause to acknowledge what had been shared and if we could sing to that member. 

The director stopped speaking. She visibly turned her head to read the searing sentence and then orally asked the member if she’d like us to sing to her. The member who had posted in the chat unmuted herself and, through sobs, said she’d like that very much. Quite without planning to, I heard myself pipe up and volunteer to lead “Standing Stone.” 

Several choir members I’ve interviewed for this project have mentioned that songs “come to them” at the right time when they’re singing at bedside—and at other moments in their lives as well. While I believed them, I hadn’t yet experienced anything like that. This evening demonstrated for me precisely what they mean: I hadn’t prepared to sing that song, or any song. In fact, two minutes prior I had explicitly decided I would not volunteer to lead any song, and definitely did not have a song in mind, and yet there I was, unmuting my mic and preparing to sing for this woman. What had changed? I’d listened to what this woman had said in the chat and felt she needed us—needed, in that moment, that song. Had no one been listening to the chat, her brave, silent moment of sharing might have gone unnoticed, un-remarked upon. Had no one been listening to the chat, she would not have been sung to, certainly not by me. The choir would have missed a chance to embody the ethic of care it holds dear. Enacting multimodal listening by listening to the Zoom chat in addition to what was shared orally ensured that we did not miss a significant and vulnerable confession; it also provided an opportunity for me to shift gears from self-absorption to other-focused care by offering a song. 

The song “Standing Stone” comprises simple, repeating lyrics, as do most Threshold songs. Threshold Choir lyrics and music are designed and intended to calm and center the listener: as Kate Munger, the choir founder, puts it, “‘the lyrics offer comfort, they offer serenity, they offer simplicity and ease’” (Munger, qtd. in “Songs”). “Standing Stone,” one of many TC songs, by the prolific singer-songwriter Melanie DeMore, consists of the same two lines repeated three times: “I will be your standing stone/ I will stand by you/ I will be your standing stone/ I will stand by you/ I will be your standing stone/ I will stand by you.” It’s easy to see why this song would be the one that would “come to me” when a fellow choir member disclosed having temporarily escaped an abusive situation at home.

I sang the song once through alone in melody and then invited the choir to join me; I gave the hand signal to add in the other singers with the Threshold Choir ’s specific three-finger gesture: thumb up for soprano; index and middle fingers outstretched to invite the melody and alto singers, respectively; ring and pinky fingers folded in. As the other singers joined for harmony (albeit with their microphones off due to the time lag), I led the soprano line. I led one verse replacing the pronoun “I” in the official lyrics with “We”—such adjustments are a common type of substitution when the choir sings—and closed with a round of “oos.” Using the established TC signal: I pursed my lips and pointed at them with my index finger. Finally, I held up a closed fist to silently indicate the last round of singing aloud. After that final verse, I closed my eyes and silently sang through the song once in my head; the rest of the choir, too, stayed silent. 

This silent time is a common TC practice called “holding space,” a practice that invites an additional form of listening. The time spent “holding space” lets the singers listen internally to the echo of the song, listen to their bodies’ responses to the song, or listen to the absence of song, immersed in the peace created by the song. After I sang, several other singers also volunteered to lead songs they felt appropriate for the situation: “If Not Love” and “May Peace Be with You” from the official repertoire and “Lay Back in the Arms of Love,” a song unknown to most of us in the rehearsal. Various members offered emotional or material support, both orally and in the chat; the member told us she was grateful for the songs and the encouraging words; rehearsal ended. 

This story isn’t about how multimodal listening saved the day. By listening to the chat and then singing to and for the member in crisis, we didn’t change her physical situation; we didn’t spare her the challenges ahead; we didn’t fix anything. But by listening to this member of the community via the chat, we heard the struggle she was experiencing. Justin Lohr and Heather Lindenman Lohr suggest that “empathic listening at the individual level may open the opportunity for individuals to recognize the challenges others face as representative of the concerns of larger communities” (72). In this instance, focused attention on the Zoom chat made empathic listening to one individual possible. That listening led to the broader choir carrying out what Megen Farrow Boyett calls “empathetic, generous listening” (Boyett 22). 

Boyett unpacks community listening theories and strategies in her 2021 dissertation, in which she argues that “empathetic, generous listening” is “not only kind, but key to the process” of community listening (22). From there, the choir moved to what Boyett frames as the second step of community listening, which includes “attend[ing] carefully to consequences” (22). In this story, listening first through the Zoom chat and then within the full audio-visual Zoom session enabled the choir to enact an ethic of care, recognize this woman as a member of the broader community of those experiencing domestic abuse, and “employ a responsibility logic” to help her in that moment and beyond (23). 

Exploring the rhetorical contexts of domestic abuse, Amy Propen and Mary Schuster assert that “victims of violence are rhetorically Othered, marked as ‘deviant, irrational, uninformed, fragile…’ (134). By listening to this woman and adjusting our singing to focus on her, we did not Other her or mark her, but rather embraced her as a member of the community and offered support through song. We collectively changed those few moments, not only for her, but for all of us. We changed the energy of the rehearsal, and we changed her energy and mood, however briefly. She initially shared in the chat at a moment when she clearly did not want to speak orally, or perhaps couldn’t. One wonders if she would have shared that private, painful experience at all, or even attended rehearsal that day, had we been meeting in person. I can’t know, but I suspect that the Zoom chat afforded her a unique opportunity to share her circumstance without speaking aloud. Once addressed orally, asked if we should sing to her. She responded orally, with a shaking voice, through tears; after we sang, she shared orally again to thank us, this time with a noticeably steadier, calmer voice. 

In her masterful monograph, Surrender, feminist rhetorician Jessica Restaino describes “a kind of rhetorical yearning, an impulse for human contact of the sort that only a medium that exceeds words can deliver” (112); it is just this rhetorical yearning the choir member expressed in the chat. In a shelter context amidst the nation-wide Covid quarantine, she could not seek a hug, or shared tears over cups of tea, but she could seek community over Zoom, and she could seek song. By contrast, while I could not seem to get past my insecurities for my own sake, or even for the sake of research, I was immediately, unthinkingly able to get past them when the choir member made her need known. Because I was listening to the community via the chat, I was interpellated into her pain and catapulted out of my tiny mind to try in some small way to offer solace. Listening to the zoom chat deactivated an ethic of ego and activated an ethic of care. This act of multimodal listening ensured that I was open to changing my stance and actions in that moment in response—not for my own benefit, operating with an ethic of ego, but for hers, and on her behalf, operating with an ethic of care.

Not Listening to the Chat: Activating an Ethic of (Self-)Care by Listening Differently

The concept of an ethic of care is central to the Threshold Choir, and demonstrated in part by its commitment not only to sing for those on hospice, but also for the community. The choir I study holds quarterly community sings, advertising on Facebook and with flyers posted around town. In addition to singing for those who explicitly attend the community sing, the choir sometimes sings for those nearby, such as one winter evening pre-pandemic when the church was hosting a dozen unhoused men overnight. The choir sang informally for that group before the “official” community sing. While not part of the official plan for the event, that impromptu performance readily demonstrated the choir’s overall ethic of care by listening for the needs of people—of multiple, intersecting communities—in the shared space.

At this point readers might be wondering What do community sings have to do with listening over Zoom or the Zoom chat? I’ve written so far about the responsibility I feel to enact multimodal listening by listening to the Zoom chat and described the beneficial effects that multimodal focus can have in a meeting context. That argument stands, but I also want to argue that in other Zoom contexts, focusing on the chat—the simultaneous emphasis on the technology and the text and the visual—can distract from the fully embodied and differently multimodal experience of “merely” listening to music, in this case specifically a community sing. 

The concept of the Community Sing returns us to Ceraso’s notion of multimodal listening as “a bodily practice that approaches sound as a holistic experience” (105). While participants do listen to songs with their ears, the event is intended to be a much more immersive, embodied multimodal listening experience than simply an auditory one. Ceraso explains that, “[u]nlike ear-centric practices in which listeners’ primary goal is to hear and interpret audible sound (often language), multimodal listening amplifies the ecological relationship between sound, bodies, and environments” (105). At a community sing, singers and audience alike are meant to inhabit an open/ing space, both externally and internally. Community sings are thus often held in sanctuaries or in beautiful, soothing outdoor spaces—the specific location enhances and is an inextricable part of the community listening experience.

During the pandemic, however, community sings, like rehearsals, could no longer safely be planned for physically shared spaces. Initially, the usually quarterly events simply stopped happening—there was no spring 2020 Community Sing, no fall 2020 Community Sing. But for winter 2020, the choir planned a community sing as a Zoom event. As Restaino argues, “[i]nstead of abandoning place, situation, or location, the task … becomes to work from the space and moment in which we find ourselves” (141): it is this task the choir chose when planning a community sing over Zoom. Amid the usual planning practices, such as the selection of songs and the assignment of songleaders and soloists, came discussions of the Zoom environment and the Zoom chat, in particular, as the Threshold Choir prepared for the Winter 2020 Community Sing. 

My field notes from an early December rehearsal describe the choir’s attempts to plan for a late December community sing over Zoom, beginning with a discussion about how to lead the song “You Are Not Alone.” One member suggested four singers could take turns unmuting their mics and leading different verses and harmonies. The discussion of logistics for leading songs in the Zoom context included the following exchange:

M—How will it work? 

B—It’s a short song, so two times of each verse, each by a different singer leading: “You are” two times, “I am” two times, “We are” two times.

S—{suggests that we put song lyrics in the chat as we go during the community sing}

G—<coughs> I don’t think we should do that. {[it will put] pressure for people who are relaxing to} “watch the words in the chat”—{doesn’t think sharing the words is necessary}.1  (Threshold Choir Field Notes, 7 Dec. 2020)

The choir members were re-creating the community sing concept for this new platform, and debating the merits of using the technology’s various tools to do things differently. In the discussion that ensued, one member, agreeing with those who did not want to include lyrics in the chat, brought up the fact that “we don’t share the [written] words at community sings normally…it’s not an event with a program or postings, just auditory” (Threshold Choir Field Notes, 7 Dec. 2020). That “just” is misleading, however, because the auditory experience is intense, multisensory, and multifaceted. G’s awareness that “watch[ing] the words in the chat” would make the experience less relaxing pairs with the invitation for the audience to listen with their whole bodies. 

G’s framing of the experience of attending a Community Sing as “relaxing” is, then, at once correct and somewhat incomplete. While the goal is certainly to allow people to listen to songs and release tension, which could result in relaxation, the intention is also to allow participants to listen deeply and feel different as a result. Deep listening, according to folklorist and ethnographer Deborah Kapchan, “involves an affective stance that … is qualitatively different than other kinds of listening. For those who are able or trained to listen deeply, music evokes a profound emotional experience … one that is often … experienced in a group situation. (76). In order to promote the “affective stance” that makes that kind of listening possible, the choir explicitly focuses on ways to ensure that the listener is relaxed, free from distraction, and thus able to pay closer attention to their responses to the music and truly listen deeply. Listening deeply involves “layer after layer of imagination, memory and meaning down to the cellular level of human experience” (Oliveros, qtd. in Kapchan 76), requiring particular attention to be paid to the self. Kapchan’s inclusion of the “group situation” connects explicitly to the community sing context in which participants might attend alone, with friends, or with family, but are there for an explicitly communal listening experience that allows for shared as well as individual experiences. 

In the context of community sings, the focus is on multisensory listening, which I invoke here as a term signifying listening that is embodied, emplaced, and empathetic, open to allowing changes in oneself and in one’s perception and feeling. While multisensory listening in this sense connects to community listening as Fishman and Rosenberg theorize it, as “ways to make relationships more productive and substantial with the goal of meaningful change” (3), in this situation the meaningful change is not being driven by a researcher, but by the community members, in this case singers, themselves. The meaningful change they seek is emotional, embodied, and personal. It’s about meaningful change in a person’s physical and emotional state, in the moment, for the moment, and how that change might reverberate and have beneficial effects beyond that moment.

In “Make Some Noise, Drari: Embodied Listening and Counterpublic Formations in Moroccan Hip Hop,” ethnomusicologist Kendra Salois describes ‘the shared affect generated through shared expectations of the power of music and sound” (1040). She explains that “live performance leverages the plural” (1040). The community sing, in its usual iterations, is in part a live performance; the Zoom community sing, like the Zoom meeting, the Zoom class, the Zoom religious service, necessarily lacks some (some would say all) of the human spark of an in-person event, loses some of the “leverage of the plural” Salois postulates, making its intentional design to provide a conducive listening experience all the more critical. G recognized before the rest of the choir that listeners need even more care during a Zoom community sing than at an in-person community sing. They need fewer distractions, fewer inputs from technologies, to permit the full experience of embodied responses to listening to the singer(s).

The community sing, even over Zoom, relies on the power of song, the power of a singer’s voice, to do its work—in this context simultaneously palliative and generative. Rhetorician Eric Watts, theorizing the concept of “voice” in rhetorical studies, points out that “[i]n a sense, the ‘voice’ announces the body’s presence; it utters the body’s sensory experience of its environment and of others” (180). While the singing voice coming through speakers over Zoom is dis-embodied, it nevertheless conveys the presence of a body somewhere, if not in a shared space, and carries its sonic invitations and passes along embodied instructions to the listener: “all musical communication is based upon … subtle listening and variegated response” (Kapchan, invoking Keil, 74). Those planning the 2020 Winter Community Sing prepared the program to allow for those varied and layered responses.

My field notes reflecting on that rehearsal indicate my inchoate understanding of this phenomenon: 

Preparing for the community sing… I think this will further connect to listening to the chat (or not) and the work of listening and the experience of listening to songs versus listening fully to zoom—one is relaxing, one is work. Doing community work entails listening fully but the community should have the luxury of being sung to without having to do all those pieces of work to listen, although their experience is still multisensory with bodies, etc. (Threshold Choir Field Notes, 7 Dec. 2020)

While one choir member initially thought providing the song lyrics in the chat would enable listeners to focus on the words, after G’s prompting, the choir quickly agreed it would instead distract them. By deliberately not asking participants to look at/listen to the Zoom chat, offering them fewer intermediary elements to pay attention to, the choir sought to increase the calming effect of the music over Zoom, allowing the audience to experience and participate without having to “work” at it. I would add now that what I initially described as “relaxing” isn’t quite that—in this context listening requires a largely self-directed listening focus, while in a meeting or rehearsal context, “work” requires an other-directed listening focus. The choir thus planned to invite those in attendance to pay attention—to return again to Ceraso’s definition—“to the material and environmental aspects that comprise and shape one’s embodied experience of sound” (105), in part by not inviting them to listen to the chat. 

This decision is another instantiation of the ethic of care I previously argued for, a decision that enables community sing participants to focus on embodied listening, which “engages not only the ears and the mind, but the limbs and the pulse, the senses of balance and proprioception”—what Salois describes as a “fully engaged sensorium” (Salois 1025). In being asked only to focus on the sounds and the experiences the sounds evoke in their bodies, those attending the community sing are invited to care for themselves, to immerse themselves into what some Threshold Singers describe as a “song bath.” Salois explains that a certain “physicality that makes such self-care possible…via the engaged sensorium” (Salois 1025). Multimodal, multisensory listening here becomes a means to self-care ends, facilitated by the conscious choices of the Threshold Choir not only to sing for others, but to create conditions for their community of listeners that are most conducive to the layered effects they seek their songs to have.

Conclusion

Writing in 2001, Watts argued that “voice”: 

has to be capable of salvaging the communal features of discourse for the challenge to rhetoric over the horizon is to find new ways to ‘keep it real’ in a fast-approaching virtual reality. As we all increasingly feel displaced from one another, occurrences of ‘voice’ represent events in which we can characterize our commitments and sentiments toward our social spaces. ‘Voice’ grounds us by reminding us of our situatedness. We are also reminded of our needs.” (192)

The arguments Watts makes about displacement and the virtual held new meaning in 2021, after a year of largely virtual life for many in the US and across the world. While Watts was focused on explicating the nuances of differing interpretations of “voice,” the focus here is on explicating some of the nuances of different interpretations of multimodal listening in the mediated Zoom environment many of us have learned to inhabit. The social and rhetorical Zoom space invites varied and specific forms of listening, each multimodal and multisensory in unique combinations, each shared despite bodies being situated in separate physical spaces.

With dramatic changes to the technological mediation of community spaces and meetings, it is critical to examine the ways those technologies affect what it means to listen to and within various communities. This piece’s discussion of the Zoom chat opens up one thread of that needed analysis. The focus here boils down to a “to listen or not to listen” understanding of the Zoom chat in particular, but the implications and applications of how technologies, community goals, and community members affect and transform listening as an ethic of care hold meaning across contexts.  

One thread persists across platforms, communities, and analytical frameworks: the focus on the importance of multimodal, multisensory listening. In terms of listening to song, Deborah Kapchan cites a woman in her study explaining that “‘each song carries its own secret’” (78). That sentiment rings true for Threshold songs, from “Standing Stone”—the song that popped into my head at just the right moment for a fellow singer in need to the song that comes to me now. Although not in the official Threshold repertoire, “Listen, Listen, Listen” was one of the first songs I learned in the choir, one of the last we rehearsed in person, and one we return to again and again in Zoom rehearsals. The song echoes the spirit of interaction and introspection, invokes the connections between singers and those sung to, reminds singers and hearers alike to care for one another. It does so, quite simply, by asking them to “listen, listen, listen.” 

Notes

1. {} brackets indicate my own words summarizing the overall sentiment; [ ] brackets indicate my additions to direct quotes to clarify meaning; unbracketed words are direct quotes.

About the Author

Kim Hensley Owens is Professor of English at Northern Arizona University. With Cathryn Molloy, she co-edits the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (RHM) journal. Her scholarship focuses on rhetorical agency, rhetorics of the body, and pedagogy. Her publications include the co-edited Beyond Productivity (USU, 2023); her monograph, Writing Childbirth (SIUP, 2015); and various articles and book chapters, recently in RHM, College English, and Assay. 

Works Cited

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Fishman, Jenn, and Lauren Rosenberg. “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Community Writing, Community Listening.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 13, no. 1, 2018, pp. 1–6. 

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Kapchan, Deborah. “Learning to Listen: The Sound of Sufism in France.” The World of Music, vol. 51, no. 2: Music for Being, 2009, pp. 65–89.

Yogananda. “Listen, Listen, Listen.” Flagstaff Threshold Choir Binder. N.d. 

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