The “Spectacle” of Sounds: Trajectories of Listening Between Ethics and Aesthetics

Abstract

If music and sound have always played a fundamental role in shaping human sensibility and transmitting cultural and ethical values (whatever they may have been), today the risk is that this function is gradually being hollowed out by the dominance of technique and the commodification of knowledge. In a society increasingly oriented toward efficiency and measurability, the aesthetic dimension risks being reduced to mere entertainment, losing its capacity to influence thought and the collective imagination, if not slipping into the realm of distraction and indifference.