Who Cares If
You Listen

Concept

Taking its title from Milton Babbitt’s 1958 essay Who Cares if You Listen?, this work revisits the essay’s questions of musical specialization, audience, and the act of listening. Rather than treating listening as passive reception, the piece asks how attention changes when a familiar human sound is fragmented, multiplied, and placed in motion. Built entirely from vocal performances, it transforms raw recordings through multitrack processing, precision editing, and dynamic control into a tightly composed Ambisonic soundscape, accompanied by animation created in collaboration with Ziyi Ye.