Abstract
This chapter discusses three case studies – a sound engineer mastering an audio recording, a translator listening to music while working, a student listening to an audio lecture – to illustrate just as many prerequisites for critical listening. At the same time, by underscoring the epistemological, emancipating, and empowering potential for critical listening, it argues that the ultimate goal of critical listening should be, in strict sense, the dismantling fo ideological discourses. While drawing extensively on recent sensory studies scholarship, the chapter outlines a concept and a practice that are embedded more specifically in Marxist theory.