








































ARTICLES

The Operatic Ear: Mediating Aurality
Megan Steigerwald Ille

During the final scene of Christopher Cerrone’s opera Invisible Cities, 
protagonist Marco Polo reflects on the central role the listener plays in 
narrative forms: “I speak and I speak, but the listener retains only the 
words he is expecting. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is 
the ear.”1 Polo’s words are (unintentionally) ironic: by this point in ex-
perimental opera company The Industry’s 2013 production, the spectator 
hardly needs to be reminded of the importance of the ear. Rather than 
being sung out to audience members seated around a proscenium stage, 
Polo’s line, and indeed, the entire opera, has been transmitted into the 
listening ears of audience members via wireless Sennheiser headphones.

Opera scholarship often begins with the voice then moves to the ear.2 

*I wish to thank Jacek Blaszkiewicz, Gabrielle Cornish, the participants of the 2019 “Map-
ping Spaces, Sounding Places: Geographies of Sound in Audiovisual Media” conference, and 
the anonymous readers and editors of this journal for their enthusiastic engagement with 
earlier versions of this work. I would also like to thank the performers and production team 
of Invisible Cities who took the time to share their experiences with me.

1 Partially adapted from Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: 
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 135

2 In recent years, scholars in the field of voice studies such as Martha Feldman, Nina Eid-
sheim, Jelena Novak, Brian Kane, Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Steven Rings, James Q. Davies, 
and Emily Wilbourne, among many others, have done much-needed work to theorize and 
explore many capacities of the operatic voice, and in turn, the listening ear in operatic perfor-
mance. Work by Carolyn Abbate and Michelle Duncan played a significant role in establish-
ing this turn to the material properties of the voice and sounding voice-body. See Nina Sun 
Eidsheim and Katherine Meizel, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 2019); Martha Feldman, Emily Wilbourne, Steven Rings, Brian Kane, 
and James Q. Davies, “Colloquy: Why Voice Now?” Journal of the American Musicological 
Society 68, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 653–685; Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body 
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Ana María Ochoa Gautier, Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in 
Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Michelle Dun-

Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2021), pp. 119–143.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. DOI: 10.13130/sss14186.



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But what if we move in the opposite direction?3 That is, what can we dis-
cover about operatic sounds—including voices—by focusing on how pro-
cesses of listening are mediated by social and technological patterns of 
behavior?4 While these questions have a precedent in studies of sound and 
voice, they also demonstrate how the operatic ear and operatic voice are 
co-constitutive elements in performance.5 If, as interdependent parts, they 
are also—pace Polo—equally relevant, the technologically-mediated oper-
atic ear that witnesses Invisible Cities offers much to studies of sound, dig-
ital media, and modes of narrative performance like opera. In this essay, 
privileging the biological and metaphorical ear over the voice allows us to 
consider the ways digital technologies create equivalent modes of under-
standing operatic listening as simultaneously fragmented, interstitial, and 
relational.

The radical, mediated staging of Invisible Cities was hailed by critics as 
“the opera of the future” and an “unprecedented, interactive dramatic expe-

can, “The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence, Performativity,” Cambridge 
Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 283–306; Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Crit-
ical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 505–536.

3 This inverted formulation—ear to voice rather than voice to ear—is, in part, indebted to 
the scholarship of Ana María Ochoa Gautier. Ochoa Gautier suggests that by “[inverting] the 
emphasis on the relation between the written text and the mouth (implied by the idea of the 
oral),” it is possible to “[explore] how the uses of the ear in relation to the voice [imbue] the 
technology of writing with the traces and excesses of the acoustic.” Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 
7. While Eidsheim approaches voice, text, and listening from a different perspective than 
Ochoa Gautier, she too suggests that “[voices are] located within [listeners].” Nina Sun Eid-
sheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 13.

4 This approach, which brings together scholarship on technology, performance, and 
sound cultures more broadly, is rooted in the work of Douglas Kahn, Benjamin Steege, Jon-
athan Sterne, and Emily Thompson, among others. See Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A 
History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Benjamin Steege, Helmholtz 
and the Modern Listener (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Jonathan Sterne, 
The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University 
Press, 2003); Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the 
Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

5 Gautier Ochoa describes this shift as “the general auditory turn in critical scholarship,” 
Aurality, 6. More specifically, Eidsheim has pointed to the way voices are co-constructed 
through socio-historic processes of expectation and feedback—or, in other words, modes of 
listening. See Eidsheim, The Race of Sound, 13. Clemens Risi describes the listening relation-
ship between operatic performer and listener as “performative” and “erotic,” thus implying 
another type of relationship between the two parts. Clemens Risi, “The Diva’s Fans: Opera 
and Bodily Participation,” Performance Research 16, no. 3 (2011): 49–54.



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rience.”6 A key reason for the critical acclaim attributed to the performance 
was because of the way the opera used digital technologies to “reformulate” 
operatic listening, thus foregrounding the notion of the materially-enhanced 
ear. By asking spectators to listen to the entire opera through wireless head-
phones, the production foregrounded technological mediation. Simply put, 
the performance spotlighted the role of aural perception over other modes of 
spectatorship. Accompanied by the angular choreography of Danielle Agami 
and the efforts of the L.A. Dance Project company, the opera was performed 
twenty-two times in October and November 2013. Wireless headphones al-
lowed audience members to spectate from any location as each individual 
wandered the “stage” of Los Angeles’s Union Station while miked perform-
ers roamed the space. Far from the rooted experience of sitting in a theater, 
viewers drifted through the ticket concourses, waiting areas, and outdoor 
patios of the historic station while attempting to both locate and link the 
voices in their ears to the bodies in front of them. The performers began the 
opera in street clothes—every commuter within the station a potential art-
ist—and gradually donned costumes as the work progressed. Following the 
opera’s dramatic conclusion, ushers drew audience members into a common 
space for the final scene, applause concluded the performance, spectators 
returned their headphones to the stage managers, and left the station. Stage 
(and station) remained open, but the opera had ended.

Based upon several episodes from Italo Calvino’s 1972 surrealist novel Le 
città invisibili, Invisible Cities recounts a series of conversations, memories, 
and elaborate stories exchanged between the explorer Marco Polo and the 
emperor Kublai Khan. As the Khan listens, Polo evokes the cities constel-
lating the aging emperor’s realm with visceral detail. The work’s first in-
ception, a concert staging at the New York City Opera’s 2009 VOX Festival, 
revealed production and musical challenges. The Industry founder Yuval 
Sharon first encountered a version of the opera when working at VOX as a 
program director, and it was clear the work might need a different perfor-
mance treatment to succeed.7 The ambiguity of the narrative, lyric opacity 

6 Jeffrey Marlow, “Is This the Opera of the Future?” Wired Magazine, October 22, 2013, 
https://www.wired.com/2013/10/is-this-the-opera-of-the-future; Shari Barrett, “BWW Re-
views: Invisible Cities Offers a Total Immersion Experience at Union Station,” Broadway World, 
Los Angeles, https://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/BWW-Reviews-INVISI-
BLE-CITIES-Offers-a-Total-Immersion-Experience-at-Union-Station-20131025.

7 See Anthony Tommasini, “Sampling of New Dishes, Some Still Being Seasoned,” The 
New York Times, May 9, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/arts/music/05vox.
html?mcubz=3.

http://www.wired.com/2013/10/is-this-the-opera-of-the-future
http://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/BWW-Reviews-INVISIBLE-CITIES-Offers-a-Total-Immersion-Experience-at-Union-Station-20131025
http://www.broadwayworld.com/los-angeles/article/BWW-Reviews-INVISIBLE-CITIES-Offers-a-Total-Immersion-Experience-at-Union-Station-20131025
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/arts/music/05vox.html?mcubz=3
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/arts/music/05vox.html?mcubz=3


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of the text, and elongated musical lines meant that the work seemed to lack 
dynamism on the traditional stage. Enter the mobile staging of the opera 
four years later, which fused Sennheiser wireless headphones with audience 
imaginations, and drew in patrons through the allure of immersive and 
site-specific performance.8 The changes paid off: the 2014 Pulitzer Prize 
committee described the work as “a captivating opera … in which Marco 
Polo regales Kublai Khan with tales of fantastical cities, adapted into an 
imaginary sonic landscape.”9

The Sennheiser wireless headphones, individual audio feeds, and earbud 
microphones for each singer, dancer, and orchestral musician might have 
seemingly indicated that the performance of Invisible Cities represented a 
new kind of work more akin to Janet Cardiff’s mixed media installations 
than to historical operatic convention. As I have argued elsewhere, Invisible 
Cities actually capitalized upon historic tensions inherent to the operatic 
form.10 This production structure, however, allows us to think about more 
than just the historic trajectories and iterations of the operatic genre.11 To 

8 The question of what constitutes site-specific performance is a topic of much debate. For 
instance, Mike Pearson uses the work of designer Cliff McLucas to distinguish between the 
“host”—the established elements of a site—versus the “ghost”—“that which is temporarily 
brought to and emplaced at the site.” The “host” of Union Station and “ghost” of Invisible 
Cities musicians, costumes, and staging would work together to constitute this performance 
as site-specific. However, visual artists such as Richard Serra read site-specificity as more 
particular to the art’s impact upon and relationship with the site itself. Thus, Serra argues 
that site-specific works should be “inseparable from their [locations].” As an opera revised 
for the LA staging and made more meaningful within a space of transit, Invisible Cities fits 
uncomfortably within Serra’s definition, but squarely within Pearson’s. Following language 
surrounding the reception of the opera, the descriptions of performers and audience mem-
bers, and the musical changes made to the work for the LA staging, I interpret Invisible Cities 
as site-specific opera. Richard Serra, “The Yale Lecture, in Art in Theory, 1900-2000: An An-
thology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 
1096–1099; Mike Pearson, “Site-Specific Theatre,” in The Routledge Companion to Scenogra-
phy, ed. Arnold Aronson (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 295–301.

9 “Finalist: Invisible Cities, by Christopher Cerrone,” The 2014 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in 
Music, The Pulitzer Prizes, last updated 2021, https://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/christo-
pher-cerrone.

10 Megan Steigerwald Ille, “Live in the Limo: Remediating Voice and Performing Spec-
tatorship in Twenty-First-Century Opera,” The Opera Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2021), published 
ahead of print, January 7, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbaa012; see also Megan Steiger-
wald Ille, “Bringing Down the House: Situating and Mediating Opera in the Twenty-First 
Century,” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2018).

11 While not the focus of this article, productions like Invisible Cities by necessity put pres-
sure on the concept of “opera” as a fluid generic designation. See Steigerwald Ille, “Bringing 

http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/christopher-cerrone
http://www.pulitzer.org/finalists/christopher-cerrone


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that end, as digital mediation becomes commonplace both in and out of the 
opera house, it is worth considering how technologically-enabled modes of 
narrative spectacle influence operatic performance, and vice-versa.12 Rather 
than focusing on acoustic perception of sound as it relates to the concert hall, 
or the way the opera enacted forms of sonic gentrification, as other scholars 
such as Nina Eidsheim have productively explored, here I am interested in 
highlighting the material significance of the headphones themselves in the 
production.13 I put interviews and public press reviews in dialogue with the 
body of rich scholarship around historical and contemporary modes of lis-
tening. I situate these headphones within a history of mobile listening and 
behaviors in order to understand what elements shape the twenty-first cen-
tury operatic ear. In focusing on the headphones, I reveal the significance of 
material technologies in constituting operatic aurality.

What is the value of aurality as a critical framework?14 Benjamin Steege 

Down the House,” PhD diss. For broader exploration of the ontological understandings of 
opera in the context of Invisible Cities and other productions by The Industry, see also the 
forthcoming monograph: Megan Steigerwald Ille, Opera for Everyone: Experimenting with 
American Opera in the Digital Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press).

12 Invisible Cities is not the only twenty-first century opera production to engage with 
themes of aural mediation and spatial displacement. For instance, Cerise Lim Jacobs’s Alice 
in the Pandemic, produced by White Snake Projects in late 2020, “enable[d] singers at re-
mote locations to sing synchronously together as they [interacted] with each other and their 
3D avatars who lip sync in real time to live performance.” “Alice in the Pandemic,” White 
Snake Projects, accessed December 10, 2020, https://www.whitesnakeprojects.org/projects/
alice-in-the-pandemic-a-digital-opera/.

13 For an alternate exploration of Invisible Cities and a thorough consideration of how 
the cultivated aesthetic of the opera can be thought of as another version of the designed 
acoustic of the opera house, see Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as 
Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 80–94. Marianna Ritchey 
also briefly considers the opera in the context of urban gentrification, a topic that Eidsheim 
also explores through the context of voice studies in a second article. See Marianna Ritchey, 
Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 2019), 90-113, and Eidsheim, “Acoustic Slits and Vocal Incongruences in Los Angeles 
Union Station,” in The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, 301–313.

14 While to my knowledge, aurality has not yet been used as a critical framework in opera 
studies specifically, the concept has been productively used in a range of disciplines with-
in musicology, ethnomusicology, and the humanities more broadly. See Steege, Helmholtz 
and the Modern Listener, and Ochoa Gautier, Aurality. For a representative range of usages, 
see: Jairo Moreno, “Antenatal Aurality in Pacific Afro-Colombian Midwifery,” in Remapping 
Sound Studies, ed. Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 
109–134; Lynne Kendrick, Theatre Aurality (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Kahn, Noise, 
Water, Meat; and Veit Erlmann, ed. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Moder-
nity (Oxford: Berg, 2004). For a helpful overview of how aurality has been used as a critical 

http://www.whitesnakeprojects.org/projects/alice-in-the-pandemic-a-digital-opera/
http://www.whitesnakeprojects.org/projects/alice-in-the-pandemic-a-digital-opera/


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defines aurality as “a network of experiences, practices, and discourses 
of hearing and the ear.”15 Similarly, Ana María Ochoa Gautier uses the 
framework of aurality as a mode of thinking through what she describes 
as “acoustic abundance” and “multiplicity,” in which the “entities that 
listen and entities that produce sounds … mutually produce each 
other.”16 Correspondingly, a framework of aurality offers opera studies 
the opportunity to think through how modes of mediated spectatorship 
co-constitute audience perception. Operatic aurality is a set of material 
contexts, discourses, and patterns that encompasses operatic performance 
and spectatorship within the hybrid environments I describe above.

This article is concerned with the materiality of the 400 sets of head-
phones sitting on the station’s old ticket counter, waiting to be washed 
and dried in a nearby Laundromat before the next evening’s performance. 
Throughout the opera, these headphones had facilitated whispers, shouts, 
and highly trained operatic voices into the ears of those audience members 
paying for the performance. They had been shared with those passersby in 
Union Station who had no idea what musical event was interrupting their 
commute. They had translated arching phrases and rhythmic staccati into 
Calvino’s landscapes as amazed onlookers listened and saw the train sta-
tion from a new aesthetic perspective. And they had made it difficult for 
tenor Ashley Faatoalia’s friends to locate him in the train station by ob-
scuring the aural signals that would reveal his specific location.17 (This was 
despite the fact that these individuals knew Faatoalia was playing one of the 
central characters in the opera, Marco Polo.)

The aforementioned advice from Polo (“It is not the voice that com-
mands the story: it is the ear”) is key to not only the narrative of the opera, 
but also the mode of spectatorship upon which it relies. In this example, the 
operatic text works in tandem with the physical realities of the production. 
Two analytic modes, hermeneutics and materiality, dialectically constitute 
the spectatorial experience in Invisible Cities. The libretto and open-ended 
compositional elements emphasize individual exploration and interpreta-
tion. At the same time, the headphones offer a singular experience of sound 
regardless of where the audience member or performer is in the station. On 

“epistemic threshold”, see David Trippet, “Sensations of Listening in Helmholtz’s Laboratory,” 
essay review of Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, by Benjamin Steege, Studies in History 
and Philosophy of Science 47 (2014): 124–132. 

15 Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, 7.
16 Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 4, 22.
17 Ashley Faatoalia, interview with author, San Pedro, September 12, 2017.



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the other hand, the headphones are also the gateway to a set of behaviors 
centered around individual interpretation and exploration. Thus, Invisible 
Cities offers an operatic opportunity to expand the ways we as listeners 
conceive of the relationship between mediated sound and narrative.

After providing an overview of the production, I situate the notion of op-
eratic aurality within studies of sound and narrative. In so doing, I demon-
strate how the operatic ear allows for a particular form of material and 
spatial listening. As a technologically-contingent work, Invisible Cities of-
fers the opportunity to explore the implications of the operatic ear beyond 
voice. In analyzing the opera from the (aural) vantage point of the head-
phones, I argue that Invisible Cities catalyzed operatic spectacle by fusing 
mobile listening practices with live performance. Contextualizing Invisible 
Cities within other modes of mobile listening demonstrates how the oper-
atic ear exists within a spectrum of recorded, live, mobile, and place-bound 
sound. In effect, the operatic ear shapes the context, and thus the percep-
tion, of the mediated voice. By foregrounding the material processes inher-
ent to Invisible Cities, I highlight the ways technology mediates aesthetic 
and social performance, and in turn, how social processes inform our ex-
pectations and experiences of mediated performances.

Logistics of Invisible Cities

The Industry is a self-described “independent, artist-driven company creat-
ing experimental productions that expand the definition of opera.”18 Found-
ed in 2012 by artistic director Yuval Sharon, the company has received na-
tional and international acclaim for their original, site-specific productions. 
The 2013 production of Invisible Cities played a large part in catalyzing the 
kinds of critical attention that have since become the norm for the company.

Invisible Cities begins with a short speech made by Sharon, in which 
spectators are told that each experience of the opera is meant to be deter-
mined by the individual choices of spectators. This speech is followed by an 
overture performed in the Harvey House restaurant, which has been closed 
since 1967. Following the overture, audience members begin meandering 
throughout the station.19 The overture is followed by a prologue and seven 

18 “About,” The Industry, accessed June 24, 2020, https://theindustryla.org/about/.
19 See Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 82–90 for a first-person account of the opera, and for a 

detailed walk-through of her individual experience of the work along with a diagram of the 
station in relation to the performance. 



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scenes which depict conversations between the two central characters of the 
opera, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The libretto’s text, lifted almost direct-
ly from the 1974 William Weaver English translation of the novel, builds in 
complexity through layers of detail, sometimes paradoxical ambiguity, and 
suggestive dialogue. Along with the Khan and Polo, two sopranos, an SATB 
quartet, and a cast of eight dancers play a changing set of characters within 
the opera. Two shows are given a night, one at 7 PM, and another at 10 PM.

With a ticket, an audience member receives a set of Sennheiser wireless 
headphones through which is broadcast the live-mixed version of the opera. 
While this person may be in any part of Union Station (ushers keep spec-
tators within the boundary lines of the space), all audience members hear 
the same operatic stream. The singers and dancers move throughout Union 
Station wearing lavalier microphones and in-ear monitors. Although there 
are no monitors for them to see conductor Marc Lowenstein, they hear a 
dry recording of the music being played by the orchestra dispersed into 
the in-ear monitors. As a result, they can hear the other singers, regardless 
of where they might be in the station. Tenor Ashley Faatoalia, who played 
Marco Polo, described the experience:

You’re singing for random people in a random space. Some people will know 
what’s going on, some people won’t. And so, every night was a little bit dif-
ferent. When we started the run, we had a little more leeway because people 
were following us [versus during rehearsals when performances were less of 
a distinct event]. So, then some people were like “ok, something’s going on.” 
But even that was chaos, because then the curiosity would peak to a certain 
point where people who were or weren’t involved were cavorting around and 
following us in different crowds . . . Some people came multiple nights to find 
different parts of the story—so because of that, someone was always peeking 
and looking with anticipation, so even when you weren’t ready to sing, you 
had to sit there, trying to be a character, or emote, or engage with the person 
on the other side of the entire campus that you couldn’t see.20

Baritone Cedric Berry, who sang the role of the Kublai Khan, echoed 
Faatoalia in underscoring the challenges of the unconventional staging:

We had rehearsed for months, we were finally becoming comfortable with 
the music, and then we went to the space. And I know we had talked about 

20 Faatoalia, interview with author.



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what we were going to do when we got to the space, and Marc announced 
that the orchestra not only would be in a different space in the train station 
no less, but that there wouldn’t be a monitor and that it would all be aural—I 
thought “now he’s really crazy” . . . I never thought I wouldn’t be able to see a 
conductor somewhere, especially with music that really requires a conductor, 
but it worked!21

There were a number of compositional techniques that anticipated the chal-
lenges in coordination Faatoalia and Berry describe, including ostinati, a 
strong sense of pulse used as varying types of signals throughout the entire 
opera, and overall a small number of vocal forces. The final scene, which was 
the most complex in terms of ensemble, also required all of the singers to be 
in one room together, although the orchestra was still in a separate space.

Audience experiences of non-aural elements within the performance were 
completely variable. In other words, the live audio mix being streamed into 
spectators’ headphones was the only consistent element of the performance 
from night to night regardless of where those spectators were located in the 
station. Unless audience members removed these headphones—which some 
did for brief moments throughout the performance, sometimes to share with 
other people in the train station, or to listen to a nearby singer live—they all 
heard the same live-mixed recording of the opera. Thus, Sharon’s production 
seemingly enfolded the role of visual spectacle in operatic production into 
the headphones worn by audience members. As I describe in greater detail 
throughout the rest of the article, this does not mean there was no aspect of 
visual spectacle throughout the production—far from it. Rather, the con-
sistent aural elements of the work (in the headphones) suggested that every-
day events in the station were spectacular, regardless of if actual performers 
could be seen or not. Because of the structure of the opera, the visual space 
of the proscenium stage that might be understood to be “controlled” by the 
director was not simply moved into the site-specific space of Union Station. 
Rather, this consistent element of onstage spectacle was relocated to the 
headphones, the imaginary space of which was controlled by sound design.22

While sound designer E. Martin Gimenez originated the idea of the head-
phones in the opera along with Sharon, Nick Tipp worked as lead sound 

21 The Industry, “The Industry Company – Cedric Berry,” October 2, 2018, YouTube, 3:36, 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK-8Wfl3Dm4.

22 Ryan Ebright briefly situates Invisible Cities within a history of operatic sound design. 
Ebright, “Doctor Atomic or: How John Adams Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Sound 
Design,” Cambridge Opera Journal 31, no. 1 (2019): 85–117.



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designer for the opera after Gimenez’s relationship with The Industry end-
ed suddenly. Tipp juggled three mixes during the performance: a dry mix 
intended for singers and dancers, a live-mixed stream meant for audience 
members with a significant number of atmospheric and spatial effects, and a 
third mix for the orchestra that had balance adjustments made for the instru-
mental musicians and Lowenstein to better hear one another. Lowenstein 
noted that in technical rehearsals “we kept fiddling with the balance of what 
we heard, especially because the orchestra was seated in an unusual distri-
bution and the pianists couldn’t hear each other very well acoustically.”23 The 
second of these three mixes (the live-mixed stream for audiences) was creat-
ed with the goal of establishing a distinct “landscape” for listeners, one that 
was distinct from that of the train station where the action was taking place.24

Reflecting on the use of postproduction techniques drawn from other 
genres in the final mix audience members heard through the headphones, 
Cerrone felt that Invisible Cities was “as much a sort of studio album as 
it is a live piece” and described the influence of recorded and even com-
pressed formats such as MP3s to the sound-identity of the opera. He said: 
“We wanted it to sound more like a pop record than a classical record. So 
it was sort of like bringing classical music into a more sonically connected 
pop music [sound] than your average classical recording.”25 Indeed, the use 
of sound design within the live performance of the piece along with the 
headphones themselves played a large role in cultivating the imagined aural 
space described by both audience members and performers. These elements 
together further intensified the likelihood that audience members would 
listen to the recording by drawing on behaviors of listening associated with 
mobile music, and not live performance.

Precedents and Opportunities of Aurality

What is the function of the operatic ear? How might we situate this concept 
within broader discourses around the dialectical construction of specta-
torship? The operatic ear represents a biological and metaphoric node in 

23 Marc Lowenstein, email correspondence with author, June 25, 2020. 
24 See Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 81 for more on the use of sound design to render the 

“acoustic landscape” (90) in Invisible Cities. 
25 Christopher Cerrone, phone interview by author, August 24, 2017. Notably, combining 

sound design with live performance (as was done in Invisible Cities) is a key part of live elec-
tronic music performance as well as in the performance of live popular music.



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a broader network of listening practices and behaviors. As Steege notes, 
the “ear” as a historical concept can function in multiple ways: “physical, 
mechanical, organic, physiological, psychological, or cognitive.” 26 The sin-
gular ear of an audience member takes on multiple roles within a perfor-
mance. The operatic ear is actually a multiplicity of ears simultaneously 
enacting various responses within a performance. Moreover, the roles an 
“ear” might take on in one performance will be different in other perfor-
mance contexts, thus constituting operatic aurality as a whole.

 Operatic aurality creates a space for material technologies and somatic 
responses in listening. Just as text and headphones work together to consti-
tute the spectatorial experience of Invisible Cities, so too does aurality en-
compass both spontaneous experience and dictated spectatorial response. 
To think through this dialectic, consider a listener wearing the headphones 
during Invisible Cities. As I illustrate in the next section, wearing the head-
phones may, for her, trigger a set of scripted behavioral responses that im-
itate her personal experiences listening to music on a mobile music device 
like her smartphone. At the same time, as she listens, she feels a rush of air 
around her, and turns to notice a dancer sprinting by. Turning to watch the 
dancer move away, she is distracted from the aural spectacle continuing 
to play on the headphones. In this hypothetical example, the spectator’s 
experience of reality is fragmented and layered. Multiple ears, or modes of 
engagement, constitute her engagement with operatic aurality.

Moreover, the concept of operatic aurality foregrounds both histori-
ographical and material approaches towards listening and space. In the 
twenty-first century, operatic performance is accessed through myriad 
spaces, modes, and practices of listening. The ear is likewise responsive to 
these shifts in space and mode of performance. Works as diverse as Da-
vid Lang’s The Mile-Long Opera, performed on New York City’s High Line, 
Adam Taylor and Scott Joiner’s online opera Connection Lost: L’opera di 
Tinder, and traditionally staged canonic works such as Le Nozze di Figaro 
at the Lyric Opera of Chicago or Metropolitan Opera House require a sim-
ilarly broad range of listening behaviors, a multiplicity of ears.

The operatic ear is the product of concomitant practices of listening and/
or spectating through multiple live and mediated forms. While here I am 
curious about the influence of material technological practices on the ear, 

26 Steege, Helmholtz and the Modern Listener, 50. While Steege is arguing for hybrid un-
derstandings of the historical ear, this conception, I believe, is helpful for contemporary anal-
yses as well. 



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it is helpful to consider earlier conceptions of the operatic ear articulated 
by philosophers such as Theodor Adorno. Adorno famously describes the 
ability of the operatic listener to protect herself from the adverse effects of 
being “[cajoled]” by the totality of the operatic experience by relocating the 
opera to the ear:

Shorn of phony hoopla, the LP simultaneously frees itself from the capri-
ciousness of fake opera festivals. It allows for the optimal presentation of 
music, enabling it to recapture some of the force and intensity that had been 
worn threadbare in the opera houses. Objectification, that is, a concentration 
on music as the true object of opera, may be linked to a perception that is 
comparable to reading, to the immersion in a text.27 

For Adorno, the operatic ear suggests a tantalizingly pure experience of 
operatic audition. The listening experience he idealizes, though, is di-
vorced from the realities of space and materiality with which the listener 
should also be concerned. The LP might offer freedom from the stage, but 
with the LP comes a new set of material behaviors, a fact Adorno conven-
iently ignores. In fact, Fred Moten highlights the way in which Adorno’s 
interpretation of the listening experience enables him to ignore rather 
than recognize the role of materiality in listening. In Moten’s words, 
Adorno’s structural listening is “a scene of auditory reading [… related] to 
the literary experience of the score,” reinforcing the transcendental, au-
tonomous object of the work.28 Technically, structural listening does rely 
on a set of behaviors responsive to material technologies. Adorno’s end 
goal of being immersed in the “work,” however, valorizes the autonomous 
art object at the expense of actual technologies and modes of behavior 
that make the listening possible. 

Later conceptions of spectatorship acknowledge the role of space in the 

27 Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 284–285. 

28 Interestingly, structural listening becomes a way of listening that relies on the visual: 
“Thus the phonographic mise-en-scène, because of and despite the structuring degradations 
of the culture industry, is revealed to be the most authentic site of a mode of ‘structural lis-
tening’ that approaches reading, one where development and the closed totality of the work 
become the objects of a kind of ocular-linguistic musical perception in which music’s textual 
essence comes to light. As Rose Rosengard Subotnik puts it, this kind of structural listening 
‘makes more use of the eyes than of the ears.’” Fred Moten, “The Phonographic mise-en-
scène,” Cambridge Opera Journal 16, no. 3 (2004): 271. See also Stephen C. Meyer, “Parsifal’s 
Aura,” 19th-Century Music 33, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 151–172. 



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spectatorial experience but are broader with regards to how this space is 
controlled. Thinking about the experience of operatic attendance rather 
than the isolated listening with which Adorno is concerned, Joy Calico 
highlights the ambiguity of the terms “spectator” and “audience member,” 
noting the ways these terms privilege certain sensorial modes and thus 
aural (and visual) expectations.29 Admittedly, focusing specifically on the 
operatic ear does not allow me to sidestep the ontological mire of what the 
audience member is actually doing—watching, or looking. Invisible Cities, 
however, makes this choice for listeners by using aural spectacle as the main 
consistent element of the performance. In effect, the headphones in Invis-
ible Cities mirror and miniaturize the experience of acoustic containment 
and manipulation Emily Thompson describes taking place in the first half 
of the twentieth century as concert halls and urban spaces were cultivated 
with architectural acoustics in mind.30 Invisible Cities foregrounds the ear 
as the means by which the rest of the performance is perceived. In so doing, 
the opera offers the unique opportunity to “isolate” the ear in operatic per-
formance, inasmuch as such a thing is possible. In so doing, we are able to 
explore a specific example of how heterogenous operatic ears constitute one 
form of operatic aurality.

The Operatic Ear in the Headphones: Performing Audile Technique

Audience members of Invisible Cities relied on specific sociocultural notions 
of listening—a multiplicity of operatic ears—to synthesize components of 
aural and visual alike within the work. This process of interpretation was 
premised upon each viewer’s past experiences with modes of mobile-music 
consumption like smartphones and portable media players. Mobile music 
creates a narrative world around the listener that she herself controls. In-
visible Cities was dramaturgically oriented around these notions of individ-
ual control and imagination borrowed from mobile-music practices. Just 
as listeners might create a narrative linking a specific song heard on their 
smartphone to a rainy day, crowd of apathetic commuters, or flock of birds, 
spectators at Union Station linked the sounds emanating from the head-
phones to the physical actions of the station, regardless of where the actual 

29 Joy H. Calico, Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 
147–48. 

30 Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity. 



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performers in the station were located. Invisible Cities was also designed 
around an assumed fluency with portable audio technology. Just as attend-
ing an operatic performance in an opera house has a set of audile techniques 
associated with it, so too does listening to a work using headphones.31 

The ubiquity of personal mobile-music technologies such as car radios, 
portable media players, and smartphones in the twentieth and twenty-first 
century United States has drastically changed the way music and space are 
perceived in relation to these innovations.32 Moreover, electroacoustic com-
position and sound art more broadly have shaped how mediated sound is 
both composed and heard.33 Thus, the headphones were more than just a 
practicality of the performance. Rather, these devices initiated a specific set 
of spectatorial behaviors. Indeed, this responsive pattern to material cul-
ture has a long historical precedent. Jonathan Sterne’s helpful term “audile 
technique” explains the ways in which listeners assimilate new ways of un-
derstanding and interacting with sound in tandem with these same technol-
ogies of mechanical reproduction. As Sterne makes clear, in the early twen-
tieth century, audile techniques—like the ability to “construct an auditory 
field with ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ sounds”—were learned through “media 
contexts” and “through sound-reproduction technologies like telephony, 
sound recording, and radio.”34 As technologies of mechanical reproduc-
tion—and corresponding audile techniques—developed, listeners began to 

31 Eidsheim refers to this set of sonic expectations as a two-dimensional figure of sound, 
in which sound is present both in front of and alongside a group of audience members, as in 
a proscenium-style opera house or traditional concert hall. Sensing Sound, 80–95. 

32 Miriama Young describes these modes of mobile listening as “pod music,” which “en-
gages with the creation and transmission of an aesthetic centered on internalized experi-
ence of the voice through the inner ear.” Young, “Proximity/Infinity: The Mediated Voice 
in Mobile Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, 404. Sumanth Gopinath and 
Jason Stanyek emphasize that mobile sound culture is not new to the digital age, nor was 
sound “static” prior to the technological innovations of the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and 
twenty-first centuries. Rather, “technological developments and socialities” of these periods 
produced new relationships between capital, consumers, and consequently, new sociocul-
tural patterns of listening. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, “Anytime, Anywhere? An 
Introduction to the Devices, Markets, and Theories of Mobile Music,” in The Oxford Hand-
book of Mobile Music Studies, Volume I, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Sanyek (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 2014), 2. 

33 While beyond the scope of this article, examples that resound in particular with the lis-
tening experience of Invisible Cities include Max Neuhaus’s sound installations like Drive-In 
Music (1967), Janet Cardiff ’s Walks (1991-2019), Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks (2004-
2017), and most especially, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Lohengrin II (2004). 

34 Sterne, The Audible Past, 137–138. 



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understand auditory space as private and individually constructed. This em-
phasis on individual control has continued to dominate rhetoric surround-
ing mobile-music in the forms of commercial advertising and individual 
behaviors alike. The twenty-first century operatic ear is a product of these 
material technologies and well-practiced at incorporating these behaviors. 

One of the greatest allures of the individual, portable music device is the 
way in which it allows the listener to control her experience of space. In 
the act of covering her ears with the soft leather of headphones, or insert-
ing earbuds, a listener demarcates a private aural zone and shapes personal 
perception of the visual arena beyond this intimate aural space.35 Michael 
Bull explains that those practitioners well-versed in the use of mobile mu-
sic through hardware such as the portable cassette/CD player, MP3 player, 
smartphone, and even automobile use sound to control and aestheticize 
changing urban environments, often through what he terms a “filmic” ex-
perience.36

Cerrone also acknowledges the effects of these patterns of musical con-
sumption; his compositional style is a byproduct of the dominant technolo-
gies of the late- twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This aspect of in-
dividual control and private space contributed to his own listening practices 
and subsequently, those compositional practices at work in Invisible Cities:

35 In Young’s view, this process “produces … the auditory deceit of ‘closeness.” Young, 
“Proximity/Infinity,” 405. Gopinath and Stanyek emphasize the intimacy of this experience of 
mobile listening: “Just as vital to the story is the use value of that relationship, one that vitally 
produces a number of different intimacies: the intimacy of insertion (earpiece in the ear); 
the intimacy of enclosure (the sonic bubble of the earphoned headspace and the womblike 
envelopment of the covers); the intimacy of the human other (the radio deejay, the voices 
of the singers); the intimacy of the distributed collective (listeners drawn together through 
the synchronic time engendered by radio technology). There is also, crucially, the intimacy 
of the body with device, that other entity beside and besides the listener.” All of these inti-
macies produce a “network of interrelated bonds.” Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, 
“The Mobilization of Performance: An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Mobile Music,” in 
The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, Volume 2, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason 
Stankyek (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 31–32. While not necessarily focused on 
the headphones as intimate mediator, Holger Schulze puts the question of intimacy into di-
alogue with other types of sound art that deal with similar staging concepts as those present 
in Invisible Cities. Holger Schulze, “Intruders Touching You. Intimate Encounters in Audio,” 
in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art, ed. Sanne Krogh Groth and Holger Schulze (New 
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 221–234. 

36 Bull distinguishes between two types of filmic experiences: “specific recreations of film-
ic-type experience with personal narratives attached to them and more generalized descrip-
tions of the world appearing to be like a film.” Michael Bull, Sounding out the City: Personal 
Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 86–87.



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For me, [listening on headphones] is a very immersive thing, and I think it’s 
a more private experience. There’s something very public about hearing or 
playing music live for people, and there’s something very private about the 
idea that you’re having this experience and maybe no one else is around you. 
That’s very much a part of Invisible Cities, the sense of walking around in a 
world. It’s a modality that is much more private.37

Cerrone’s words demonstrate how Invisible Cities works to aestheticize 
mundane actions and spaces, a key part of the artistic mission of The In-
dustry’s early productions. Moreover, the experience of turning a private 
technology into a public spectacle allows for a dialogic exchange between 
public and private experience into operatic spectatorship. The headphones 
give the listener personal control over her auditory, and thus visual envi-
ronment in a public space. At the same time, she loses the privacy associat-
ed with headphone listening in the process of participating in the spectacle 
of the opera as a listener.

Notably, scholars of mobile music emphasize the role of the individual 
within the listening environment. Shuhei Hosokawa describes the walk-
man’s capacity to “[mobilize] the Self ” and in that process of mobilization, 
what Hosokawa calls the “walk act,” to indicate to others the presence of a 
secret as indicated by the appearance of the walkman.38 In Invisible Cities, 
the control over the experience, the sense of individuation implied by the 
presence of “the secret,” is paradoxical. The audience member does not con-
trol the soundscape of the opera as she would control the streaming content 
on her own personal device, but the success of the narrative relies on her 
ability to link visual with aural spectacle. Moreover, the opera broadens 
the notion of Hosokawa’s individual secret to that of a communal secret. 
Audience member Ellen described her experience of seeing Invisible Cities 
through the headphones:

Listening to music on my headphones is really an intimate experience I have 
with myself. For people of our generation, it’s what you do—you listen to your 
headphones. And then there’s an element of almost cinematic storytelling 
that happens. Where you’re listening to this beautiful song, and then a but-

37 Cerrone, interview.
38 Shuhei Hosokawa, “The Walkman Effect,” Popular Music 4 (1984): 175–177. Hosokowa’s 

conception of the walk act in connection with the walkman relies upon Michel de Certeau’s 
writing on urban geographies, also pertinent to Invisible Cities. Michel de Certeau, The Prac-
tice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 98.



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terfly floats by—and you feel like you’re in a movie—kind of making up this 
story about the people around you, and the light on the grass… and when I 
was watching Invisible Cities, because I had on the headphones—for the first 
few split seconds, I felt like that’s what was happening, and then I realized that 
every person around me was doing the same thing.39

Ellen’s past experiences with mobile music not only allowed her to create 
synchronicity between audio and visual elements in Invisible Cities, but 
also heightened her sense of communal viewership. In fact, she explained 
that what she termed the “vernacular of the headphones” made Invisible 
Cities both more personal and communal than an experience in an opera 
house. She focuses on the communal experience of the opera, rather than 
on the sense of individuation. In this way, Invisible Cities mirrors simi-
lar headphone-based gatherings such as silent disco, in which participants 
choose one of several tracks to listen to in a large group. Reviewer Sarah 
Zabrodski, too, emphasized the sense of connection with other spectators 
from the perspective of a communal space: “The thrill of Invisible Cities lies 
in creating a shared focus within a space where we intuitively tend to keep 
to ourselves.”40

Heterogeneous Accounts of Spectatorship

Crucially, the headphones scripted certain audile techniques only to those 
well-versed in these techniques. Correspondingly, the behavior of the oper-
atic ear is dependent upon those materials and audile techniques to which it 
has been conditioned. To the listener trained in habits of mobile music, the 
visual spectacle of the opera could be choreographed in a number of ways 
among various audience members. Meanwhile, the spectacle of the pro-
duction, as we have seen, is firmly situated in the headphones themselves. 
Ellen’s description relies on previous experiences with mobile music: “For 
people of our generation it’s what you do—you listen to your headphones.” 
Audience members were primed for the experience of mobile listening 
thanks to the ways the piece built upon an established social dialectic of 

39 Ellen’s language echoes the mode of narration and control described by Bull. Ellen A., 
interview with author, Los Angeles, August 22, 2016. 

40 Sarah Zabrodski, “The Public Spectacle of a Personal Opera in LA’s Union Station,” 
Hyperallergic, November 14, 2013, https://hyperallergic.com/92262/the-public-spectacle-of-
a-personal-opera-in-los-angeles-union-station/.



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mobile music consumption. The material agency of the headphones, how-
ever, was predicated on an assumption: that audience members would un-
derstand the implicit signal the technology communicated about how the 
opera should be watched. 

Spectator accounts of the opera paralleled the hype of the press reviews. 
Audience member Andrew emphasized the individualized experience of 
the work, explaining that “you could follow someone, you could see where 
they go and sing, and then you could follow someone else, and then they 
would lead you to a totally different part of the train station.”41 Rita Santos, 
who managed the supertitles for the original run of the opera and assisted 
in the audio booth for the opera’s performance extension, also emphasized 
individuality and ownership. She explained that “Invisible Cities is totally 
your own exploration—you can see Invisible Cities many times, and nev-
er really see every single thing that happened—Yuval [Sharon] didn’t even 
see every single thing that happened, and he was walking around every 
night. The point is that you never really know what is going to happen.”42  
As Zabrodski noted for Hyperallergic: “No one observes the show in the 
same way … making it a highly personal, not private, experience. It is this 
individualized element that provides the source for sharing different stories 
connected by a single, very public event.”43

Many glowing reviews of the work also reveal this same fluency with 
modes of mobile listening and individual narrative creation. At the same 
time, these reports demonstrate how the visual experience of the opera did 
not add up to a consistent narrative. For instance, Alissa Walker wrote in 
Gizmodo: “I discovered that I didn’t even have to follow the story to have 
a transcendent experience—it was more like I was stepping in and out of 
different conversations between the music, the public and the building.”44 
Similarly, Lisa Napoli of National Public Radio member station KCRW ex-
plained that the opera “made you pay better attention to the random other 
humans who happened in on the experience, as they gazed with wonder or 
concern or even disinterest at those dancers writhing on the floor of the ter-
minal.”45 Audience members described by Maane Khatchatourian seemed 

41 Andrew A., interview with author, Los Angeles, August 20, 2016. 
42 Rita Santos, interview with author, Los Angeles, August 18, 2016. 
43 Zabrodski, “The Public Spectacle of a Personal Opera.” 
44 Alissa Walker, “A Secret Opera Erupts Inside California’s Biggest Train Depot,” Gizmo-

do, October 21, 2013, https://gizmodo.com/a-secret-opera-erupts-inside-californias-biggest-
train-1447832488. 

45 Lisa Napoli, “The Drama of Humanity Unfolds in Union Station—oh, and an Opera, 



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to be even more removed from any sort of visual spectacle: “some [audience 
members] wandered aimlessly throughout the building, listening instead of 
watching.”46 Each of these people had a different experience of the work. At 
the same time, individual spectators were left to interpret their own experi-
ence as the visual staging of the opera.

By contrast, those individuals who came to the production with dif-
ferent expectations of the type of listening required by the show were 
seemingly frustrated with some parts of the structure. Reviewer Isaac 
Schankler reminds readers that although “Cerrone’s music provides a 
powerful throughline for the entire duration [of the opera],” he never-
theless missed parts of the performance. “When we re-entered the sta-
tion [from another scene], there were several audience members clustered 
around some chairs where two men were sitting. One looked bewildered, 
while one was sleeping or pretending to sleep. We had clearly just missed 
something, but what?”47 Schankler seems to be disappointed with a lack 
of consistency in the visual narrative as compared to the aural spectacle 
provided by the headphones. His reaction exhibits the conflict between 
how certain material technologies shape audience perceptions of aurality 
and corresponding behaviors of spectatorship. Another reason this kind 
of confusion occurred had to do with the setting of the opera in crowded 
Union Station as well as the fact that all of the performers began the piece 
costumed in everyday, casual clothing. (Audience members were marked 
as audience members; however, performers were unmarked.) Andrew de-
scribed the unexpected discovery that certain individuals in Union Sta-
tion were actually performers. “There were moments where I was like ‘oh, 
I’m standing right in front of someone who is singing,’ and sometimes I 
didn’t even realize the singer was actually a singer [because of the way 
sound was processed].”48 

In other cases, spectators who came expecting to see a certain performer 
often had a difficult time finding that performer. The point was to engage 
with the aural experience as an audience member, not necessarily to actual-

Too,” KCRW, October 18, 2013, https://www.kcrw.com/culture/articles/the-drama-of-hu-
manity-unfolds-in-union-station-2014-oh-and-an-opera-too. 

46 Maane Khatchatourian, “Invisible Cities Opera Gets Immersive with Wireless Technol-
ogy,” Variety, November 16, 2013, https://variety.com/2013/legit/news/invisible-cities-immer-
sive-opera-1200841486/. 

47 Isaac Schankler, “Invisible Cities: Choose Your Own Opera,” New Music Box, November 
27, 2013, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/invisible-cities-choose-your-own-opera/.

48 Andrew A., interview. 

https://www.kcrw.com/culture/articles/the-drama-of-humanity-unfolds-in-union-station-2014-oh-and-an-opera-too
https://www.kcrw.com/culture/articles/the-drama-of-humanity-unfolds-in-union-station-2014-oh-and-an-opera-too
http://variety.com/2013/legit/news/invisible-cities-immersive-opera-1200841486/
http://variety.com/2013/legit/news/invisible-cities-immersive-opera-1200841486/


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ly see all of the performers heard in the headphones. That purpose, howev-
er, was implicit in the headphones themselves, not stated directly. Faatoalia 
explained that certain friends were disappointed when they couldn’t find 
him or locate a specific scene they had heard about. “I tried to tell people: 
‘Don’t feel bad if you missed different things. Just be immersed in the expe-
rience and find your own sort of show.’”49 Faatoalia’s advice to his friends— 
“find your own sort of show”—acknowledges the way in which Invisible 
Cities relied on singular, individual operatic ears that would ideally come 
together to constitute narrative.

Conclusions: From the Operatic Ear to the Operatic Voice

Invisible Cities inspires a definition of the operatic ear that is highly indi-
viduated and responsive to listener experience (or lack thereof) with var-
ious technological interfaces. Listening to sound simultaneously live and 
recorded demands a correspondingly hybrid form of spectatorship. Sound 
helps to define space and guides behaviors within this space. At the same 
time, an audience member has more control over the types of space she 
chooses to occupy as the sound moves with her. She is separate from the 
people at the station not wearing headphones and yet a clearly defined—
even marked—member of a listening community.50 Her experience of spec-
tatorship is fragmented by her decisions in the moment, and yet contingent 
upon the behaviors of others.

As I have demonstrated, the operatic ear does not represent a monolithic 
set of behaviors, nor is it a singular concept. Rather, operatic ears are situat-
ed in networks of technologies, material practices, sounds, and patterns of 
listening. As such, they allow listeners to absorb the similarly hybrid phe-
nomenon of the operatic voice. Relying on a variety of clues and behaviors, 
these listeners engage in ways both predetermined and spontaneous. Oper-
atic ears are also shaped by a number of other dialectic tensions: public/pri-
vate; encultured/unaware of listening practices, and agent/subject of aural 
production and control.

In the case of Invisible Cities, listener experiences with headphones 

49 Faatoalia, interview. 
50 Eidsheim has explored the way Invisible Cities created a form of sonic differentiation 

between audience members and commuters at Union Station. She describes this as a form 
of sonic gentrification through the lens of “air politics.” “Acoustic Slits and Vocal Incongru-
ences,” 302–3.



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shaped both spectating behaviors and the way voices were heard. As Young 
describes, music created for headphone distribution leads to specific types 
of composition, “in particular, vocalizations in sotto voce and hushed 
tones, articulated in close proximity to the microphone,” techniques which 
in turn, lead to a “new aesthetic” of composition.51 The intimate aesthetic 
Young describes certainly fits the bill for the production of Invisible 
Cities, in which performers drew on a range of pop-music techniques to 
sing in an appropriate way. As tenor Faatoalia explained to me, “I think 
my experience with mikes before on pop and contemporary projects 
helped for sure to learn how to balance and engage [in Invisible Cities].”52 
Young’s words also reveal how the operatic ear might be understood 
as byproduct of the mediated ears of the twentieth- and twenty-first 
centuries. The “fabricated aesthetic” she describes is meant to encapsulate 
the intimacy of the headphones, and this is certainly true of the pop 
aesthetic so described by Cerrone when speaking of Invisible Cities. As 
such, the operatic ear indicates how operatic voices will be produced and 
subsequently heard. In turn, the notion of operatic aurality offers a new 
way to consider how practices of performance are inherently reliant upon 
other contexts. Just as ear produces voice and voice produces ear, so too is 
this relationship of mutual production an interstitial one.53 By this I mean 
that spaces of possibility are produced in the context of aurality, and the 
mutually constitutive relationship I am describing will produce further 
heterogeneities of listening and spectatorship.

I began by putting hermeneutic analysis in conversation with new ma-
terialism, and this dialectic is, I believe, a helpful way to conclude. Invisi-
ble Cities ends with a dramatic scene in which the Kublai Khan, who has 
previously been dressed in contemporary clothes, emerges in a dramatic 
costume as the emperor at the height of his glory. He faces Marco Polo, 
who stands at the other end of the Historic Ticketing Hall of Union Sta-
tion.54 The pair is surrounded by the now fully-costumed cast, as well as 
the headphone-wearing audience members who have been ushered into 
the space by stage managers. As the two face one another, Polo and the 
quartet sing a repeating chorus: “Kublai Khan | seek and find | who and 

51 Young, “Proximity/Infinity,” 406. 
52 Faatoalia, interview. 
53 See Ochoa Gautier, Aurality, 22.
54 For a sense of the production locations as associated with specific scenes, see “Select a 

Scene at Union Station,” Invisible Cities: Experience, accessed July 23, 2020, http://invisibleci-
tiesopera.com/experience/.

http://invisiblecitiesopera.com/experience/
http://invisiblecitiesopera.com/experience/


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what, | in the midst of the inferno, | are not the inferno. | Make them 
endure, | give them space.” This proscenium-like spectacle combines live-
ness, recorded sound, shared and fragmented-headphone space, voices, 
and ears. Aurality offers a similar sort of amalgamation of signifiers. The 
important thing is to discover what signifiers—material, hermeneutic, 
and otherwise—are present, and to give them space to sound and be heard 
by listening operatic ears.



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Abstract

Opera scholarship often begins with the voice then moves to the ear. But what if we move 
in the opposite direction? That is, what can we discover about operatic sounds by focusing 
on how processes of listening are mediated by social and technological patterns of behavior? 
I use The Industry’s 2013 production of Christopher Cerrone’s opera Invisible Cities, which 
relocated the audiovisual space of the opera house to a set of wireless headphones worn by 
each audience member, to think through these questions. In this article, privileging the ear 
over the voice allows us to consider the ways digital technologies create equivalent modes of 
understanding operatic listening as simultaneously fragmented, interstitial, and relational.

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Rather than focusing on the acoustic perception of sound as it relates to the concert hall, 
here I am interested in highlighting the material significance of the headphones themselves 
in the production. I put interviews and public press reviews in dialogue with the body of 
rich scholarship around historical and contemporary modes of listening (Eidsheim, Sterne, 
Ochoa Gautier, Steege). I situate these headphones within a history of mobile listening and 
behaviors in order to understand what elements shape the twenty-first century operatic ear. 
I argue that the modes of spectatorship used in Invisible Cities built upon an established 
sociocultural tradition to show audience members how to successfully listen to the work. 
In focusing on the headphones, I demonstrate the significance of material technologies in 
constituting operatic aurality.

Keywords: Mediation, Aurality, Spectatorship, Opera, Headphones.

Megan Steigerwald Ille is an Assistant Professor of Musicology, Educator at the College-Con-
servatory of Music, University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the roles of place and 
digital mediation in the twenty-first century U.S. opera industry. She is currently working 
on a book on the Los Angeles-based opera company The Industry titled Opera for Everyone: 
Experimenting with American Opera in the Digital Age, that considers the impact of exper-
imental spectatorship practices on contemporary operatic performance. She has published 
articles in the Journal of the Society for American Music and the Opera Quarterly.


