reduced listening

Schaeffer’s ‘reduced listening’ is a method towards the systematic creation and maintenance of what James Tenney would call a ‘threshold of formal concern.’ This listening style brings the ‘sound object’ into being by describing its phenomenological boundaries.
To say that Schaeffer’s ‘sound object’ is a special case of what Tenney calls a ‘temporal gestalt unit’ is to bring the temporal aspect of its objectivity to the foreground.