Daily Inspiration Quote by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen’s line lands like a diagnosis delivered in a control room: we live in a culture where seeing has the authority of proof, while hearing is treated as secondary evidence. Coming from a composer who spent his life stretching what “listening” could mean, it reads less like nostalgia and more like a warning about attention itself. The eyes “dominate” not because images are richer, but because they’re easier to police, package, and monetize. Vision provides instant consensus: look at this, react now, move on. Sound asks for time, ambiguity, and trust.

The context matters. Stockhausen is writing and speaking in the postwar, broadcast-saturated decades when television becomes the household altar and pop stardom becomes a visual economy. Experimental music, already outside the commercial mainstream, is made even more marginal by a media system that rewards spectacle. In that world, the avant-garde composer isn’t just competing with other sounds; he’s competing with the entire visual apparatus of modern persuasion.

There’s subtext, too, about power. “Eyes over ears” is a politics of perception: images can be staged, edited, framed; they recruit you before you’ve had the chance to interpret. Sound, especially abstract sound, resists that quick capture. It forces an internal cinema, a private meaning-making that can’t be easily standardized. Stockhausen’s intent is to reassert listening as an active, almost ethical practice - not passive consumption. He’s arguing that the crisis isn’t that people don’t like difficult music; it’s that they’ve been trained to treat attention as something you watch rather than something you do.