Listening without speaking alludes to eavesdropping and the covert monitoring of communications. The audience can influence the clarity of the message by adjusting the controls on the machine, giving a physical side to the sense of searching and trying to hang on to the messages. However, the piece includes the deliberate design of interfering with the descrambling process to cause the gradual degradation of the audio so that the messages eventually become engulfed in machine noise before cutting off suddenly to silence.