Sea of Sound

Be an Earwitness

SEA of SOUND

Be An Earwitness

“Stay close to any sounds that make you glad you are alive,” says Hafiz, the 14^th Century mystic and poet, who apparently paid very close attention to his sonic environment. Can you imagine what things sounded like in the 14^th Century? Nothing mechanical, nothing amplified. Only the most basic of musical instruments. Voices, animals, nature. People then must have heard so much of nature.

Now, our sonic environment is cluttered with human, manufactured, electronic and noisy sounds:  horns blaring, planes overhead, machines whirring, music that is too loud in the background of our daily lives. Always, always too loud. We mostly don’t “hear” these sounds because we don’t listen to them. They’re just there, like the cars driving down the street.

In 1993, a composer named R. Murray Shaeffer wrote about the “soundscape” to describe the aural equivalent of landscape - those sounds that surround us and define our immediate sonic environment. His book The Soundscape – Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of the World is a fascinating, insightful and still relevant look at sound in our world.

In my current sonic environment, a coffeeshop, there are people talking on their phones or to each other or listening to something through headphones - music, someone’s voice? The word “phone” is from the Greek meaning “sound or voice.” “Telephone” means to send sound (or voice) over a distance, but we don’t say telephone anymore, that’s for 1950s movies. Maybe to some of us our phones are the primary way we access sonic things. But the bigger picture is that sound (and music) nourishes the life in us and sound is what makes music. In order to understand music, we need to start with sound.

Schaefer talks about “earwitnessing,” the aural equivalent to eyewitnessing. The way to earwitness is to pay close attention to the detail of your sonic environment and then describe it accurately. When I ask students to do this, there is usually (at first) consternation, and then surprise as they uncover layers of ambient sound that have been there, unnoticed, all this time.

My copy of The Soundscape is tattered and pages are falling out. I go back to R. Murray Schaefer often, so I can hear more and be surprised again and again at the sounds that are always there.