reading listening notes (1) 12/30
1. Serres, Michel. “Genesis.” Noise and Silence. 1982. Print. “[Talking of the seaside] That placid of vehement uproar seems established there for all eternity… Space is assailed, as a whole, by the murmur; we are utterly taken over by this same murmuring… The silence of the sea is mere appearance” (93).
2. Generation Anthropocene. “The Soundtracker.” Online audio. October 2015. Soundcloud. “Not once do we find in the fossil records of ear-lids.”
3. The podcast, “The Soundtracker,” brings up that there is no place in the world unaffected by sound pollution, how can we further understand the longterm effects of the pollution of advertisements?
4. I am struggling now, with the difference between listening (hearing/comprehension) and reading (visual/comprehension/hearing). At the end of the podcast, “The Soundtracker,” Gordon Hempton is explaining the phenomenon of understanding and he says, “when I listen to this [sound that I love] I disappear.” Which immediately resonated with me, though, perhaps not with listening, rather with reading. When I am reading something and the verisimilitude of the sentence/phrase/page overtakes me I am no longer there, it is the closest I am to being egoless. I think this feeling is true divinity, the moment of comprehension. When I read, I hear the words speak themselves in my head. When I am listening sometimes I see the words, which is particularly delightful as I have synthesisia. The moment Hempton is speaking of is neither of these things it’s the moment of cognition which is all together outside of space-time. In “Gensis” Michel Serres writes about the noise of the sea, “stable, unstable cascades are endlessly trading. Space is assailed, as a whole,” (93) articulating what Hempton might refer to as “the poetics of space.” Serres is able to capture the sound of the sea by describing its movement, and I wonder if without replications are we left to resort to using the other senses to describe this sense? Because my senses are tied to each other I complicate this even further. The way that we translate meaning to each other through language is familiar to me, though the way that we translate meaning to each other through sound is incredibly unfamiliar. I cannot think of how to translate a non-sound thing that is beautiful to me into sound. This question, practice, doing will be what tethers me this semester.