Stop and Listen to the Roses
This week’s readings made clear the inevitable relationship between sound and listening. They explained how, without one, the other would cease to exist and how we, as human beings, must train our ears to hear delicate and complex sounds. We must also practice describing, repeating and recording these sounds. R. Murray Schafer describes our interaction with sound by saying that, “the only way we can comprehend extrahuman sounds is in relationship to sensing and producing sounds of our own” (Schafer 207). In this way, our most reliable method for understanding sounds we hear in our environment is being able to attempt to reproduce those sounds and share them with others. Schafer says sounds are, “only comprehensible by comparison with what we can hear or echo back ourselves” (Schafer 207). Being able to mimic sounds as closely as possible gives human beings a way to discuss the sounds and categorize them in a universal way. The author Trevor Cox takes a more direct route to analyzing echoes in his novel, The Sound Book. He spends his 4th chapter, “Echoes of the Past”, discussing the sound phenomena and how they can be differently interpreted—through his discussion, one thing seems for sure, hearing your own voice come back at you can play tricks on the brain. While there are many different kinds of echoes, they have been something to fascinate the human race since their emergence. Another concept of fascination that has been around for awhile is that of “The Aeolian”. Directly, aeolian can be defined as, “relating to or arising from the action of wind” (Oxford Dictionary). This concept is discussed in Earth Sound Earth Listening by its author Douglas Kahn. His main dialogue is about whether the aeolian is music or not. The biggest debate stems from the fact that, “musicians disagree about the proper definition of the term music—indeed, almost every theorist gives a different one” (Kahn 42). In my opinion, this is exactly the reason why the aeolian should be considered music. If beauty truly is in the eyes of the beholder than one could most definitely lose themselves in the aeolian in a similar manner someone else might lose themselves to the classical compositions of Bach.
