“The sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will” is an interesting though that was the basis of week fours lecture: sound.
Sound is created by physical vibrations that set molecules in motion, creating sound waves that travel through the air. Now that scientific description does not do sound justice. Sound helps us hear music from the Beatles, a babys laugh, crying, singing and anything you can think of.
In class we discussed listening versus hearing, which is a very interesting topic of discussion in my opinion. Hearing just happens where as listening requires a conscious effort. Just like when you are reading or speaking. I have done a lot of both in my life, hearing things happen and attentively listening, as everyone probably has. But the thought of deep listening is also very compelling to me.
Deep listening is about attuning your ears to certain sounds, practises of dialogue, rethinking the meaning nature and significance of our social experience. An example of this is 4’33” by John Cage. It was 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, our tutor only played a minute and a half of it, but after 30 seconds i got the idea. The artist John Cage, our tutor told us, would not play anything in-front of thousands of people, and what would ensue itself was murmuring from the crowd, slightly similar to what happened in the lecture. This uncomfortable silence where song is expected is a comment on the nature of humans, through the sounds we make due to our discomfort. In a way it in itself is a song, well, anything can be if you really want it to be. It is psychoacoustics, which means experiencing sound.
There is a scientific and a non-scientific way to experience sound. You can get technical with it and start describing the hows and why’s, which is interesting to me, but i enjoy feeling how sound can be a bit more.
