7.2 Sound Reflection

One of the things I find most interesting about sound is that our relationship with it is highly selective. While this may seem completely obvious, I've found that when we're listening for certain sounds, we hear them exceptionally well. But if we aren't listening for certain sounds, they fade into the background of our lives, becoming mere ambiances that we're accustomed to. To explain this phenomena more precisely, I believe that in many cases our ears train themselves to the "natural." By virtue of our daily activities, our ears (in a sense) become deaf to the basic sounds that flow through our lives like clockwork: breathing, our own movements, room tones, etc. When a sound that is out of the ordinary appears, our hearing snaps into gear: people's speech, a loud car horn, a door slamming, etc. The difference between these two types of hearing could be described as "passive" and "active." Of course, we are always "hearing" something, however the sounds we hear passively are largely ignored, whereas the active sounds are pushed to the forefront of our attention. For me personally, this sound project served as the perfect example of this. When I went around my environment, hunting for sound in various places, I noticed sounds that I'd probably always heard, but never really payed any attention to. For instance, walking into my bathroom to listen for sounds, I couldn't help but notice the faint whirr of the air condition--but in any other scenario, where I wasn't practicing active listening, this sound would have easily been ignored.

When artists pay attention to sound, it shows holistically. For the arts, there is so much content and meaning that can be communicated aurally if one meticulously places thought into sounds. This of course applies to any form of music, but even for visual art installations, the utilization of carefully crafted sound can go a long way to bring potential viewers into the world of the artist. Sound has a certain immediacy to it, and as such, it may communicate something to viewers that a visual component could not do as a stand-alone. In regard to our class curriculum, precisely the same principle applies. In many of our projects (such as the video unit, or some groups' Impact 25 works), solely using the visual would not have served to convey much of any meaning for what was presented. Sound was not only a desired complement to the visual, but an integral part of the total message that was being delivered. This integral nature of sound is something that we miss entirely when we go about our lives listening "passively." Instead as artists and educators, we must practice active listening, and be readily looking for ways to creatively use sound to express ideas and transform them into new meanings.