Unless we suffer from a congenital or genetic defect, or have suffered a serious injury in our lives that would have taken away our hearing, we all hear – albeit with different levels of sensitivity, of course – all the time. Unlike our eyes, we cannot close our ears or knock them shut. And in truth, sound cannot be escaped even if our hearing aids are not working for us: it can, as is often forgotten, be felt with the rest of our body. Surely we have all experienced that we can touch the sound, let it vibrate from head to toe when we stand near a bass-playing speaker. But hearing does not mean listening. These are, as the composer and ardent lawyer would tell you deep listening Pauline Oliveros, two completely different things. Hearing is a physiological condition, a given. Listening is conscious an activity that requires some effort.
Sound, as is well known, has one extraordinary property: it spreads evenly in all directions, penetrates obstacles (the lower the frequency, the better), connects near and far. Someone jams on a lit festival stage to a West African kora or an alto saxophone, and below them thousands of people listen in a trance, swaying rhythmically, alternately thumping and thumping. Isn't it amazing?
Sound has a creative, procreative nature, the ability to create, to form bonds, to fasten.
Of course, it can kill and destroy, drown out and deafen, but this does not have to be the case in most cases. Leaving aside events that are essentially uncontrollable, such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, phenomena accompanied by some of the most deafening sounds in the natural world (the catastrophic eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883, the loudest sound ever measured, reached 172 decibels at a distance of 160 kilometers from the epicenter and was heard as far as the island of Rodrigues in the Indian Ocean), the amount of harmful sounds is something that we have the power to influence through our actions. For example, the accumulated noise from shipping in the oceans, which negatively affects the health, communication and culture of countless aquatic creatures, can be very easily reduced by switching to quiet boat engines, by limiting it altogether.
Why is this unifying sound quality essential?
Because listening, however fleeting, puts us in touch with other people and creatures, and even with places and entire landscapes, connecting us to their pulse. Such a bond, once woven, can be incredibly powerful, it can completely change your life, shake it up. Or better yet: soften him beyond recognition.
By listening, you open yourself up, you let the world in: listening is, in the words of David Haskell, invitation.
But when we don't listen to the voices, the songs, the sound messages around us, we lose connection with this larger whole of life, this vibrating network. And we do so surprisingly quickly.
It's like we're always offline: we're just pretending yours, we mumble to ourselves.
The inability – or more often the unwillingness – to listen inevitably leads to us being robbed of how we ourselves enter the shared sound field, how we influence it, and this can lead to great pain and suffering. The oceans already mentioned (but also rivers, lakes, ponds, all aquatic environments where sound spreads so much better, further and faster than through air) are sad proof of this.
Deafness to the world is, from a certain perspective, behind the environmental crisis, or at least in some ways it deepens it – the initial disinterest is directed towards ways of life that, by their detachment from ecological ties, devastate the diversity of life, thereby accelerating the (aesthetic, spiritual, cultural) impoverishment of the world. This impoverishment can ultimately result in there being nothing/to whom to listen to anymore, even if there is a will to do so: once resounding places are swallowed up by oppressive silence.
This is a bleak vision, the fulfillment of which Rachel Carson warned in Silent Spring.
Let us always remember: Loss of biodiversity is always also a loss of acoustic diversity, because sound has been a part of life for tens, even hundreds of millions of years. Some sound, even if purely mechanical, was already produced by ancient single-celled organisms. From them, after all, we inherited cilia (eyebrows) in the inner ear, an integral part of a complex physiological process, the end of which is nothing less than the perception of sound.
Is it really necessary to remind you that some of the most refined forms of natural beauty, such as birdsong in all its changing forms, are of a sonic nature?
Let us ask ourselves, again and again: Do we really want to live in a world where we cannot marvel at the complexity and intense emotionality of humpback whales' songs, wonder what these long ocean songs mean, why they change from year to year? Why do different clans of sperm whales have differently structured voices? Or what drives the many-voiced thrush to remix, like a seasoned DJ, the voices of other singers and sounds that he finds interesting and hip, into a completely new improvised composition? In short: Where would there be so much music, so much excitement, so much unyielding beauty and flourishing?
With the decline of auditory sensations – the squeals of chimpanzees, the chirping of mole crickets, the bleating of fallow deer – we are in danger of sensory deprivation in the long term: a lack of stimuli that would remind us that we share the world with other resonant life forms.
What consequences can this have? First of all, a fundamental and irreversible impoverishment of our imagination, our inner life, our well-being, and perhaps even a threat to the very foundations of our humanity and culture.
Therefore, it is necessary to listen consciously, to cultivate and refine conscious listening: so that we are more aware of what is, what we have, but also of what is missing, what should be and is not, what could be again if...
Simply put: to make it happen to us immediately to/concerned.
Of course, when you wear headphones in the city to filter out the omnipresent noise and commotion for a while, to withdraw into yourself, to somehow close yourself off from the world outside, it's understandable - I do this myself sometimes. However, we pay the price for this by losing even more physical contact with the outside world - along with the noise, that is. undesirable Through sound, we also filter the voices of other people, birds, insects, the gurgling of water, the whistling of the autumn wind, the cracking of pine cones: the voices and music of countless homes and places.
We walk through places and it's as if we weren't even there. We all know this well.
What about the moments when we put down our headphones and concentrate on what is currently sounding and echoing around us?
Is there any special preparation required for listening? Any special circumstances? Do I have to be able to correctly name, analyze, sort, and read what I hear?
The answer will always be the same: No, there is no need for anything like that.
To appreciate the beauty of a flowering anemone, do I need to know the exact botanical description of its body parts, or even the taxonomic classification of the entire plant? Can't I enjoy music without knowing any complicated music theory, without knowing how to write music in musical notation?
Forget everything you've heard about listening. Forget that listening must necessarily lead to groundbreaking insights and theories about what the heard means, what it tells us. It can, of course. But if we don't have exaggerated expectations, it can also contribute greatly to dissolving conceptual barriers. It can lead, as philosopher and musician David Rothenberg writes in one of his books, "to forgetting the name of the heard." Perceiving sound as sound, for its fleeting shape and beauty and for nothing more, not trying to name it, classify it, label it, that is a path that can sometimes mean much more.
It is important that I am listening.. What is important is that I am able to focus my attention on the world around me, on the life of another fellow creature. What is important is the experience that comes from it.
Try it. Choose a quiet place, sit down, let the waves that you have made to sing with your arrival subside one by one, and just listen. Without determination, without judgment, without searching.
Revolutions sometimes begin even inconspicuously like this.
I agree. Thanks.