As you listen, the particles of sound decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. It is a symbiotic relationship. As you listen, the environment is enlivened. This is the listening effect.
When silence is conceived as the rejection of the human personality, the ultimate silence is death. Then man likes to surround himself with sounds in order to nourish his fantasy of perpetual life. In Western society silence is negative, an embarrassment, a vacuum. Silence for Western man equals communication hang-up. If one does not speak, the other will speak.
British Anti-Noise League chose these illustrations for their magazine’s covers because they alluded to the antinoise activists’ love of silence, to a serene and still life. The Arcadian mill was the perfect icon of a restful Eden on earth. Today the windmill remains a symbol of a peaceful life. However, its symbolism bears no relationship to how the sounds of wind and water mills have been valued in the past. In early modern towns, these mills were common objects of noise abatement (Poulussen 1987). The fact that we now consider mills a symbol of serenity is a consequence of viewing preindustrial society as a quiet compared to industrial and postindustrial societies.
NOISE: Etymologically the word can be traced back to Old French (noyse) and to eleventh-century Provençal (noysa, nosa, nausa), but its origin is uncertain. It has a variety of meanings and shadings of meaning, the most important of which are the following:
Unwanted sound. The Oxford English Dictionary contains references to noise as unwanted sound dating back as far as 1225.
Unmusical sound. The nineteenth-century physicist Hermann Helmholtz employed the expression noise to describe sound composed of nonperiodic vibrations (the rustling of leaves), by comparison with musical sounds, which consist of periodic vibrations. Noise is still used in this sense in expressions such as white noise or Gaussian noise.
Any loud sound. In general usage today, noise often refers to particularly loud sounds. In this sense a noise abatement by-law prohibits certain loud sounds or establishes their permissible limits in decibels.
Disturbance in any signaling system. In electronics and engineering, noise refers to any disturbances which do not represent part of the signal, such as static on a telephone or snow on a television screen.
The most satisfactory definition of noise for general usage is still
„unwanted sound.” This makes noise a subjective term. One man’s music may be another man’s noise. But it holds open the possibility that in a given society there will be more agreement than disagreement as to which sounds constitute unwanted interruptions. It should be noted that each language preserves unique nuances of meaning for words representing noise. Thus in French one speaks of the bruit of a jet but also the bruit of the birds or the bruit of the waves.
Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one’s own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awarness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through Deep Listening.
As you listen, the particles of sound decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. It is a symbiotic relationship. As you listen, the environment is enlivened. This is the listening effect.
Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.
