Listen
For those of us with hearing, at any time we can turn our attention to the sounds we encounter as we move through the world. Listening, we direct our mind’s awareness, our thoughts toward what we can hear. Staying with the process of listening, moment to moment, now that’s really something. From this can flow relaxation, a sense of connection, insight and may reboot dormant compassion.
Acknowledging thoughts as they arise and letting them pass, returning our attention to the sound, we begin to notice resonance. Just as every sound has its own timbre, its own overtone signature, every sound has unique qualities. Even in noise, we can hear beauty. With discipline and repetition, sonority can be found in any auditory stream. Fishing for sounds to pay attention to, I guess is how I imagine the rest of my life should go.
And this simple practice I suspect has benefits to ourselves and, in redirecting our awareness and influencing our appraisal of what we hear, to our environment. I know it calms me down, positively redirects my thinking and usually inspires me to play music. Could it also contribute to creating community and shared sense of relatedness between ourselves and everything and everyone else? These concepts aren’t exactly new, and there’s whole traditions both secular and spiritual dedicated to these ends. But this practice has for me shifted understanding from knowing as semantic facts to lived experiences and ongoing behaviors and identity.
And as I make my way in my work and play, I feel compelled to share, an urge to invite others to try, and see if there might be some ways listening might lead to their own little or big ways listening practice may benefit them. So, without getting too programmatic, just a general suggestion: listen. The complexity, or programmaticness would then be super useful in dealing with all the barriers, both extrinsic and intrinsic, that will limit listening.
If you are having difficulty staying with your listening in your immediate environment, try listening to music with this same attentiveness to quality. Music can assist you until you develop the ability to find music in everything you hear.
Listening practice has become embedded for me now. I’m constantly finding interest in sound fields I pass through. Connected in a current of curiosity, encountering an open elevator bay under repair, I can’t help but marvel at the complex tones emanating from the wind rushing through the opened up column of space. Or the malfunctioning overhead speakers in public spaces, spewing random crackles, hisses, or best yet, some fragment of a recorded overhead announcement like ‘pandapandapandapanda’ or at least that’s what it sounds like to me! Is it possible that tuning one’s attention to stay with an annoying sound environment until you find something genuinely interesting that you hear in it can actually translate into other aspects of our lives? How about that thing someone in your life does or says, or a tone in their voice that is irritating, is there a way to find something about it that, if not pleasing, can at least be something to be curious about? Maybe this is just another automatic thought that I’ve ascribed meaning to, but even if it is, it seems like one that can be helpful in my life. Because it seems like, no matter where I go, or who I’m with, it’s never all roses and moonbeams. I like thinking that there’s something I can do besides be annoyed and wish to be somewhere else, with someone else, doing something else. And for me, I’ve found it. I’m just gonna listen.
So, that seems like a good stopping point for now. Maybe I’ll come back to this and try to zhuzh it into better sense, but I think I got all the component pieces in place to share. Oh, and just to shill for my artist side for a minute, if you want to explore more of what I’ve found interesting in my day to day environment over the last 10 years or so, bookmark my All the Wow & Twice the Flutter page on Bandcamp. That’s where I’ve released my Revallusions series of loops. My plan is to keep releasing these sets of 1m samples of encountered sound fields. Also, just so you know I’ve been serious about trying to figure out the difference between noise and music for a while now, you can practice finding music in an excerpt from my Metaphone Sounding recording [a 15 member low voltage noise orchestra, recorded for Doug Haire‘s Sonarchy radio program on Seattle’s KCMU in 2004 (now KEXP)].
