Sounding off again

I awoke this morning in a brilliantly happy state -- no doubt some weird class of neurochemicals produced by the late night combination of smoked rainbow trout and a MacLaren Vale shiraz. I put a Gordon Lightfoot disc into the machine and was completely swept away by the aching perfection of his young voice in "Early Morning Rain". Strange thing -- I got a lump in my throat and my eyes welled up. Strange because this is not a song that has any particular meaning or history for me, beautiful song though it is. Sounds, music especially, structure time in the same way that buildings structure space. This is not a new idea, by any means. It was Goethe, I think, who first described architecture as frozen music. The same idea. I think it was something to do with that idea that gripped me by the throat this morning. It wasn't so much the song as the idea of music and what can be done with it.

On the walk into work this morning, I was very much filled with this idea as I listened to the birdsong (is there always this much song in the air or was it the trout talking again?) nicely segmented by the metronome beat of my heavy feet on the dirt trail through the park. The thing is, we can listen to the same set of sounds in so many different ways. With practice, we can reorganize the boundaries in the soundscape so that everything comes to us as the ear receives it. Or, if we choose to, we can bracket the identity of the sounds and just pay attention to the spatial properties of the soundscape. This is a very pleasant thing to do while walking, because sound sources leave things like motion trails -- a kind of aural motion parallax.

By the time I arrived at my office, I was convinced that I needed a new chapter on sound -- another topic I know little about.