All Sounds Come from Heaven

Lately I've been noticing that I have a strong judgmental response to sounds in my environment:  while some sounds are genuinely neutral to me, for many, I tend quickly to decide I enjoy or abhor them.  For example, on my commute to my office this morning, I decided to seek the solace of a quiet country road that was out of the way, but very pleasant and rejuvenating.  Just as I turned off the noisy urban street and onto a tranquil residential path, a huge diesel tow truck pulled in behind me:  I was immediately angry and put upon.  The engine was loud enough and the driver stayed close enough (this took some doing on his part, as I drive a zippy, nimble sports car) that it actually hurt my ears.  I felt violated, entitled to my peace, and angry that I had to tolerate this horror behind me.  We played cat-and-mouse for a while, me trying to get away from him and him catching me up; it turned out we had the same destination.  Once I realized that, I dejectedly gave up on my rural-soundscape-seeking and just drove to work.

This episode really brought forward awareness of my automatic judgment of what I hear.  Apart from the appropriate rejection of physically harmful sound, it seems important to explore the fullness of our aural experience.  As I get older and make more music of my own, I’m increasingly aware of my taste in what I want to hear.  This seems appropriate, in the sense that any artist identifies a comparatively narrow band of all possible expression within which to work.  That said, as I often guide my patients to do on the path to self-understanding, it seems a worthy effort to expose oneself to as wide a variety of experiences as possible in order to determine which of them one wishes to have more of and which one does not.  The more I experience the universe of sound, the more I may understand of the music I wish to make.

There are many sound artists and musicians who incorporate into their art sounds I dislike.  Cage famously built his career in part on the assertion that there is no sound which cannot be music.  I get this premise and do not refute it; it does not contradict that I can still explore and choose which sounds are meaningful and expressive to me and which are not, independent of their meaning and expressivity for others.  However, I am discovering in new ways my biases against what I think of as "noise":  I feel entitled to live only with sounds I enjoy and not with sounds I don't.

That's a problem.  (I am confident, dear reader, that you grasped that already.)  I am, of course, aware that I do not have any say in other people's or in the world's sounding, let alone control over it.  So, how did this entitlement come about?  Marc Weidenbaum* recently suggested that it comes from the auditory control our technology affords us:  pop in our earbuds and our aural universe is (nearly) at our command.  I think this is true in part for me -- or at least generalizable:  in my home growing up (long before earbuds), my parents played music almost constantly and I enjoyed most all of what they selected, even during my teen years.  I think my first experience of feeling affronted at being forced to listen to something other than what I wanted came when my younger brother hit adolescence and began developing his own, different, taste (which, to be honest, I have come in recent decades to appreciate as brilliant).  "Somebody else's favorite songs" has been a bane for me since about that time.

But there are other sonic affronts I suffer:  sirens and jackhammers while walking, television in the next room, the hiss of nearby traffic, the distant hum of the city -- none of these are especially unusual to be annoyed by.  What I'm appreciating, however, is that the word doing the most work at the beginning of this paragraph is "suffer."  It's my own subjectivity, not anything inherent in the sound, that makes a thing an affront.  Indeed, it's not even necessarily anything innate to me that causes that; yes, there are evolutionary predispositions, like toward hissing or growling or loudness, but my responses even to those can be malleable.  (This, in turn, arises from the fact that sound cannot exist without a listener -- vibrations, yes, but sound is by definition a perceptual phenomenon.)

Which raises the question, how might my experience of the world, of others' art, of my own music, change by practicing greater acceptance of all parts of my soundscape?  An interesting inquiry; I'll let you know.



*I couldn't find the link to the blog post in which he touched on this, but here's a short post in keeping with the spirit of it, so you can see his work.