Sound Ideas

I am interested in the idea of urban sound pollution. Robin Rimbaud (from my previous investigation) ‘stole’ voices from bits of cellphone conversations and used them in his sound pieces. I like this idea of chaos. Chaotic sound environments have always appealed to me. Recently I attended a lecture (i had to do this for a biology assignment) where a professor orated about the benefits of noise entropy on the brain. Someone in the audience commented on how writers will tend to work better in crowded noisy places. In fact, it seems that the more chaos that is present acoustically, the better we can concentrate. I also like how when a plethora of sounds comes together, it feels like there is some wisp of a holistic comprehension, like you are on the verge of some grand epiphany. I admire it when people attempt capturing this chaos of sounds in writing. I see it sometimes in poetry, and it is fascinating.

 

I really liked the interview with John Cage. An interesting thing he said was that his favourite sound was silence and that the silence of the world now is traffic. He really loves sound. I imagine that the ambience of traffic is like the pulse or steady breathing of the city, and as comforting. I like how earthy the idea is. He inspires you to be more sensitive to sounds, and to take pleasure in it. Music is almost too obvious for him, he can appreciate the flashy stuff, but at the end of the day he just likes noise for itself. This makes me think of writing that is down to earth. I used to really love reading boring styles. It was oddly comforting. It’s the somehow rolling rhythm of the the’s and and’s and said’s and did’s. I’d like writing like that. But probably no one would read it.

 

A lot of the links including John Cage’s video seem to have the common idea of sound for sound’s sake, and the obliteration of meaning. John Cage talks about how music to him is meaningless noise. He teaches us not to be afraid of this. Myself, I obtain some of my pleasure from any art from the meaning that is involved. But most of the meaning is probably contextual; I find lyrics ocassionally bothersome. My favourite lyrics are nonsense lyrics, or lyrics from another language. Sigur Ros comes to mind. Why does writing need meaning? Meaning is just a course to feeling. Wouldn’t it be just as (if not more) effective to come to feeling immediately? Eliminate the middle man? But it is difficult to do this with writing alone alas. A word is so much more passive than a sound. It requires something on the part of the reader. A promise of meaning invites the reader to devote himself to a piece of writing. A meaningless piece does not do this, and the reader will not concentrate and be able to appreciate it.  But, a piece of writing with some promise of meaning, from the syntax or the diction, that is in the end meaningless… yeah maybe that’ll wokr.

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