To Those Willing to Listen:
It was a bitterly cold February evening. The kind of cold that carries and delivers sound with excessive amounts of precision and clarity. As jacketed pedestrians walked ahead of me, the scraping of their heels across the pavement echoed off of the reflective walls of a large glass building known as the Power Center. I stepped through swinging doors, enveloped by the warm air of the box office.
The auditorium is a simple room, tastefully so. Bare concrete walls and golden velour seats. The stage is black and glossy, lightly scuffed and taped. On each side, dangling precariously from zip tied clusters of cords, are a mammoth pair of speakers. A light hearted kind of clamor rose from the audience and bounced around off of all of those hard surfaces.
I had assumed, during a previous visit, that the acoustic nature of the place would be hollow, maybe cold, but filled with all of these bodies, it was rich and lively. It made me feel warm even when I wasn’t.
I took my seat. The lights were lowered and the audience began to settle down. Red light poured from a spotlight and flooded the stage. Dark, ambient house music, kind of muffled, emitted from the speakers, flowing throughout the room, into every corner. Three dancers stepped past black curtains, gracefully. Illuminated in red, their reflections prominently displayed on the floor, they threw themselves amongst each other, free from gravity.
A deep ache seeded in my heart and took root, growing, sprawling into my fingertips. The expanse of my mind, in all of its entirety, fell blank. I couldn’t look away. Their movements trumped any notation of that music in all preexisting forms, each movement was a perfectly curated representation of each sound.
**pause**
Can you see the things I’m describing in your mind’s eye? Can you hear them even as they aren’t really sounding?
As with most other animals, people seem to have a knack for aural signals. We use these in a number of ways, these days in a mostly technical way, but long ago the cry of a shepherd would have done just as well as the wail of a fire truck. I certainly shouted as a car came to a screeching halt inches from my right thigh, just as my cat yelps when I mistakenly step on his tail. But what I did moments after that experience, as I crossed paths with a group of friends, is unlike anything another animal is capable of. I told them about it.
People have a real knack for aural signals, yes, but more specifically, we have a knack for storytelling. We’ve done it forever, and we’ve done it well. If you could see and hear the things I told you about in that story concerning the dancers, however, it has to do with a lot more than the power of the spoken word. We retain all of these things that our senses pick up on day after day so well that we’re able to fabricate entire scenarios. It may not be terribly accurate, but in a very general sense, you have a memory of that evening at the Power Center just as I do.
Particularly fascinating, though, is the fact that we can grasp aural landscapes well enough to include them in these fabrications even as sound is constantly shifting. In the words of the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, “You can never go down to the same water twice.” Similarly, the odds that you’ve ever heard the same combination of sounds in exactly the same way are extremely low. Regardless, if I asked you to close your eyes, and hear the soft push and ebb of ocean waves, the wind as it slips between tall grasses, and the gentle hum of insects as they crawl out of their shaded burrows with the setting sun, you kind of can, can’t you?
In all of our existential qualms, the one thing that seldom comes up is the one thing that seems the most obvious: noise. What’s so existential about noise? You might be asking.
Close your eyes. Listen.
**pause**
What do you hear? The ticking of a clock, perhaps? The footsteps of your upstairs neighbor? A train whistle? Geese as they fly north in anticipation of warmer weather?
Think deeper. What about the things you seldom tune in? What about that industrial din wafting off of distant roads? Even indoors, you can hear it, this soft, ever-present drone. We live in a world that is chock-full of noise, and there’s a reason for that. People love noise. We measure it in decibels at sporting events as the announcer entices us to be louder, louder. How many millions of people do you suppose have stood on a cliffs edge, whooping and shouting into valleys and canyons and relishing in the echo? We turn up our music so loud that it’s physically damaging our eardrums, and we know that, but we do it anyway. Living at a time where we seem to have dominated every single nook and cranny of the earth, noise is everywhere.
I don’t wish to get into all of those philosophical questions about why we do things like this, but I will bring up the kind of noise that we seem to like the most: music. And with that, a question: what is it? My short answer is that music is anything you want it to be, anything that’s music to your ears. Music is in everything, and therefore, everything is music.
Strange Associations:
Growing up, I can’t remember one evening where the stereo speakers in my dad’s office sat silent. His varying tastes in music provide time stamps for various periods of my life. Most of my memories are so deeply attached to certain songs that the sound of them can cause a sudden recollection of things long forgotten. I sometimes find that I know all of the words to music that I hadn’t even realized I had heard before.
This causes strange associations. The image of Christopher Walken flying through an empty hotel lobby in Fat Boy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” music video goes with this memory of taking pictures with Santa at the mall and then going to Max and Erma’s for milk and cookies. When I hear Chris Cornell’s “Part of Me”, in which he prominently sings, “this bitch ain’t a part of me,” I think of a specific sunny summer day where I lined up all of my Pet Shop toys for a photoshoot. “The Host of Seraphim” by Dead Can Dance, this intensely dark, operatic Bulgarian music, represents playing with Lincoln Logs with my brother in the basement. Everything about the very serious tone of Arcade Fire has everything to do with Electric Six singing about gay bars and white girls. The list goes on.
This exposure to so much music has had an enormous amount of influence on me and my attitude about most things. I failed to realize this until very recently, but I strongly believe that each of us is carefully curated through our experiences, and being so prominent in our culture, music is a more influential experience than most. One memory demonstrates this to me more than most others.
My 20th birthday occurred in the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. That strange season of isolation blurred any logical perception of time, but the anticipation of a birthday celebration my parents had planned sent the days into a creeping rhythm. My monotonous routine: a lonesome 20 miles on my bike down Huron River Drive, digital jigsaw puzzles in the dark of my living room, a few bitter beers, and Haley Henderixcks playing on my speaker with a blanket thrown over it for some kind of ambient effect, was finally broken. Starved of company, a walk with a few old friends was satiating. We ate strawberry cupcakes in the driveway.
That evening, I sat in the yard with my parents, around a crackling fire. It was a nostalgic event, having moved out a few years earlier, to sit in one of those creaky reclining lawn chairs wrapped in a blanket, the smoke soaking into my clothes and my hair. As the world around us seemed to fall into silence, my dad never lowered the volume on his music. Each night, it continued to rattle the china cabinet, and that night, it escaped into the early spring air, without consideration for the neighbor’s peace and quiet. With a chuckle, he put on “A Daisy Chain 4 Satan” by My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, this scary industrial 80s music, which I’ve since coined “Cult Club music.”
“Tell her about the bathroom,” my mom said through a smile. And with that, he told me a story.
Seventeen years before, when they moved into our house, they were appalled by the hideous state of the bathrooms. The former owner, Joan, was quite passionate about interior design, and her tastes leaned towards maximalism. Floral wallpaper clashed with patterned tile, the curtains that she thought were tying the room together were actually actively tearing it into this overwhelming jumble resembling my great grandmother’s closet.
It had to go. All of it.
My parents thought they could replace the curtains, peel the wallpaper off, throw on a fresh layer of paint, and call it good, but the adhesive put up a fight. They spent hours in there with a steamer, sweating it off, only to find several more layers of wallpaper underneath. They had never been more frustrated, but they laughed it off by referencing the movie scene sampled at the end of that song, “Joan… Joan… I’m gonna find ‘er, and I’m gonna kill ‘er.”
“A Daisy Chain 4 Satan'' has since become one of my favorite songs. At first, I would constantly assure my friends that I was only listening to it ironically, too scared to admit that I actually enjoyed listening to almost six minutes of this guy screaming about drugs over a weird synth track, but you can only make that excuse so many times.
I’m proud, at this point, of how varied my music tastes have become, perhaps a bit too proud, but would I be quite the same without it? I don’t really know the answer to that question, but I do know the answer to this one: Is the reason I enjoy that kind of music at least partially rooted in the fact that I so heavily associate it not only with somebody that I care deeply about, but also with this memory that brings me so much joy? Yes, of course. Regardless of the reason why I gave it a chance in the first place, however, it opened doors for me. It pried my mind open just a little bit further.
All of these arbitrary opinions come into existence on the basis of some specific context. It could be pride, it could be nostalgia, but it certainly isn’t nothing. To consider sounds that are “unmusical” by definition to be something worth listening to opens one’s mind to the potential value in every sound. I really do think this caused me to think differently.
I’m much less judgemental than I used to be, both of myself and others. I try to think more deeply, more mindfully, and with intention. I strive to live my life in as much detail as possible, and with as much peace as any given situation allows. Understanding that in the world we live in, it simply isn’t possible to take everything in all the time, but it’s important, now and then, to give yourself a moment. Leave time behind you, to a reasonable extent, and take things one step at a time.
Intentional Puzzlement:
Music is among the most influential of things. This is a fact that’s difficult to argue with because music is and always has been extremely culturally significant for human beings. Similar to how difficult it is to explain what common foods taste like to those who may not have had them, however, it’s nearly impossible to explain what music is.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, music is simply a sound having rhythm. The Oxford dictionary goes a little further and implies that it must portray beauty and emotion. Both of these definitions are extremely vague, however, and neither rule out the spoken word, nor do they rule out natural sounds, like a running creek or a singing bird.
There’s a myriad of songs that incorporate both or either of these things, but what is it that makes these songs more so than the sound of a musician practicing on a hillside as a train passes by in the distance? Or the clinking of glasses under the hum of good conversation?
It must have something to do with intention, but how should we define that? Are improvising jazz musicians working with as much intention as all of these composers who plan out every aspect of their work on pages and pages of staved manuscripts? As he transcribed birdsong into music for the piano and flute, did Olivier Messiaen have more intention than the birds themselves? Should the intention be assigned to those who put on the music, or to those who hear it? It’s really hard to say.
My favorite definition of music is one by John Cage, “Music is sounds, sounds around us whether we’re in or out of concert halls.” This appreciation for every sound, especially those unrecorded, fleeting sounds, precious enough to only exist for ephemeral moments, is what has become the drive behind my love for this subject. I find the soundscape of any given venue, including any variety of sounds the audience could be making, from shuffling feet to crinkling paper, to be just as important as the music itself. Is this not why we crave live music? To feel the energy in the room, the puttering waiters in jazz clubs, the earth shattering roar coming from hoards of rock fans, those amateur indie bands whose drummers overpower their singers. These things portray beauty and emotion. These things are music.
This idea isn’t confined only to things that are associated with “music” in its most generic terms. It’s also little things about where we come from, things that you might not notice until you behave as a tourist.
The way you can hear the subway in New York City, clicking wheels on electric rails drifting up through grates in the sidewalk. The ambulances there sound different. They’re deeper, slower, and there’s an echo ricocheting off of all of those solid blocks of buildings. The first time I was in Seattle, I was struck by the silence of the beaches. Pebbles clattered together in place of the static of shifting brown sands on the beaches of western Michigan, there was a void in the place where I expected buzzing crickets and cicadas. In the suburbs of Miami, the ominous voices of strange tropical birds echoed over the flat expanses of short, thick grass in the humid night air. On the cracked roads of South Euclid, outside of Cleveland, the thick foliage of huge maple trees turned my old street into something of an enclosed corridor. Dropping buckeyes made a hollow cracking noise as they hit the pavement.
These are things that we frequently disregard until we notice their absence. We each have our own versions of aural nostalgia and homesickness. These sensations smear across the blur of my earliest memories. They mark different times in my life just as my dad’s music does. The whole world is singing. All we need to do is listen.
A Forced Questioning of Things Seldom Considered:
I recently took a brief trip to a place that’s much quieter than any of the places I come from.
One evening, we took a walk down a long dirt road with the dog, and decided to veer off into a marshy prairie, lined with forest. To the left there was a patch of bare deciduous trees, and straight ahead, at the top of a hill, a grove of pines. Tangles of thorny vines twisted over saturated mosses, and beyond that was a hillside covered in long, dry grass. Scrubby bushes sat low and sparse at random points throughout the field. A storm was forming in the western sky, and clouds heavy with rain had begun to roll over, obscuring the setting sun. The smell of it drifted toward us, over a field across the street, cleared for farming, but currently devoid of crops, and full of cotton tailed deer. It was so peaceful.
The thing is, it wasn’t necessarily quiet in the way that I expected. There was hardly ever any silence, the main difference was that the sounds I was hearing were unmuddled. They rang out with specificity. I knew the exact tree from which an owl sighed its mournful call. The storm emitted winds that combed through distant trees, a sound not often heard in places near freeways and main roads. As the sun went down, a whirring chorus of frogs crescendoed into the atmosphere from a nearby bog.
From where I sit now, on the other hand, deep in the inner suburbs of Ann Arbor, it’s far from silent, even as I’m listening to nothing in particular. There are pleasant sounds, like various kinds of singing birds, and a string of Edison bulbs clinking against the house as the breeze pushes them around. But there’s also the static sound of distant construction, occasionally interrupted by a loud crashing sound, or beeping as a vehicle goes into reverse. Trucks sit running on the side of the road as men scurry around, doing everything that needs to be done in order to fix power lines damaged in a recent wind storm. Just as the sound of one car fades away, another turns the corner and takes up the empty space left by the former. There are too many sounds going on to really take one in. It’s not deafening in the very literal way that we usually use that word, but we’re subconsciously tuning out all of these things, leaving nothing but the most present and pleasant sounds. If that isn’t deafening, I don’t know what is.
Sound pollution isn’t always clear or obvious, especially when we’re so frequently immersed in it. It isn’t just massive shipping jets or muffler-less cars, it comes from every little thing that we do multiplied by the number of people in any given area. Living in a society where we’re so focused on the visual aspects of daily life, it’s difficult to recognize what this means for us. I fear that it’s turning our attention inward, causing us to be less mindful, less aware of our surroundings. In taking it upon ourselves to decide what does and doesn’t deserve our aural attention, we’re forgetting to recognize the majesty of this place that we get to call our home.
The first time I saw the Milky Way, I was camping at the Northwoods field station of Hiram College in the Hiawatha National Forest. It’s this remote cluster of cabins perched on the edge of a tiny, tannin stained lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There’s no electricity or running water, only a rusted pump thrusting up out of a mound of earth. During the day, the soft, thin trails, lined with wintergreen and fern, were inviting. The summer breeze danced among the leaves, sending whispers cascading down and soaking into the shaded soil. There was the eternal company of cheerful birds and fractals of sunlight bouncing off of the windows in the lodge. At night, though, it was a completely different world. I didn’t dare to wander out of my cabin, even to go to the outhouse. It was perfectly dark and perfectly silent. The vast, quiet emptiness of the surrounding woods sent shivers up my spine.
One night, we built a fire and lounged in its warm light, drinking shandies until the sun was deep below the horizon. Even as darkness settled between tree trunks, and the birds went to sleep, leaving our laughter to ring out without accompaniment, the combination of booze, company, and dancing flames melted away my fear. The call of a loon coaxed my gaze upward, and through the canopy I could see fragments of brilliant stars. We rushed down this slope to the water’s edge, and stood on the end of the dock. For what I saw, I suddenly regretted allowing my fear to pull me indoors, safely tucked under the wooden rafters, for so many nights.
A wide, effervescent band of glitter, stretched across the entire sky. I’d never seen anything like it. It’s difficult to put into words just how spectacular it is.
In an effort to avoid strained necks, we carried canoes over sand and rocks and lowered them onto the smooth black water, pushing ripples into the pristine surface with our ankles. One strong pull of the oar sent the boat drifting under the full glory of the sky. I carefully laid down in the bottom, where I remained for the better part of an hour, vaguely aware of my own mortality, drunkenly floating on this lake deep enough to submerge a three story house and dark enough that there could have been a house in there and we would never know. Distinctly aware of just how goddamn small I am.
I am, occasionally, struck with the profound realization that I am in love with humanity and everything that it has to offer. We fail to recognize the gravity of our achievements, both good and bad. The aura of Times Square, this strange, suspended mist of residual light pouring off of the billboards, stretches for miles. We’ve built skyscrapers that are so tall and narrow that a main concern for residents is how much their apartments are going to sway in the wind. These are incredible things, despite any amount of negative nuanced implications that they provide. However, I think it’s a good thing for us to cower in the shadow of something much bigger than we are. When we’ve overpowered the stars with our own trillions of pinpricks of light, we’ve erased that reminder that we aren’t quite as important as we think. To be able to see the stars in the night sky shouldn’t be a rare natural wonder, it should remain there every night, everywhere. A humbling symbol.
Sappy Hippy Shit:
If music has such a strong influence on us, it’s likely that our perception of it affects our mindset about most other things in a very real way. An earnest awareness of the soundscape, which is, in the words of R. Murray Schafer, “any collection of sounds, almost like a painting is a collection of visual attractions,” invites mindfulness. He says, “I think when you listen carefully to the soundscape it becomes quite miraculous. When you listen carefully and marvel.” I know first hand that the belief that there is music in every fleeting moment creates the opportunity to experience joy in every fleeting moment.
One cold winter morning, I pulled myself out of bed just before the sun came up, and went outside to listen. Wrapped in a blanket, I sat on the edge of a picnic table on this island in the middle of the parking lot. The grass crunched with frost under my feet. The landscape began to glow with pale early morning light. People were beginning to stir, keys jingling and doors slamming as they got into cars and started engines. The tires ground into loose gravel on the road as they backed up and pulled away. An airplane passed overhead as birds bickered in a nearby tree. I decided that whatever goes on in your head is much louder than any physical noise.
In that moment, even as the cold air seeped through my blanket and into my skin, I felt overwhelmingly thankful to have been a witness to that particular moment on that particular morning. I could feel it in my joints, this swelling feeling of joy, like I was in love with the world and everything in it. It reminded me how much of a gift it is to experience unreplicatable moments, and all of the beauty there is to be captured by those willing to observe.
This was the first time I practiced deep listening with intention. I’d like to invite you to do the same, and to feel the gratitude that comes with it.