sounds voices reverberating deferential halls. The whirr of humankind staring at reflections of their own making. Every hush escalates and spreads out into its space, confirming its authority and rendering it a hallowed hall. My sonic body shrinks into itself, self-consciously aware of the space I take; children’s voices confidently fire up the echo, expanding themselves happily into the architecture, practicing loud footsteps, squeals and laughter.
sounds sliding off roofs, down drain pipes, into meadows, onto rivers; invisibly slipping away all night and all day. Spattering and splattering, gurgling and murmuring away away…under my feet, above my head - sounds sucking on the landscape, giving it a formless form, awkward and dirty. Slurping cavities, gaps and hollows, through which it sifts their entropic shape until spring fills it with flowers and bird song.
sounds the vacuum of absolute silence.
sounds tremmers in the trees: regular soft explosions that spread across the treetops and open a space in my thoughts. It marks not a precise location but a diffuse timespace, coming from all directions, switching from the right to the left, ahead of me to what is behind, to confuse my ears and make my head swivel in vain to locate its source. Escaping visual capture it produces the forest as an extensive place that reaches vertically and horizontally to create a sensorial expanse of trees. I am in the midst of this expanse sensing rather then seeing its reach and breathe into the hollow of its sound.
sounds the promise of warmth. - The flat becomes that sound expanding and diffusing into the room periodically until it is temporarily warm enough and quieter clicks and clacks denote the beginning of a pause. Sounds trickling away until there is nothing more and silence hovers on the target temperature, until that drops and the next round begins, starting with a faint click from the hallway, followed by a wave rushing in, gushing about, knocking around and pulling on its metal prison to get through. And so it goes all day again and again, round after round, sound delivering the temporal respite from the cold.
sounds the heavy and expansive silence of assured privilege that overshadows the adjoining park and weighs heavy on its land. It’s a space hogging nothingness that is punctuated and confirmed in deliberately slow but regular intervals by a metallic bursting forth - shot like - followed by a male bellowing - shaping and carrying the silence in a confident and self-evident air.
sounds the awkward commotion of people shifting out of tightly organised chairs all at the same time while trying to keep the reverence of the moment. This moment is made of small sounds, tiny self-conscious sounds that reflect the uncertainty of individuals as they gather up to become a group. The boom of the organ exposes bare and discomfited bodies lined up together alone, opening a vast and empty space to surround them with. Sonically cowering in the organ’s shade, hushes and whispers outline a semi-circle formed shyly, syncopated by the certain steps of the reverend moving swayingly from one to the next, to the next, to the next, to draw in certainty the timid participation of quiet sounds.
sound the roar of a wounded animal, moaning intermittently but with persistence, in great pain, despite which it is ramping up in increasing fury. Coming closer and closer yelping and howling disjointed salvos merging into a continues scream that stretches and contorts the city’s architecture. The concrete canyons are elastic in its whine, which elongates and intensifies its place like a rubber band twisting around my ears.
Law enforcement sounds crime cutting through the silent night.
sound the rhythm of my walking as a recurrent surf. Each movement blends into the other. No single footsteps, just waves. I adjust my gate to its sound and deliberately exaggerate the stretched-out continuity. Searching for more pools of leaves I avoid naked pavements exposing my tread, preferring instead to stay in the shadow of my sound. It is a sound of memory and perennial joy at the weather turning cold. It sounds the idea of autumn as an “iconographic” sound: a sonic emblem that sounds its emblematicness through my participation and thus is clearly not an icon at all; eschewing the concept of distance and idolatry. Instead the sonic emblem is subjective and reciprocal. I activate it and hear it sounding us together, as a socio-symbolic relationship that creates the time and place we are in not as an ideal but as a moment of coincidence, until the pavement turns grey and empty and on my footsteps pound the monotone of swept streets.
sounds my attitude of listening to tiny sounds with reverence and attention. It breaks the tension of silence in silence by giving it form; and invites contemplation and meditation without the anxiety of boundarieless nothingness. This is composed nothingness, full of intention, which we realise in listening, individually and contingently. In this contingent contemplation it sounds a silent shape of experienced space and time, however vague and durational. Reminding me of the simultaneity of myself in silence without making me suffer its demand, I can listen in order to think about things but are unbound from the physical grip that other silence grasps me in.
