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My Proper Introduction to Sound

Humans are amazingly unaware of the sounds that exist within, and without, our environments at every moment. We often let them fade into the background of whatever we happen to be focusing on—and too often that point of focus is something entirely unrelated to sound. Strangely enough, sound is often a factor of whatever we’re doing without being the main focal point. Do people typically watch a show without the sound on? Can people very easily read in an environment that is too loud? The sounds that occur around us are very important and serve many purposes. Our readings this week were from The Soundscape, by R. Murray Schafer, and The Sound Book, by Trevor Cox, and they touch on many subjects including the various purposes of sound, the plethora of noises the environments of the Earth make, how organisms other than humans communicate, and how humans currently interact and react to the sound that happens around them. I found two topics particularly interesting. The first was the way sound travels through different mediums and was discussed in Trevor Cox’s novel as he quoted a wildlife recordist, Chris Watson, when considering water in the oceans as “the most sound-rich environment on the planet” (Cox 105). It goes to show that just because humans can’t hear anything, doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to hear. According to Oxford Dictionary, silence is defined as “the absence of sound” and would truly mean that there isn’t anything to hear—something humans are not accustomed to. The idea of complete silence has sparked my curiosity and is the second topic of interest coming from R. Murray Schafer’s novel. He states, “It is difficult for the human being to imagine an apocalyptic noise as it is for him to imagine a definitive silence” (Schafer 28). Considering no one alive today has experienced the apocalypse, it is made easy to comparatively assume from this quote that this it true of ‘definitive silence’ as well.