Sound Touching Connection
Sound – a vibe, a thrill, an atmosphere, a shock, a message… a presence.
We experience sound through some form of contact. When the wind shakes the leaves, we hear them rustle… as it rushes past our ears or touches our skin, the hair on our arms can rise, and perhaps even the cilia inside our ears tremble… we hear sound when a voice articulates a mind’s thoughts, or an instrument expresses its music.
We hear the contact. And, when we hear something that moves us emotionally, our whole body responds.
Sound is an expression of hearing a moment of contact, of interaction, of connection; a quiet presence with the potential for animism. But is it a purely audible epiphenomenon suggesting communication, connection, interaction, and relationship, or is it different modes of silence pervading all life, awaiting witnessing, engagement – its reunion with the explicate, and speaking to its own presence when two, or more, elements meet?
Let us also consider sound as more than purely aural hearing; it is also a sense of touch, experienced physically and emotionally by our bodies, carried through the air to the medium of our bodies and hearts. The result of interaction, sound is the witness of life happening… the documentarian.
But perhaps sound is more than what comes ‘after’; perhaps it is alert, alive, still, and deterministic, waiting to be encountered, to encounter us, just like consciousness. Perhaps it is initiating movement? Could it be deterministic? Could it have will and purpose?
Energy is sound, and sound is energy… a beingness of life.
Everything has its apparent counter, or perceived opposite, and sound’s apparent opposite is silence. Each one suggesting the other. And then there is ‘quiet’ which might be different again, from silence. When I am teaching voice students, one of the breathing/sounding exercises we do is ‘quiet breath’ – it is the least effortful, the most gentle of breaths.
There are Gods of wind, air, and of silence. ¹HESYKHIA (Hesychia) was the personified spirit (daimona) of quiet, rest, silence, and stillness […] Her Roman equivalents were Quies (Quiet) and Silentia (Silence). There is also ²AEOLIOUS, Keeper of the Winds. From which we derive such beauties as Aeolian harps, the bringers of the voice of the wind.
And what of the quality, the timbre, of sound and of silence? Sound and silence convey meaning through their texture, the texture we experience within ourselves; body and imagination, providing experiences of our consciousness that we can relish in, and learn from. Consciousness is in the mix here, for sure – mainly our attention is being drawn to self-awareness, which makes us better listeners, and trackers, of our own conscious state. From here, we can begin to master a sense of self that we choose with more pleasure, ease, and gentle freedom.
When I create sounds with my voice, I notice that in the sounding is the traveling, the seeking, the emotion, the gnosis of authenticity, along with the vast realm of unpredictability and possibilities. And then there is this profound texture of the silence in between sounds, or in extended moments of sonic rest. I sense that we are traveling in that sound, toward silence, toward knowing ourselves in the silence, as the silence. In our most profoundly awakened state, we are the silence. It inhabits us, and, when we let it, when we let ourselves be, it brings us to a state of peace. Our participation in the dance of sound, silence, breath and body means we are saying either yes, or no, to ourselves, to consciousness, and to life.
Thank you for reading.
Clare
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Citations:
¹)https://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Hesykhia.html#:~:text=HESYKHIA%20(Hesychia)%20was%20the%20personified,)%20and%20Silentia%20(Silence).
2)https://www.theoi.com/Titan/Aiolos.html
