Earlids and Brainlids: On Thoughts and Sounds.
“’Can one think without speaking?’ – And what is thinking? Well, don’t you ever think? Can’t you observe yourself and see what is going on? It should be simple. You don’t have to wait for it as for an astronomical event and then perhaps make your observations in a hurry.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations
“Well these are the simple facts of the case – There were at least two parasites one sexual the other cerebral working the way that parasites will – And why has no one asked ‘What is the Word?’ – Why do you talk to yourself all the time?” William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch
A pale light eases its way through the white curtains, a brittle mixture of the nearby street lamp and the slowly brightening sky. I run my palm across the friction of four days of stubble and the image of a match being struck surfaces then disappears like an ornamental fish. I hook my arm under the bed to retrieve the red bike lamp that is always there. Resting it unlit on my chest I grope for the travel alarm clock I bought in Berlin. Its luminous dial points to 4 o’clock.
Replacing the clock on the wooden floorboards, I switch on the lamp. The alarm clock now seems to have taken on a more strident tone, as if it, too, has been woken from a more dormant state. In the red glow of the bike lamp, the ticking mechanism seems irregular, shifting from faster to slower as I move my head on the pillow. Intrigued, I attempt to manipulate this effect only to discover that with intensified concentration the clock lapses into a stable tempo and then falls back into a more subdued participation in my bedroom’s atmosphere.
In its place come other the sounds. My wife’s breathing struggles through the cold that she’s not been able to shake; the inhalation the texture of pipes and drains, the exhalation like air from a balloon neck. A softer echo emerges from my young daughter’s sleeping body, less troubled and more steadily rhythmic. From my son – sprawled nearest to me on top of the duvet, arm flung across his sister – hardly a sound escapes. No more than the rustles that accompany his shifts and turns and the occasional glutinous thumb-sucking that no promise of toys or adventures is incentive enough for him to relinquish.
Out in the street beyond the curtains, seagulls mark their temporary territory. The flying gulls offer their characteristic cry, rising and receding as they move between the terraced houses. Once settled on a rooftop another call, this time an insistent “Ugg, ugg, ugg!” signals their presence.
Rubbing the beginnings of my beard again for comfort – without, this time, eliciting the image of a match - I switch the bike lamp off and place it on top of the small pile of autobiographies I keep on my side of the bed – guilty primers for a lived life.
A gentle rain has begun to fall, rustling through the early Summer leaves of the tree outside our window and tapping on the car roofs below. Another, smaller, but unidentifiable bird can be heard, a brighter refrain. Perhaps a starling? A blackbird? The bird song almost, but not quite, repeated, melodic variation withheld and then unexpectedly given. The window frames rattle percussively in response to the growing breeze.
Behind the sleeping family and the gulls and the birds and the gentle rain, traffic noise is now discernible. Not yet in the focused form of a vehicle in our street but still there as an ambient backdrop of tires on wet tarmac and ill-defined engine murmur.
I am conscious now of my own breath, a sharp release through my nostrils. Conscious too, suddenly, of the sounds of my body’s movement in the bed, of legs drawn up then extended against the sheets, of my hair brushing against the pillow and my nails scratching the skin of my upper arms, of the cartilage in my finger joints as I snap them through a nervous routine. Listening below those surface sounds, a persistent hum emerges at the threshold of audibility; it seems to come from somewhere inside. Maybe it is nothing more than the fridge downstairs or maybe it’s an acoustic illusion born of excessive attentiveness combined with that special fatigue that is the privilege of those who should be asleep. Whatever its source, I try to grasp it and discern more of its shape and colour.
Before I can capture the elusive drone, I become aware of another noise - this time one that is unambiguously internal – the noise of my thoughts. This is not just the sound of nouns and verbs shadowing in distinct then indistinct ways what might have been spoken aloud; that is what happens when we are thinking as Wittgenstein might have said.
My thoughts now, with the bike lamp back on and my wife’s snoring much gentler. My thoughts, as I write then pause, write, then pause, my thoughts also consist of fuzzy renditions of associated ideas. Forms of what has once been heard but as might emerge from a turntable whose stylus has accumulated a little coat of fluff. The start of the match scrape; the wet ripple above the fish and a child’s voice to the left; the thump of a snowball against my taxi in Berlin; the rush of water beneath a manhole cover and reverberation through a guttering pipe.
My brain too active to let me lie any longer, I switch off the bike lamp and return it to the floor. I swing my legs out from under the duvet and rise unsteadily to my feet, one hand holds the pencil and paper, the other probes the beginning of a spot at the corner of my mouth. I creep out of the bedroom like the worst actor portraying the worst burglar.
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As Marshall McLuhan once observed, there are no earlids. For the vast majority of human beings, there is no escaping the external sound world, even when asleep. Yet although complete escape is not an option, retreat remains a possibility, a possibility that seems everywhere to be readily grasped. The enduring derogation of sound in stubbornly visual cultures can be traced across a number of indices, too many to be captured in this short post. As one brief measure of sound’s marginalisation, it is worth conducting a concentrated listening experiment like the one described above, if only to compare your discoveries to the soundscapes conventionally represented in film and to hear what was once rich, dynamic and engaging rendered banal.
Another dimension that emerges from such experiments is the extent to which a significant proportion of the soundworld we inhabit cannot be located externally. Sound-proofed windows and walls, ear-plugs and active noise reduction systems can muffle the sounds from ‘outside’; cranked-up headphones or stereos speakers may replace certain exterior sounds with others that have the values of having been chosen and being predictable. None of these systems, however, can drown out the sounds from within. The sounds of metaphor and association played through that dirty turntable I mentioned – the match scrape, the fish plop, the Berlin snowball, the gurgling pipes. That inner voice articulated by Wittgenstein and Burroughs in the block quotes at the start of this post is also, I believe, a consistent contributor to our personal soundtrack. And finally, in this clamour, there are those mysterious hums and whines of obscure origin that emerge, paradoxically, both in moments, of relaxation and of enervation.
Just as there are no earlids, nor are there brainlids.
Nada Brahma: all the world is sound.
—
Angus Carlyle
you can listen to the soundscape for this essay here: no ear lids sound file mp3
This looks like an interesting project in relation to your blog, Angus. I’m sure you know about it…?
“Recycled Soundscape is designed as a system through which to explore and engage with auditory aspects of experience in the city, and to provide the possibliity of relief, through sound and relational design, from the prevailing and often stressful urban flow.
The result is an interactive system for the public orchestration of an urban sound ecology. It consists of a set of kinetic, human-scale interfaces which seek to create diversions and concentrations of attention within the sonic context of a location, by facilitating reflective activity in the public sphere, in the course of which an acoustic landscape may be augmented, modified, and performed. It offers the possibility to listen to and to record noises - human, natural, machine - which are otherwise difficult to take notice of, and which nonetheless contribute to the characteristic of a place over time, composing its evolving memory in sound.”
/Katy 10/07/2005