11 - Stirrup Notes: Fragments on Listening
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2020
Summary
The stirrup transmits sound vibrations from the hammer and anvil to the oval window, a membrane-covered opening to the inner ear. It is the smallest and lightest named bone in the human body.
d[11.1]b
Auto pulse return lock slides synapse trucks walking along minor key in all sunlight withstands oscillating sync of life at pond morning. Each of every day given over to wasteful activity. Literally washing one's essence. Necessary redundancy. Spikes emerge from a dog day. White spindrift particular eats the soda. Winged messengers at full daze, throttling the wage scopes, the din submarine echoes.
Infant twister ducks slide the pop along walls, incognito hills and love mountains. If the sun the hills the cars the roads the lakes the cows: underwater ways a swift engine thrill. Groan in the concert hall. Bash clash and why write why produce, an insectoid burrowing activity.
Twist pry pull up kill eat compose and consume. Get comfortable. An unscripted body bloats and wilts. If you knew, you would not push for more cowbell. In the back room at the end of a dark forest a quiet secret human makes music.
d[11.2]b
Since I began recording soundscapes in the field, not only in ‘nature’ and not always ‘outdoors’, my instinct to switch on the radio or the hi-fi, or to put on headphones, to listen to pre-recorded material has dwindled. I often go for several days without listening to recordings of any kind, including the recordings I myself have made. Yet I rarely go for several days without pressing record on my digital pocket recorder. This inversion intrigues me. Has the ‘recording stance’ made me a better listener? And what do the recordings sound?
d[11.3]b
In the weave, the bee loud, list. Sound meshes promise of objects beyond self, of lives other than human. An illusion of materia primordia. There is no sound without event. Yet the nothing that is there is time, the space of a walk, the distance to and from a point of attention, a match from frequency to reception. Scale and granularity: the high frequencies are healing, says one recordist.
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- Information
- Writing the Field RecordingSound, Word, Environment, pp. 246 - 270Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018