A Penny for your Sound

Hello all!

Now I’m excited for this week…this is right down my alley. I think that if I’ve ever had a talent for anything it would be a talent for sound. What’s amazing is sound comes in so many different ways. I’ve always been able to play instruments generally from ear. This meaning that if I heard a song or rhythm and had an instrument on hand, and had a minute to familiarize myself with the instrument, I could generally replicate the sound. I mainly channeled this into piano playing because that was what I had as a kid, but I loved playing concussive instruments such as bongos, congos, and snare drums. What I loved about this was that I became emotionally invested in the music, or the sound, and it helped me through whatever I was going through at the time or gave me emotional release that I didn’t even know I needed. The sound made me feel.

The audio story “Moon Graffiti“, that I was mandated to read this week, made me think of this phenomenon. I’ll tell you what, I really enjoyed this. The story had an old-fashioned feel to it that I loved, and was very emotionally potent. The way in which the stories sound was designed put me right there in the helmets of those astronauts. I think that one of the ways that this was achieved was by the absence of excess sound. In todays society there is so much white noise. There’s so much going on and so many pictures. Listening to something such as this forces you to slow your mind down and let you listen to what you’re hearing, in order to paint a picture. This is exactly what Jad Abumrad from Radiolab said in “How radio creates empathy“. He said that as a radio speaker he narrates, telling a story but giving the listener the paintbrush to paint the picture themselves. I had never thought of this before but it is very accurate from my experience. I’m a big Audible guy, I listen to books all of the time during my commute and often when I’m at home doing yard work or something along those lines. Whenever I’m listening to these books I am constantly going through the process of creating pictures in my mind from what the narrator tells me with his or her words. Additonally Jad Abumrad refers to the different technologies that can be used in sound production, and I believe that this sort of technology contributed to making the environment found in “Moon Graffiti”.

 

Just Zaying…