This article is essentially a challenge to think about sound in a different way than we are raised and taught to think of it. The author initially compares sound to the sense of vision. He points out that the way we see the world is by differentiating different groups of colors, and then analyzing their arrangement in order to formulate the image of an object or landscape. If we try to do the same thing with sound, it can be difficult to distinguish where one sound ends and another begins, and often times the sounds overlap, creating a new sound. The author uses an airplane as an example: although all you can see is a tiny dot in the sky, what we hear is a “web of sound” that reverberates through the entire area.
Then the author brings up various philosophical questions about sound. What is the evolutionary purple of music? How can we differentiate between regular sound and music? Is music another system of metaphors used to describe the world, like a language? Obviously, these questions are not easy to answer. The one thing that is indisputably true is that sound plays an important role in connecting us to ourselves, to other beings, and to the rest of the world.
The author finishes with a description of his work. He talks about listening to mockingbirds after noticing them mimicking the sounds of monkeys from the San Diego Zoo. He also talks about his time studying the sounds of a pond and concluded that the sounds the pond makes is an essential property of the pond itself. And understanding the true causes of these sounds can never be fully grasped by the human mind.
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