// Blog //
We seemingly will happily describe a view, a meal, or a holiday in great detail, but without any reference to sound, to think of it, how many activities in life do we talk about focusing on the sound? And yet, if we look carefully, there is a substantial body of material where people do talk about sound, usually in the form of ‘noise’. You’ll find it on the endless scroll of social media.
am always teaching that sound is immediate, it enters our being before we can prepare, before thought can form a perceptual shield against it. From the time we are in the womb, before ‘King Sight’ (Walter Murch in Chion’s Audio Vision) has taken over we are learning and understanding about the our world through it, and then when we born, our existence in the world is to be immersed in it, pulled into relations that we do not choose but cannot escape. Unlike sight, a sense which allows for distance and framing, sound insists on intimacy, it places us inside the world and ourselves. Ever since, just over 50 years ago, R. Murray Schafer tried to “tune the world” and formalised the notion of ‘soundscape’ and thus soundscape studies which has lead increasing formalisation within the frameworks of academia and now government legislation (for example in the Noise and Soundscape Plan for Wales 2023-2028).
