On… Hearing

In this new series we look at each sense and how it links to our perception of art and reality — we start at home, with hearing.

Firstly. This isn’t going to be an image packed, Instagram friendly post.

Now just think about how you read that sentence.

The punctuation is deliberate. It’s almost…as if you can hear it.

There’s not many ways that we can really dull our hearing. You can close your eyes, hold your nose but your ears stay open. Perhaps it’s because of this it plays such an important part in our interaction with the world. It doesn’t just shape how we process music, or hear voices, it’s much more than that.

It’s also amazing that it possesses such value to humans despite being constantly bombarded by it. Noise is everywhere and even those places we hunt for their silence have a certain sound about them. Just like we filter out and ignore most of what our eyes see that we don’t think is important — we don’t listen to most things we hear.

And that’s the funny thing about hearing, because people so readily confuse it with listening.

This picture is an example of why listening is just so important. If you focus on it, take in the detail, then close your eyes you can almost expect what you think you will hear and what’s the first word that comes in your head to describe that? Nothing.

But it isn’t nothing, in-fact it’s quite the opposite of nothing. It’s everything. A thousand concurrent sounds that meld together to create a medley of that place and that time. The winds noise so so dependent on the way that it flows over the water and through the hills, the height of the trees and the thickness of the leaves.

The water didn’t just ripple, it pulsed, it’s not a uniform picture of a stone hitting the water and the gentle waves that come with it, it’s a violent shifting landscape covered in water which somehow manages to stay stable enough to look still.

And that’s why listening is so exciting and provokes such a visceral reaction — because it’s the most complicated and delicate way to interact with the world that you can isolate yourself in and similarly, you can use it to profoundly change your experience of the place as well.

There’s a naivety of recorded music that it takes the uniqueness out of the music — surely it’ll be replicated the same way everywhere? But again, it’s a lie. Everything from the speakers, the amount of people around you and just what mood you’re in changes your entire relationship with the sound.

Next time you hear. Stop and listen and you might be surprised with what you hear.