creation is soundful. (r. murray schafer)

{this is a calico cat that lives a few houses down, who likes visiting us & sleeping on our porch. his meow is very plaintive & sweet & yowly.}

I have been thinking a lot lately about sound, & how we remember sounds, how we store aural memories. Not so much the process of how we remember the things we hear, the songs or facts or stories, but how we recall the quality of sound, its texture, resonance. How we conjure up the particular tone of someone’s voice, the sound of wind moving through lodgepole pine trees, the scratchy squawk of magpies in the morning – how we remember the details of the soundscapes we inhabit.

I was having a nap this afternoon & was awakened quite definitively by a bagpipe medley, coming from the church across the street. Bagpipes have the timbre of geese (in a good way, not a dying-goose-in-pain way), make me think of the sound of water moving over rocks & grasses, makes me think of the sound that sunlight would make when it shines on green pine trees, or makes long november-ish shadows over wheat & dead grasses. So I lay in my bed & listened to the streams of music, hoping it was a wedding, not a funeral. & indeed it was a wedding, because when the bagpipes ceased, there was a small roar of cheering, the sound of an old car’s motor sputtering & vrooming, & then the sound of a garland of tin cans banging & clattering over the warm asphalt.

& I thought about how the visual is more valued in our culture – Bryna wrote a super-excellent paper on gendered sound, the visual vs. the oral/aural, which discusses (among many things) the celebration of the visual, the visual primacy so omnipresent in western industrialized societies. This is no better exhibited in the way we take so many pictures – that photographs are the way in which we preserve memories of any important event. (That there is so much advertising based around this – photo albums as ‘memory books’, ‘preserving your memories’, etc).

The wedding participants & guests will undoubtedly have taken many photographs. They will remember the wedding attire, the light coming through the stained glass in the church, the old turquoise car with the shiny cans glinting in the sun. But how well will they remember the clank of the cans, the tremulous slide of the notes in the bagpipe melodies?

I suppose now many people do make audiovisual recordings of events, where together both elements are important. However, I would still argue for a favouring of the visual, because it is much rarer to have a solely audio recording of such things.

Audio recordings (that are non-musical) sometimes don’t go over so well with the general public sometimes. (Poor audio-(w)hereabouts!) But I still believe that they are essential & incredibly important, and evocative in ways that the visual masks. When I listen to Bryna’s recording of her family’s Easter dinner, when I listen to the recording we made skiing in the woods – you pay attention to so much more without the visual. It’s easy to be distracted by what we see. Different elements emerge, become salient – things like voice quality, little movements & fidgets around a table, & the precise layers of sound, train whistles, frosty breathing, the crunchy squeak of snow beneath ski & its changing tone moving over the dips of the trail.

Bryna is about to start on a writing project with an audio component, where she will incorporate found sounds with sound clips & text that she will read. I am so excited to have our neighbourhood, places we know documented. I think this is very, very important – to create these records, to document & highlight the sounds around... like R. Murray Schafer did with his soundscapes and soundmarks –

Because I worry about losing sounds, forgetting them. I don’t think it’s that our visual memory is inherently stronger than our aural memory, but I think we do tend to develop it more in this visually-prime society, & we have such a plethora of visual aids to help us, like our photos & such. This is unlike a society such as that of the Kaluli (see Stephen Feld’s very good book, Sound and Sentiment) – where sound is the focal point of everything.

To think of forgetting the sound of my grandma’s voice makes me inexpressibly sad. Her voice is such an integral part of who she is – it carried her kindness, her humour, her weariness, her wisdom. I am so glad that I have those four little songs I have recorded us singing, so I can always remember. I probably won’t forget the songs themselves, I can’t even really imagine forgetting her voice – but it’s nice to know that I can even put them in my new-fangled technology like my mp3 player & carry them around in my pocket & have her voice singing to me kazalo divchatko, or sumno meni sumno, anytime I like.