At 4:36, she says, "When listening, there is a constant interplay with the perception of the moment, compared with remembered experience. Listening, or the interpretation of sound-waves then, is subject to time delays. Sometimes what is heard is interpreted anywhere from milliseconds to many years later, or never." 

While I listened to Oliveros' words, I thought of my mother. Throughout my life, I have often recalled my mother's voice in my head when she was not with me as clearly as if I were coming into the world and hearing her again for the first time. Taking in Oliveros’ words, I imagine my life-long listening practice through a new lens. What if the listening practice that I was born into and have cultivated throughout my life took the form of one long, continuous experience? 

If listening can be imagined as one long, continuous experience, my mother's voice has threaded longitudinally through the soundscape of my life, and my experience of her voice in that first moment I emerged from her womb has not ended yet. When do sound waves fade into nothingness, both in the memory and in the unseen physical world? Perhaps they never do. Toni Morrison said, “We die. (…) But we do language.” I’m thinking about her words in a new way now.

So, listening to the world inside of this three-day-old snow fort had me wondering a little bit more. I remembered hearing once that it is the air pockets that are created by the gradual falling of snow that make for that quieting, post-snowstorm sound we all recognize. Maybe gradual snowfall is different from a hand-crafted snow fort, but I wonder if the air pocket theory still applies in some way. What happens to the sounds outside and within the snow fort when the snow is packed hard, and has maybe melted a little bit? What did it sound like inside this fort when the snow was really fresh?

For this recording, I stood very still outside the snow fort, about 4 feet away from its opening.

This notion of an experience of listening being shaped and subjectively defined by a person’s history with similar sounds and their cultural understanding of each sound, particularly as such sounds are linked in a person’s mind to visual experiences, struck me. Last spring, I was living in Squamish, British Colombia as the pandemic began. I lived in the mountains and went hiking every day, and listening to the sounds of the forest was a meaningful aspect of that daily experience for me (in part because I had to be cautious of predatory wildlife, but mostly because I was just interested in listening). As the pandemic slowly began to shift my perception of the sounds around me- in a culture of avid joggers and dog walkers, similar to the culture that Voegelin writes about- I found myself thinking and frequently journaling about something that almost exactly echoes Voegelin’s words. “This birdsong is the same birdsong that I have heard before; my reaction to it is informed by my past experiences and cultural understanding of this sound. But I’m skittish on the trail around people now. Every hiker’s panting breath as they come up the mountain behind me is the same sound of every hiker’s breath that I have ever listened to before, and now the strangeness of this time is changing it. I’m in the middle of a cultural shift in perception of this kind of sound. I used to feel safe knowing there was another human breathing in the woods.” (Excerpt from my journal, sometime in early spring, 2020.)

Reading Voegelin’s work now, I’m curious to learn more about this “residue” of “earlier subjective generative appreciations of such sounds” that she describes. I can’t help but relate this to the pandemic. Different sounds that used to be comforting, such as the exhale of another human being in a quiet wild place, or simply ordinary and expected, like a siren in the streets of New York City, have become causes for reactions of skittishness, panic, and dread. What happens to us, as generators and observers of this changing culture, in this constantly generative soundscape?

How does this shift in the cultural perception of sounds like these affect our perception of ourselves, if we are a part of this soundscape of sirens and exhales: not quite such objective, separate listeners as we might think we are? Whether or not we understand ourselves to be intimate participants in the endlessly generative world of sound, I gather from Voegelin’s work, we are those participants; feeling the sirens pass through us as our understanding of the siren changes, and then, perhaps, however implicitly, our understanding of ourselves.

Knowing that I don’t hear all of the sounds that other creatures hear leads me to ask more questions of what other creatures' aural experiences might be like. I imagine what it would be like if I could readily listen to the sound of blueberries ripening, of my heart beating when I feel proud or sad, of wild roses closing for the evening. I think about the sounds that bats make- the kind that we listened to at the start of our class last week- and I wonder what it would be like to hear those sounds without recording them and slowing them down. 

I’ve been thinking about last week’s reading in comparison and connection to this one. As Voegelin points out the ways in which each person and their listening is inextricably connected to their participation in the generation of sounds in their soundscapes, so Oliveros’ work reminds me of the imminent interconnectedness of all beings. My understanding of Pauline Oliveros’ writing this week is that with this work, she is inviting readers to expand our understandings of what is worth listening to, or what we could at the very least imagine- or perhaps auralize- an experience of listening to. What does the newborn bird experience? What does the hungry bat? What might forests of trees need when it comes to their soundscapes in order to thrive? Every human has their own particular relationship to sound: we all have different voices, and different capacities for listening. Birders who use listening practices to identify species say that the same is true of birds. Oliveros calls my attention to another reality that exists whether or not I develop the capacity to tune into it: the humming, roaring, mumbling, singing aural experiences of other creatures, other inhabitants of this earth whose lives are interconnected with my own.

My compilation opens with a clip of quiet birdsong. For most people, I imagine that the verb “to wash” has an immediate, obvious connection to water: the sounds that come with water’s varying pressures: the gurgling, tinkling layers of sound that come from its smooth motion. Certain birds’ songs sound to me like bubbling streams of water, and their sounds “wash” over me in this way. This kind of birdsong, however, also invokes a different kind of aural “washing” for me, one that I thought about as I worked on this piece. When I listen to birds singing, I feel the emotional memory and imagination of springtime envelop my whole body, and in this response to birdsong, I experience a certain washing of my senses. A renewal, a rejuvenation, a relaxation towards the future. 

From the clips of bird songs, my compilation transitions into a recording of a stream, bubbling after a snowstorm. Then my compilation moves into the sound of a gutter’s harsh water flow following yesterday’s alternating freezing rain and quick snow melt. In this way, I wanted to direct listener attention to the different levels of intensity that the verb to wash can take: from the soft and hopeful birdsong to the busy, melodic stream, to the water in the gutter creating a loud, almost clattering symphony of sounds. In between clips of loud gutter water, I interjected clips of bird calls, hoping to connect and contrast the different kinds of washing that we can experience or imagine through sound. 

In my mind, washing is a verb that, when connected to sound, often invokes a certain sense of being enveloped. It carries a sense of calming, welcome overwhelm. Wind washes over me as I walk into the open field behind my friends’ home and I feel both renewed and held when I close my eyes and listen to its rhythms. I myself can be a vessel for and generator of wind and song, washing other, smaller things with my sounds. In the last part of this clip, I included a recording of my own exhale, whooshing air down into a brown glass jug where it resonated quietly back upward.

I thoroughly enjoyed this project; I want to continue to make sound compilations in relation to words throughout and beyond this course!

The first trend that I noticed was an association between lower noise levels and higher populations of Native American people (referred to as American Indians in this paper). I wonder what reasons there might be for that. I also wondered if there are negative implications to quietude in some places. In some ways, could it be quite negative for an area to have less car traffic and less accessible transportation? These are both generators of noise, yet also important parts of many peoples' daily working lives. I would like to discuss this in class.

The second trend that I saw was that anthropogenic noise levels were consistently about 2 decibels louder among urban block groups of (majority) Black residents than among urban block groups of (majority) white residents. (I noted this from Table 1, p. 5 of the reading.)

The third trend that I saw was that quietude tended to be a major indicator of affluence (and generally higher socio-economic status). I thought this was interesting. I also noted the passages in the paper that discussed the ways in which people with power who live in quieter area have the ability to dictate decisions that would affect the noise levels in their areas, and the way that that often means sending noise to other, less affluent areas. I thought that the correlation between the presence of influential regulatory offices and quietude, versus weaker citywide regulations on things like construction work and noisier nights, was also quite interesting.