Listening To The Noise

This was an article I wrote in 2014 for a magazine, the magazin where never printed...  

Seaphones by Enrique Muda

I rarely leave my home without headphones. Mind you, the pair I have is really special: it isolates the noise and surrounds me with pure sound. I have used headphones as long as I remember myself. In the start they were plugged into a walkman which always had a tape that I ‘d mixed. Now, I would not last long without a streaming service. Since I am wired like this almost all the time, I happen to listen to all kinds of music. The tunes vary a lot depending on the mood, circumstances, setting or surrounding.

Commuting in such loud isolation, I happened to notice that almost every fellow traveler has head or earphones on. Their earphones varied in color, size, type and brand (although I can proudly point out that so far I have not met anyone wearing the same pair as mine.) I assume that “wired” individuals, like myself, have a favorite playlist on with mostly one purpose - to mute the people around them, to enclose in their own environment and to substitute the city noise with a more coherent sound.

Yet, correct me if I am wrong, but it seems that the majority of headphone fans became deaf to the actual music they are listing to. There is no appreciation of art, no desire to hear the depth of the composition. A constant listener is most likely deaf to anything that music has to offer. Even though a lot has changed on the music scene over the last hundred years, it is still impossible to deny how righteous was A. Shopenhauer, when describing music as

"exceedingly fine art, its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself." (From The World as Will and Representation (cited in Musical Worlds: New Directions in the Philosophy of Music, Alperson: p.1).)

We have not lost the ability to understand the universal language of music, we simply stopped listening. In exactly the same manner as we stopped noticing nature changing with each coming season or the eyes color of our best friend. We still perceive, but we are not attentive. We are not looking for impressions.

Music became a background noise, while the surrounding noise just got substituted by music. Quite a dystopian image of the everyday, isn’t it? Though, there are those who are able to find inspiration in the very same surrounding noise that an average commuter is muting, and then include the sounds into musical pieces.

Sounds. They resonate in tunes, yet primarily still in lyrics. A careful listener to The Doors “The Cars Hiss By The Window” from L.A.Woman (1971) would hear that “The cars hiss by my window/ Like the waves down on the beach” indicate a transformation of an irritating, industrial hiss into a relaxing nature sound. Or as in the “City of Dreams” The Loft offers their sound impression of a foreign city: “the traffic’s stuck and a blind man’s begging/ While screaming ‘New York City I love you’” (2004).





But constant listener is hard to impress. Someone who digests between forty to fifty number per day is most likely already deaf to the lyrics. Besides, it is likely that music became a shortcut to an emotional moment or a possibility for a moment of nostalgia in the morning rush...

What if, instead of revoking the feeling of lost happiness that came along with the tune gets back to the actual listening? Begin to listen to the stormy weather. Later try to feel the power of a similar storm in the almost 12 minutes long “William Tell Overture” by Gioachino Rossini (1829).



In Ravel’s Miroirs: No 3, “Une Barque Sur L’Ocean” (1905) the impression created by the woodwind instruments portrays a bark, or even a mail boat , while the accompaniment strings transmit the image of sea breezes and twinkling lights in the water. As the music stops, the imaginary boat disappears behind the horizon.



The 1969 album by Black Sabbath opens with a distant church bell ringing; it is possible to hear the blowing wind and the rain. In the background there is thunder. All this cacophony is in full motion before the guitar sets in and the words roll out “What is that standing before me?” The album is considered to have started what is called a “heavier sound.” These strains of sounds reproduce a certain mood, working perfectly together leave the listener with an aftertaste of something dark and threatening.



Not always tunes are there to set the mood. Mike Oldfield in his Amarok from 1990 experimented with everyday objects: shoes, spoons, chairs, the sounds from a toy dog and even a Hoover vacuum cleaner, including afterwards the individually recorded rattle into a tune.



For the album “Infinity Pool” released in 2013 by When Saints Go Machine, Nikolaj Vonsild explains that they tried to encapsulate the absurd feeling of people who attempt to construct nature. The band started with a musical expression focusing exclusively on sounds from natural surroundings. The “Infinity Pool” became, on the other hand, a drastic cast into chaos and noise from the city environment.



I am convinced that it is worth to listen. After all, what is life but a big endless concert: it could start for you one day with the roar of a bus that has just left the stop and end with the almost silent hum from the air conditioner in a café. Go unplugged, switch of your device and listen.