[PDF] Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred

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"In the sound of these foxes, if they were foxes, there was nearly as much joy, and less grief. There was. the frightening joy of hearing the world talk to ...
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Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred (ggl html) - by David Dunn, p95 in anthology The Book of Music & Nature

'In the sound of these foxes, if they were foxes, there was nearly as much joy, and less grief. for the listenener. for you. in *hearing* the sound, there was joy and grief. There was the frightening joy of hearing the world talk to itself, and the grief of incommunicability. yes. In that grief I am now as then, with the small yet absolute comfort of knowing that communication of such a thing is not only beyond possibility but irrelevant to it...' irrelevant to -? the thing, I think (not the possibility). and yes I think I know the irrelevance. but I d n know if it is a comfort. ~ part of the grief. it's irrelevant to the thing that the thing cannot be communicated.

In the conclusion to his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee describes the depth of
meaning and intelligence conveyed through the late night calls of two foxes. In his nine page
description of these calls he invokes archaic sentiments and a profound contradiction that humans
must have always felt. We hear in the world talking to itself a sense of otherness that simultaneously
mirrors our deepest sense of belonging. Agee compares the quality of laughter in these fox calls to the
genius of Mozart, 'at its angriest, cleanest, most masculine fire.' Somehow we have always intuited
that music is part of our reflection to reflection to? and from the non-human world. We hear the alien quality of the non-human in our music and the humanity of music in nature. hmm.

The following discussion is an attempt to wrestle with the "grief of incommunicabilty" that arises through our attempts to both hear and talk to the world. oh - good -

...the passage that I opened to that caught my eye was re vision emphasizing separation, distinction, colors, contours; and listening inseparability, relation. birdsong, wind, water.

Each of us is constructed as a miraculous community of systems that function together to form the coherent totality of a living thing capable of sensing the external world. Since that coherence is finite there are real limits on what we can sense. All of the sound we hear is only a fraction of all the vibrating going on in our universe. What we do hear is the result of a dance between the world and how we are made. In a real sense, we organize our reality out of this dance. Since this is true for all living things, and since each thing is made differently, each form of life hears a slightly different multiverse. Each species of insect, frog, bird and mammal listens to a distinct reality that arises from the constraints of how they are constructed.
When we look at the world, our sense of vision emphasizes the distinct boundaries between
phenomena. The forward focus of vision concentrates on the edges of things or on the details of color as they help us to define separate contours in space. We usually see things as one window frame of visual stimuli jumping to the next. The sounds that things make are often not so distinct and, in fact, the experience of listening is often one of perceiving the inseparability of phenomena. Think about the sound of ocean surf or the sound of wind in trees. While we often see something as distinct in its environment, we hear how it relates to other things.