This is the second part of three sections that makeup my second assignment for IDEA 2900: Sound, Music, and the Creative Self, as taught by Charmaine Liu at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. It is a written reflection on your participation in the course’s first listening exercises. Through it you have the opportunity to comment, with considerable latitude, on the full range of experience with these activities, including what you expected or assumed would happen before engaging with them, what you experienced during the activities, and how your initial impressions may have been changed or challenged after they were completed. This last step is particularly important because it asks you also to summarize your observations and learnings.
Exercise 2: SORTING THE SOUNDS YOU HEARD
What I expect / assume will happen
I assume most of the sounds I heard will be technological in origin.
The sort
What I experienced
The experience of assigning descriptive words to identify the sounds I had heard felt straightforward. For example, the humming of the fridge was obviously technologically generated. The fridge was already plugged in and has been running for many years now. I didn’t have to do anything to make it hum. By contrast however, I did influence the sound my iPad’s keyboard made by manipulating it with my fingers that typed out what information I wanted to share with readers of this document. To my knowledge, the iPad’s keyboard cannot make any noise unless I use it.
With breathing, on the chart I noted it wasn’t something I could control, and we know that’s not true. I can control how long and deep a breath is, I can control the noise I make when I breathe in deeply and conversely, when I exhale deeply. I can hold my breath too, although eventually my brain will override this by making me try to breathe at some point. But generally, when we aren’t concentrating on controlling our breath, we don’t have to remember to breathe in and breathe out. It just happens. And it’s something we can hear if we quiet ourselves and the space around us by being present in the moment.
How my initial impressions may have been changed or challenged
My initial impression was that this would be a relatively easy exercise. But it wasn’t. In a more busy environment (such as in the food court of the Metrotown mall, or on the Vancouver sea wall on a sunny Saturday afternoon in July, or in a seat at Roger’s arena during a Canucks Hockey Game), this exercise would have been exceedingly more difficult to complete. It would have felt impossible to separate the sounds one heard, and to discern as to whether or not a sound was of a natural, human, or technological origin.
“Listening is receptivity.” —NATALIE GOLDBERG