The reading I am responding to is “Field Recordings Centered Composition Practices” by John Levack Drever. What fascinates me about this reading is the different ways in which sound and audio are transplanted and understood in different cultures and time periods around the world. We certainly take sound to be a constant for us in our culture and I think it’s easy to assume that it is thought of in the same way by everyone, which this reading is quick to point out is not the case.
It reminds me a lot of the Oliver Sacks book “The Island of the Colorblind” in which a Micronesian island is made up of roughly 1/3 colorblind people. The way that they interact with their environment is fundamentally different from the way that others do because that proportion is so high, but because they are so separated from the rest of the world, this is seen as normal to them. I can imagine this also being the case for sound in certain circumstances. Of course there will always be music in cultures and while I know that is kind of out of the purview of this class in regards to “sound,” I think that that also can be seen as an extension of the human voice.
The human voice is one of the defining characteristics that differentiates all humans from one another, and is a very personal way to express ourselves sonically. I remember seeing the documentary “32 Sounds” by the filmmaker Sam Green in which he called recordings of human voices a kind of resurrection of the dead, not unlike the first photographs. However, whereas photographs are able to freeze a particular moment in time, audio recordings are linear and can replay the past in real-time. I wonder what the first people to hear back a recording of their own voice felt like, since that seems like somehow an even more astounding and arresting experience than seeing a photo of yourself for the first time.