We live in a soundful world. We are living sonic intimacies. Desire, sex , seduction and even violence has sonic elements. Our intimacies are mediated by sonic phenomena. Sound at best is therapeutic and at worst is psychedelic. Sound affects our conscious and unconscious. We do live a soundful life. Sounds is a way of knowing and being in the world. Sound and silence produce our life. The relationship between audibility and human life has to be critically understood. Sound has a capacity to influence us deeply .
Places that we live are inhabited by sounds. We can understand how they sound and resound. Our academic approach has been predominantly exhibited a visual bias. It is oculocentric. It has become a panopticon. We have become Oculus and have become deaf to the soundscapes around us. Our experience is multi-sensory and critical consideration of the sound is a big step forward. Awareness of the sonic world, will awaken our sonic sensibilities.
We also create sound and music. Our sound practices have important place is our life. Our writings such as poetry are soundful. Besides several musical scores and tracks we produce, our very speaking has music of its own. We live a soundful life. We have the ability to hear the sound of silence. We can hear the sound of democracy. We can hear the sound of politics or even medical practices or religious practices. Our socially constituted sense of self is produced not without soundful experience.
Sound can illumine us about mystery of our experience of time. Time is certainly not sound. But time is invented as sounds spreads out. We do have an aural knowledge of the flow of time and we measure it while we listen to the soundscapes around us. We align this individual aural experiences and collectively sense a past, present and a future. There is a time relations between our aural experiences and our sense of time. We are, therefore, beings in sound and time. The first sound that we experienced might have been the heartbeat of our mother. We live in a flow of time in a soundful world. Perhaps, we have to expands Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, to include, Being, Time and Sound.
We have the challenge to listen carefully to both natural and human made sounds. Such a careful listening to the soundscapes will enable us to understand how our desires are produced by the sensorium around us. Sound like vision also plays a vital role in the stirring of our desire. Studying how our desire is mediated by sounds will enable us to produce acoustemologies of hope that can able us to bring control over bad or evil desires. Auditory-cultures, sonic geographies do trigger our desire. In the good old days wars were fought while animating music was played in the background. Acoustic ecologies produces us and our desire. Several phonesthemes or sonemes come together to move our desire. By carefully listening to these phonesthemes, we shall be able to construct cartographies of our desire.
We love some sound very much. The sound of our name is very close to our heart. Listening to the sound of our name opens us to the world. Thus, different orders of sounds or sonemes trigger different desires in different people. Sound can take a profound affect over the brain. The Beethoven effect demonstrate the same. Ludwig Beethoven’s classical music is known to produce, cognitive, neurological and emotional effects on us humans. Sound and music can stir up emotions. It can calm us down and dispose us humans to deep cognition and concentration. Sound can stimulate our brain waves. Beethoven’s music induces alpha waves in our brain that aid metal health and stress reduction. Soundful experience open us to the world that is often beyond what eyes can do .
