"APOLLONIAN GASKET" | NATURAL SENSITIVITY & SOUND

NATURAL SENSITIVITY & SOUND

We shape the world and the world shapes us.

Drive your truck or car sometime up to a wilderness
boundary and road's end for a midsummer picnic.
Perhaps you're wearing shorts and a short-sleeved
shirt. Sitting in a grassy meadow, before long, your
body will be assaulted by any number of insect probings,
bites, attacks, and sundry hexapodic explorations.
What's remarkable about this, from the skin's point
of view, is our sensitivity. One little ant on a leg is
instantly noticed as we in a kind of knee-jerk reaction,
without thinking, move to swipe it off.

The skin's sensitivity as a sensing instrument of a
million eyes and ears is truly a remarkable thing.

One can argue that the ear's as sensing instrument is
no less sensitive. Except that, with the ear, the surface
of "its skin" is very much larger, covering easily an area
of 300 meters in diameter, expanding out in all directions
as a kind of sphere.

In the natural world, we can see that this circular
pattern of sensitivity is absolutely essential, a kind of
hyperalert eye for hearing in all directions at any time
of day or night, constantly monitoring every movement,
every change, every subtle difference, and every
potential friend or foe.

But what has happen to this same natural sensitivity
in not natural, but cultural soundspace? Notice that
when we bring a cultural artifact into the natural
soundscape, a single slam of a car door is very telling
indeed. In a natural context, the slamming door is a
shock that shoots right through your being to the bottom
of your soul. Instinctively, you contract to protect
yourself. And all it was was an everyday slam of the
door, happening thousands of times in any urban
soundscape. And yet, it reveals a kind of pristine and
marvelous sensitivity of the ear as instrument in just
the same way as a single ant reveals the sensitivity
of our skin.

Now, get back into that truck or car, and drive back
down to the urban soundscape where most of us live.
Here, we are surrounded by mechanical artifacts of
industrial culture. the key feature of the sounds and
noises that they produce is that it is entirely an unwanted
undesigned unconscious by-product of their use and
movement. It was never designed; it was never intended;
it was never planned. And yet, what are its consequences?
These thousands of slamming car doors and countless
other intrusive noises with which we have surrounded
ourselves? Especially for the still developing sensitivity
of the young. What have we become? How do we protect
ourselves, instinctively? It may very well be, that we
retreat within hard-boiled shells of insensitivity. What
other alternative do we have? That's bad. That's very
bad.

It has led to the ironic current situation in Western culture,
that, while our new digital technology is in some ways quite
sophisticated regarding sound, our ears—the real instrument
with which we perceive the result—have become in this
very general and important way, I would suggest, vastly
less sensitive. So much so that we are largely ignorant
of this very fact, in other words, we are insensitive to the
insensitivity, as if our body were crawling with ants, and
we did not even notice. At least not consciously. And we
must remember: This was never designed; it was never
intended; it was never planned. That's very bad, indeed.

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