Quasi-Random Resources

This quasi-random resource list isn't meant to be comprehensive, even after it's further along, but rather is a place to share items that caught my curiosity, and might pay back your attention.

To start, here are three books that I've read in the last 12 months that struck me as particularly relevant to the Silences and Sounds theme:

Erling Kagge, Silence in the age of noise (2016)

This book offers a meditation on inner stillness from the perspective of an explorer. A few sample quotes:

• When I am out trekking across the Norwegian wilderness or in the Himalayas, I also come across facilities where visitors may experience silence. If you venture a bit farther away from them, you’ll find it is quieter still.
• Silence is about rediscovering, through pausing, the things that bring us joy.
• I find it unsatisfying to measure sound with a number chart. Silence is more of an idea. A notion. The silence around us may contain a lot, but the most interesting kind of silence is the one that lies within.

Eric Clarke, Ways of listening: an ecological approach to the perception of musical meaning (2005)

We hear things in the world, and we hear things in music; Clarke's insight is that the two processes are related in important ways. He wants us to think about the “awareness of musical meaning in music” during the listening act -- as distinct from meanings that come from thinking about it, reflecting it, imagining it, recalling it. I originally picked this one up for its discussion of Beethoven Op 132, but wound up drawn in by the approach that he took. Quotes:

• Perception must be understood as a relationship between environmentally available information and the capacities, sensitivities, and interests of a perceiver. (Note: Bathurst says more or less the same thing below, coming from the "perceiver" context!)
  

Bella Bathurst, Sound: a memoir of hearing lost and found (2017) 

This book is an interesting take on the experience of going deaf -- how it affects a person, what it means to NOT hear at critical moments, how loss of hearing is situated in our social lives and our internal narratives. As someone who's had a bout of catastrophic hearing disruption (yay for surgery), this book spoke to me. (Oh, look, a hearing-based metaphor). A couple of quotes:

• One of the benefits of deafness is that it teaches you a lot about acoustics. Pilots talk about air as a visible thing; its speed, its flow, the quirks and currents in a particular valley, the way the wind assumes a colour or mood. The same applies to sound and the way it’s shaped. Cold means more reverberance, hot means less. Although it’s warmer, city air is harder to hear than the air in the country. Snow softens sound though the cold in ice clarifies it. Out here, the air is cool, but the boat itself contains a series of different acoustic microclimates–the cockpit, the deck, the galley.
• True hearing edits all the time. Every second of every day it judges and discards, picking through what it understands to be significant and ignoring everything else. So sticking a small pair of amps in your ears might help a lot with the volume of what you hear, but it’ll do absolutely nothing for the sense.
• Sight gives you the world, but hearing gives you other people. It gives you your capacity to interact, to use the gift of language and contact, to be heard and understood in the world.

 Then there's all the scholarly stuff, but that's for a different day.