Noise, sound, music, speech, (silence) or not your ears can detect, that your brain, body, and emotions can react to. Even if an individual is very hard of hearing or deaf, their person's body often picks up and reacts to noises in the vicinity.
I appreciated our host Kate's contrasting her spouse growing up surrounded with layers of sound, whereas relative quiet or silence remains her preference. I'm one that definitely prefers not silence. I often try to explain how traffic, a nearby radio or TV, conversation next door, and similar help me concentrate. Is it because I grew up in the inner city? I don't know. And I do know that when I've gone camping or on retreat to a more rural or countrified (bucolic, maybe?) location, it takes about a day to get beyond my anxiety over the lack of external aural stimulation and begin to appreciate not necessarily complete silence, but sounds of a different quality and caliber.
To find illustrations I searched my computer with keywords noise, sound, and music. My header turned out to be from the church in San Luis Obispo we visited during July 2017 as one of the almost a dozen stops in the Reformation Roadtrip the ELCA judicatory sponsored to celebrate Reformation 500. What a day! I won't mention how early we got up on that Saturday morning to drive 200 miles up the coast from Los Angeles to SLO (because I don't remember. Otherwise I would).
My original snapshot was full color sRGB. Technically, the gradient map overlay added some noise to the photograph. Speaking of gradients, I'm still stuck in the era when printing gradients was risky because even with high end mechanical presses (think Heidelberg, but not the catechism), they'd often end up banded. Adding some noise such as 15% Gaussian blur often solved that. Besides, sometimes adding the noise of a Photoshop filter changes an image just enough to make it more interesting. Then there's shadows and highlights that I'd describe as a sophisticated, nondestructive subtly noisy version of brightness and contrast.
These image editing-enhancement digressions closely pair with our human desire – sometimes it's a real need – for some amount of ambient music, sound, noise or related to help settle our senses, often to help focus if we're doing a thoughtful activity that requires intellect and brain power.
What's your own home, work, recreational, or outdoors noise preference? Is it consistent, or does it vary?
This is a place of swirling noise
ReplyDeleteand full of ever-present play
as the canine girls and boys
enjoy where they have come to stay,
dashing now from room to room
as they make their zoomie rounds
and fragile treasures meet their doom
(Peanut weighs two hundred pounds!).
Is this Heaven's foretaste here?
Will we be like pups unchained
and running heedless, without fear
through Elysium unstained
to then fall tuckered out, asleep
in a happy doggy heap?
Your comment about the hard of hearing or deaf reacting physically to sounds in their vicinity is interesting. I think that shows noise impacts us more than we realize. Our family lives behind a school. Yesterday felt eerily quiet in our home. We knew something was missing, realized halfway through the day that it was the noise of children playing on the playground. Yesterday was a snow day. Most days we don't even realize we're hearing it, but when it's gone, we hear the silence. Thank you for your thoughts.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I never thought about those who are hard of hearing still being able to "hear" noise in the physical sense. My dad was hard of hearing and now that I think about it could still "hear" noise. I'm more of a quiet solitude kinda gal.
ReplyDeleteFMF #11