What's In a Sound?
Or, Sound as the Catalyst for Imagination
This morning, I sat on my back porch couch meditating.
This is a habit I’ve cultivated, and I do it most mornings, outside if weather and mosquitos permit. Sometimes I get a profound sense of oneness with the universe. It’s euphoric. Sometimes, I can’t stop making to-do lists in my head or my thoughts wander into standard life worries and won’t let go. Even when those few minutes don’t produce bliss and wonder, I remind myself, it’s called a meditation “practice” for a reason; the point is the process.
Often, with my eyes closed and the feel of the Earth all around me, I notice the sounds. From our current little plot on the planet, I hear…
a variety of birdsong
the buzz of hummingbird wings
the white noise of far off traffic
the rumble of a lawn mower
the bark of a dog several houses over
Today, I also heard the drone of a commercial jet overhead…
And I thought about what that very simple, consistent whooshing sound told me. Up there in the sky, in a metal tube with engines, wings, and windows, was a flight crew — captain, co-captain, flight attendants, all in uniform. Passengers sat packed into cloth-covered seats with luggage packed beneath them and in overhead compartments. I could easily visualize it in my mind.
The passengers were reading, watching movies, pretending to sleep. Some of them were excited to go on an adventure or vacation or to see old friends. Some were traveling out of duty with a sense of reluctance. Some were on their way home and relieved to reunite with their families, dogs, and familiar home space, while others dreaded it, resisting the end of vacation fantasy.
I knew everything that had happened leading up to that moment — baggage loading, the walk down the jetway, people shoving things into overhead compartments, apologizing for bumping into one another in the cramped space, settling into their seats and ignoring the “in case of emergency” speech. I could picture their future with equal certainty. Flight attendants preparing them for landing — tray tables, seat backs, trash, electronic devices, and the impatience everyone would feel as they waited to extricate themselves from the hunched over space and shuffle down the aisle toward freedom.
All of that from that one sound.
And these are things I can tell you with 99.9 percent certainty. They are not stories I’ve made up but knowledge accumulated in my brain from flying hundreds of times. All of that knowledge is tagged in my brain storage as “the sound of a jet.”
Sound seems to me somehow more primal than sight, more of a raw material thing than the rest of our senses. Our eyes go through a complex process to feed our brains images of the world around us, and they even have a blind spot the brain guesses at to fill in. In this way, sight seems less reliable than sound.
Deriving so much from one sound felt very poetic and insightful (pun always intended) to me, but as much as I am an artist, I am also an analyst, so of course, I couldn’t let it lie. I had to look it up.
I did some research on how our senses developed.
According to BBC Science Focus, eyes predate ears in evolution by at least 40 million years. (Apparently my bias toward my own hypothesis isn’t working for me in the research department.) In a different article, the BBC shoots more holes in my assertion about sound as more primal:
[Of all the senses], hearing in air came last, because sound waves are weak compared to electromagnetic waves such as light, and require specialised structures to amplify the signal, especially for high frequencies.
Dammit, BBC.
But AI says, “Sound (or the ability to perceive vibrations) is generally considered an older sense than sight. The ability to detect vibrations predates the evolution of eyes in many organisms.”
Hmm, maybe the issue is how you define the ability to detect sound. Does sensing vibration qualify as hearing?
I went a little further down the internet rabbit hole, including some compelling pontification on Quora, and concluded the answer to “In what order did our senses evolve” is…
It’s complicated.
The question is not a straightforward as it seems.
I’ll stop there. Analysis rabbit holes often get in the way of my poetry, as a delve into the minutia and leave the larger picture in my wake.
What is the larger picture here?
What does it mean, this small revelation that I can pack a gargantuan amount of knowledge, ideas, manifestations and constructs into a common sound on a Saturday morning in the backyard?
However you want to argue the evolutionary nature of the senses, maybe what struck me is how unconfined sound can be. Because a sound is a simple representation, I am compelled to take the mental journey and consider all it represents. Sight is confining; it limits us to the flatness of vision, to the illusion of objective representation.
“Seeing is believing.” We view sight as the sense that confirms reality. It’s even in our language, as the verb that I naturally used in the last sentence is synonym for “see.” To see, our language reveals, is to truly understand something. That is our belief, as humans.
“Do you see the light?” - religious revelation
“I see” in response to something complex being explained to you.
We trust our sight more than any other sense, and in that, it is limiting. Once we see something, we no longer question it. “I SAW it,” is considered an unequivocal confirmation of existence. And then we move on. But hearing, sound, we question. We wonder, we investigate further, even if that only means rummaging in our vast mental stores of information.
When I close my eyes in the backyard and deprive myself of ocular input, I more fully experience my other senses, especially sound. Hopefully, I can carry that with me outside of meditation as well. With my eyes open, I mean.
I wouldn’t throw away the ability to see with my eyes and deprive myself of the colors of wildflowers or the familiar sight of my loved one’s faces. But I would embrace my other senses more fully. That is where imagination can create wonderful things — inventions, ideas, and stories that make our world such an interesting place to live.
My hearing is really good, sometimes too good. Whar do you think about the sense of smell. It too, can bring a flood of thoughts. I used to take different things for the kids to smell, then write a journal about what it made them think about. Fun.
As someone who has very poor vision, albeit correctable , I feel it has helped me develop my other senses, especially my hearing. I think I would rather be blind than deaf if I had a choice and had to pick one.