THE ART OF LISTENING
By Contributing Editor Des Coulam. Recording the street sounds of Paris attempting to capture that gratuitous, never-ending show for which no ticket is needed
WHEN DID YOU last hear something indescribably beautiful? When did you last stop in the street and listen to the sounds around you?
In real life, we tend to listen to beautiful sounds and we hear the street sounds around us.
We hear instinctively and the only sounds that we really pay attention to in our everyday lives are the sounds we like, the ones that are necessary for us to function, and those that are essential to our safety.
But listening is not instinctive. It is a deliberate action—an art to be learned—requiring concentration, thought, analysis, and intellectual questioning. We seem to be gradually losing this art as a result of today’s noise pollution and the media obsession with twenty-second sound bites.
What I do in my street recordings is to create a sense of atmosphere and a sense of place through sound. The sound is a catalyst to unleash the listener’s imagination. So see what bubbles up in the two contrasting sequences recorded in Paris that I’ve included in this column. For the best effect, listen using headphones.
The first recording is from the annual summer jazz festival in La Défense, which I recorded in June this year. Listen to the Jazz festival at La Défense by clicking here.
The second recording is the sound of silence in the Church of Saint-Gervais in Paris. Listen to the silence at the Eglise Saint-Gervais by clicking here.
In his excellent book, The Soundscape – Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, R. Murray Schafer says: “Our task is to listen, analyse and make distinctions.”
That seems to say it all really.
Unless otherwise indicated, photos by Des Coulam.
Des Coulam writes and records the Soundlandscapes blog at www.soundlandscapes.wordpress.com
