Weekly Response 1 — Listen to the World

I barely think about sound outside of the context of music. Maybe this is by necessity since our urban environment is so loud. The city soundscape is characterized by the collective sounds of different beings’ activities — link between sound and liveliness — the sound of lava reaching water is like the cries of earth being born. It moved me to recognize the formation of land as an ongoing process. I remember being a child and first hearing the riddle — If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? — and being frustrated by any insistence that a human must perceive it for it to be real. Using sound to gauge the health of an ecosystem, the sound of extinction is the absence of the collective community noise of lost habitats and denizens. Thinking about the sounds of many fish together, illusion of the individual evaporates when we acknowledge the multiplicities of non-human/more-than-human beings that make up bodies, and the symphony of vibrations contained in every body. Sounds outside our perception — New York rats speaking to each other, singing and laughing beyond our natural range of hearing. How much is communicated and sung around us that we cannot perceive? I listened to this portion this morning with my partner and we looked at each other in amazement at the croons and cries of our rat neighbors. Our dog’s eyes glazed over as his ears perked up and his nose began to work. I recall taking a walk with my dog the other day and noticing he was fixated on the smell of something under a car, a rat’s body so mangled and eviscerated it looked like the sloppy mound of cheese, tomato sauce and grease that slid off a pizza crust onto the train platform where I stood the other day. I wonder what the sound of rats mourning is like, and whether anyone mourned the rat under the car.