For the past few weeks I keep waking up and thinking about sounds. Usually, listening for birds trying, without looking at the clock, to gauge the time, a song comes into my head, or was already sounding and I become aware of it. I hear the song and if it is a popular or once popular song that appeals to me, I notice that part of that appeal is hearing it in the voice of the singer I have heard it in when it first took hold of me. If it is a hymn I hear a chorus of voices singing it, as for me hymns are best heard chorally.
Then I go and try to sing the song or the hymn, or I hum a few lines of a classical instrumental that I particularly like (sometimes I remember who composed it, and sometimes, to my disappointment, I don’t).
When I sing or hum, I wreck it. I do not like to hear my voice. My outloud voice does not do the music justice to my ears. So I stop and try to revive the professionally or chorally performed piece in my head.
Then I wish it to lull me back to sleep before my thoughts crush in and make so much noise and keep me awake way too long.
As I was typing the paragraph above I asked my memory to touch on a song the singing of which reached me. This is what came up. Dusty Springfield had a voice and a way of using her voice that you had to stop for and just listen. If you have not ever heard it, please do.
This predawn thinking of songs in my head, thus of sound, I moved on to “what is”. I won’t go far in this but have a couple of questions or observations that filtered through me. At first blush, sound is perceived through a “sense”–hearing. There are also the senses of seeing, touching, smelling, and tasting. These five senses express our physicality. They need to impact some facet of our body to be known. And yet, they can be experienced time and time again in our mind.
The very same physicality that I see, hear, touch, smell, taste, someone else can simultaneously, but not identically. And thus, that someone else’s experience is stored in that person’s mind differently than mine is in mine. In the case of Dusty Springfield singing The Look of Love–presumably her voice coming from her mouth, lungs, diaphragm, had the same timbre, pitch, audibility regardless of the listener. Why do we, each of us listening, not hear it the same at the moment of listening? And, in my mind’s memory and the other person’s mind’s memory, is her voice as I/you heard it, or is it as she sang it regardless of how our physical mechanisms’ hearing capacity stores it?
And the person, Dusty Springfield (who, sadly, died in 1999), were I or you ever once in her presence or simply saw a photograph–I only ever saw her on television or on album covers or in print, I would still have a visual of her. And I do. As, possibly, did you and now, once you look below, do you. Is the visual in my mind’s eye the same as yours? How will we ever know?
I know that witness’ statements can never be 100% accurate, because we are, essentially, plunk, standing in our own way–how we experience is always influenced by our own presence, the composition of our molecules, as well as our angle of perspective, health and well being at the moment, mood, past experiences,” etc. etc. etc”. (to quote Yule Brynner in “Anna and the King of Siam”). But the thing in my head that I have stored, that I can recall almost at will, simply by naming (another topic I have been thinking a lot about lately–naming!!)–is it also unique to me, or are your and my mental recall the same? I am pretty sure they are not the same. So, what is the reality of physicality?
And when I come upon someone face to face, do I only sensually perceive that person, or is my mind reshaping who I see even as I am present with that person, or being, or item. Does my physical experience define my perception of a moment? Well, we would probably say that mind influences physical perception, but how does mind maintain the being of that perception? Why does mind recall it when it does, often “out of the blue”? Why does it then slip away, usually unnoticed in its absence? Where does it go? Why can it sometimes be called back and sometimes not?
I believe I have made myself dizzy. I will now sit back and recall Dusty Springfield singing another of her songs–“Stay Awhile”. As a note, she sings sad songs with a voice that is not. You have to listen to the lyrics to know the song is sad. But even still, her voice brings me to a smile of delight.
Ah, it’s on.
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Just as a respite from my crowded questions:
whereIwonder&why 