The Tyranny of Soundscapes - An Ear for McLuhan

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Just been reading some McLuhan and came across this nice morsel ("probe"?):

"We simply are not equipped with earlids."

Nice comment on the phenomenology of sound. Implicit in this is that we have no choice when it comes to sound, in the same way that we might choose to shut ourselves out of the real world by closing our eyes. I like this comment for its pithy provocation.

Nothing to really say, but I think a brief discussion of McLuhan and sound might be interesting. Or not.

― Guymauve (Guymauve), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:21 (twenty-one years ago)

We have choices: walkmen/hearing aid

― Sébastien Chikara (Sébastien Chikara), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:25 (twenty-one years ago)

Yes, and we can usually leave. If a club is playing music too loud, I'm out the door; and then I go to The Audium.

http://www.audium.org/audium_1.jpg

― andy, Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:27 (twenty-one years ago)

But you're still immersed in sound. You can't turn it off the same way you can light. There is of course still an element of control, but the nature of our relationship with sound is one which is constant and irrepressible. In a culture like ours which is primarily visual/ocular, aurality is perhaps something we don't talk enough about.

― Guymauve (Guymauve), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:31 (twenty-one years ago)

And the Audium looks like damn good fun.

― Guymauve (Guymauve), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:32 (twenty-one years ago)

But I think the nature of the constant omnipresent sound makes the brain construct a series of filters - and we're able to unconciously wash out certain sounds. A child screaming we immediately hear, but the hum of a light fixture is tuned out, even if the sound level is the same. I think we do something similar visually. Our eyes might pass over thirty pairs of shoes in a store but we only notice that one pair...

― andy, Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:34 (twenty-one years ago)

Audium is great -- it's been the same piece for decades, but it is great

Schaefer took up McLuhan's idea in interesting ways

World Soundscape Project

R Murray Schaefer's The Tuning of the World

― (Jon L), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:39 (twenty-one years ago)

xpost

I think that has more to do with the Fletcher-Munson Curve.

I read this passage from a McLuhan book about a dentist that pasts white noise into the headphones of patients as an alternative to pain medication. That was pretty interesting.

― Dale the Panopticalist (cprek), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 18:40 (twenty-one years ago)

I thought this was going to be a thread about
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v296/WilliamCrump63/fripp2.jpg

― Rock Hardy (Rock Hardy), Tuesday, 24 August 2004 19:29 (twenty-one years ago)

five years pass...

tomorrow is shafer's birthday, and also the inaugural World Listening Day

http://www.worldlisteningproject.org/

― zvookster, Saturday, 17 July 2010 23:22 (fifteen years ago)

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