How to Listen

I love music. I mean I REALLY love music. So does Dash. So do a lot of you I imagine. Maybe we share some favorites, or maybe you listen to everything I do not. Either way, music's great.

Now, how about the act of listening itself? I don't think about it much, I just hit play and enjoy. I know that sound is actually just vibrations moving through the air and into our ears and that different frequencies determine if we can hear something or not. Like dog whistles and stuff.

Evelyn Glennie is a percussionist, a really good one too. She's also apparently the first full-time, solo percussionist in 20th century western society. - Wikipedia. She's won a bunch of awards for her music and playing. She's also profoundly deaf, I'll let the lady herself explain what that means:

Profound deafness covers a wide range of symptoms, although it is commonly taken to mean that the quality of the sound heard is not sufficient to be able to understand the spoken word from sound alone. With no other sound interfering, I can usually hear someone speaking although I cannot understand them without the additional input of lip-reading. In my case the amount of volume is reduced compared with normal hearing but more importantly the quality of the sound is very poor. For instance when a phone rings I hear a kind of crackle. However, it is a distinctive type of crackle that I associate with a phone so I know when the phone rings. This is basically the same as how normally hearing people detect a phone, the phone has a distinctive type of ring which we associate with a phone.

Now I know what some of you are thinking, "A deaf percussionist?! IMPOSSIBLE." But she does it somehow! So what does this mean? Sure she can, hear and detect what a phone ringing is, but music is full of creativity and rhythm and all sorts of stuff and you have to be able to distinctly hear everything right? Well, maybe "hearing" isn't just something you do with your ears.

She gave a wonderful and insightful demonstration/lecture and I really must implore EVERYONE to watch it, if you're at all like me, you will be thoroughly amazed.



Her wikipedia article.

An essay she wrote about hearing.

-James

Now playing: Klaus Nomi - Cold Song

PS she's really pretty and her accent is super cute and I want to marry her.