Lately, I am very interested in the cohesion between sound arts and the human body. In my essay for Contemporary Issues in Sound Arts module, I would like to expand on the way sound influence speech, listening, and human brain activity. I was always fascinated by how the human brain works and the depths we didn’t discover yet, especially in the context of multi-personal disorders. When one of the people created by our brain can speak fluently in a language we have never learned or generate personalities and characters we have never had, which is giving life to a completely new person inside our body. Nevertheless, I have never thought about combining the source of my interest with the field of my studies. Therefore I have decided to dedicate the current essay topic to dissolve around those two specifications. I will vocalize the therapeutic and harmful effects of sound, how it affects our body on mental and physical levels, the philosophical meaning of sound, and how our brain interprets it. I aim to investigate the art of sound not solely as commonly known music but also as silence and noise and reach the deepest nooks of the meaning of sound and its effect on the human body.
I would like to start with research on the existential level. I divide my work into disruptive and undisruptive sounds but what are “noise” and “silence”? Christoph Cox in his article called “Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious” disclose the nature of those two terms and their inseparable meaning in the universe. According to Cox noise is:
“…is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic… Background noise may well be the ground of our being.”
He contradicts the common statement that ” noise” is a secondary phenomenon and something disruptive. In reality, is necessary to distinguish signals from background noise, which allows us to notice and focus on what is important to us. Noise is not some linear accumulation of signals. Rather, noise is the set of sonic forces that are capable of entering into differential relations with one another in such a way that they surpass the threshold of audibility and become signals. John Cage was calling for a shift from music to background noise. “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise…When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating” he wrote in 1937. Noise is no longer merely one sound among many, a sound that we do not want to hear or cannot hear. It is the ground and the condition of possibility for every significant sound, as that from which all speech, music, and signal emerge. On the other hand, Cage equated ‘noise’ with ‘silence’; by the same token, he rejected the conventional conception of ‘silence’ as the absence of sound. His most famous piece “4’33” open our eyes to what silence’ is in his opinion, which we can perceive more or less such as the shuffling of feet, wind, rain, and the muttering of the audience but he also draws our attention to what remains out of earshot: the global field and flow of noise, which we perceive only obscurely. Christoph Cox says:
“Silence is the sound of the mill or waterfall, the perceptual back- ground that we no longer hear. But it is also the sound of the seashore, whose roar registers the inaudible intensive forces that produce it, a noumenal essence that we grasp without distinctly hearing it.”
Silence and noise despite being completely different are inseparable and essential for each other to be distinguished and noticed. Noise is not the only term for something disruptive and interfering, as well as silence, is not just an absence of sound. What’s more, they can have a deep and everlasting impact on the human body and mind. Therefore in the next paragraph, I will focus on the physical and mental effects sound has on us.
In everyday life situations, humans receive complex sounds which contribute to the way one perceives reality. Studies show an interconnection between the physics and psychology of hearing. Blowing of the wind, sea waves, and birds singing are more than audible sounds. They can interact with the emotions and mood of a human being and create feelings. Sound contributes to communication and conveys information with semantic and emotional elements.