Sound of Silence and Sibilance

An early lesson in filmmaking is that an audience will forgive, ignore, or simply not notice when there's a mistake in the visual part of the film. The brain easily ignores mistakes in images. But audible mistakes, pops, hisses, volume spikes or drops, will always yank dreamy movie-goers out of whatever fantasy the director created and back into annoying reality.

The penchant that sound has for demanding absolute attention can be illustrated by running your nails down a chalkboard vs watching somebody do that without sound. Both suck, but which would you suffer if you had to suffer one or the other?

If you want to annoy somebody, over-sibilant your consonants like one of those poets you might have heard at a hip coffee house in the 80's (yeah, I'm that old).

I'd repeat an 80's poem, but you'd turn this off before I got to the second line. I never did read my own. Too scared.

More than a literary device, sibilance is a pain in the ear. And ears are important to people. Indeed, in a study a few years ago more people said they'd rather go blind than deaf.

Sound is, of course, physically intrusive. There are waves of particles entering your body through your ear hole, whether you like it or not. Your eyes, you can close those, but you've got to laboriously shut your ears with your hands to keep sound out.

And you've only got two hands for two ears, so then you're stuck like the hear-no-evil monkey until the sound stops.

Ears have vestigial muscles in them, auricular muscles that may have allowed our ancestors to move their ears, may even have made closing the ear with that flap toward the nose side of your head, called the Tragus, a possibility.

How great would that be? You could just shut your ear hole and tune out, man, while you kept at whatever your hands were doing.

We're inundated with noise. There's always a hum, a drip, a drop, or tick, or click going on. highways, buildings, people, whatever, it's all making noise.There's always noise. Even our breaks from it all are usually just retreats to some form of regimented sound--music, podcasts, audio books.

Audio book and podcast consumption is growing dramatically, even as print book sales also continue up, though print growth is at a much slower rate. Interesting to note that the brain discerns no difference between read and listened to books. Kind of sad, but true.

But, that's only for the word conceptualizing gray matter bits. You know how the lab folk need to reduce everything to study it. So the studies on books, audio vs read, are reduced to things like word conception, which gives us no data on the esoteric and beautiful moments one has while reading for real in the real world. Nothing beats the feel of paper or the rhythm of a turned page, in my book.

pa dumb dumb

Take that pun and stick in your study Western reductionist absolutist neuroscientists!

There are conflicting ideas about how to break up a dog fight. Some say you should scream, or yell, or grunt really loudly, that that will break the dog's process enough, confuse them enough, to get them apart. I've actually seen this work at a dog park. But then the flipside is that the dogs, already adrenaline fueled, may turn on the person making the noise and attack.

I was taught to dump water on the dogs when they fought, or spray it in the face of the dog that was obviously winning. Water always worked. I think the trick was to essentially waterboard the dog, get him to breath in some of it, and that would end the fight right there.

You learn a lot growing up in the country.

I knew a guy who had been an alternate to the Olympics in Kaju-gem-judo-furro-rate, or whatever. I really can't remember what it is. God, I sound like a racist. I'm going to have to ecosia it. gah. I looked it up. Taekwondo.

I asked him to attack me like he would in a taekwondo tournament, except without the actual hitting part. He moved really fast, but it was his scream that really threw me. I mean, my mind kind of shut and I suspect I looked like a stunned rabbit to him. The sound was so unexpected. It was pretty disconcerting.

I said 'ecosia it' instead of 'google it' because I despise all monopolies. Ecosia is a search engine that uses it's money to plant trees. When you use it the initial search results will seem quite different from what you're used to. That probably says more about the way google defines you than you define yourself.

The other thing I found out when I was trying to not be a racist was that Karate will be in the Olympics in 2020. Two types, Kata and Kumite. Kata are forms, or precise displays of a series of movements and poses. Think your hippie aunt's Tai Chi class but a little quicker and a little more deadly looking.

I tried a few karate classes when I got to college. At my first class the instructor told me to punch him as hard as I could in the stomach. Seriously. I think he was trying to prove to everybody how tough he was. So I hauled off and punched him like I'd been taught, from the hips, use your legs and back, and he screamed and gasped for a bit and then had to leave.

There is definitely an animal power to that kind of scream. I'm imaging that it signals meal time for a predator. Yeah, I don't think I'll be screaming to stop a dog fight now that i put these events together.

The last time I went to a karate class some dude followed me out afterwards because he wanted to show me his Kata--that series of forms. I politely watched but I was really embarrassed. It seems silly now as I look back at my mortified self thirty years ago. I should have been, I dunno, more generous with this guy who obviously spent a great deal of time on his karate. I realize now that it wasn't this guy doing his kata for me in front of passersby that embarrassed me, it was the silence.

Human movement without sound. That's something that will catch your breath.

The Olympians in the Kumite class of karate at the Tokyo Olympics won't have to suffer screaming like caught prey because they won't actually be hitting each other. They'll fight, but they're supposed to be in such great control that they can strike a fatal looking blow, but arrest it millimeters from the target organ or throat or primary sexual characteristic. I dunno. I kind of love that Japanese ethic of display over blood.

Of course, where's the sumo, folks? I mean, is there a more Japanese sport than sumo? Have you ever watched a full sumo basho, or tournament? And I mean, not just the actual battles but all the elaborate posturing and salt throwing that precedes a bout? It's fantastic.

First and most gorgeous is the Gyōji. That's the person in the elaborate kimono who waves a fan and makes all kinds of amazing sounds between and at the outset of matches. In other words, the referee. I know he would make much more sense if I understood Japanese, but really, you don't have to understand Japanese to understand what he's saying. Because the way he says it is so profoundly Japanese Gothic, no, that's not it. The way the Gyoji introduces the matches, though I'm not sure that's what their doing, but it's like Japanese music written by Wittgenstein.

If you don't get the reference look up Wittgenstein's house, it's the structural equivalent of German engineering meeting Japanese Aesthetic and then somehow, improbably, something beautifully alive comes out of it, but sad at the same time.

The word 'sad' drips too much. Beautifully alive, precise, with a minor third dinking away in another room, maybe that's a better description of Wittgenstein's house.

I worked in a performing arts theater in the summers of my youth. And I was privy to many rehearsals as I variously cleaned, fixed, and goofed off there.

I had the liberty to just sit in the house sometimes and so I'd often watch rehearsals, especially the local ballet dancers--hey, I was a teen boy in the days before toxic masculinity had been defined as toxic. So it would be just me in the back row, near the exit, in the dark, and a few people from the show somewhere near the front row who were resting and/or directing, and then whoever was on stage doing their thing.

One of the most powerful performances I've seen on stage I watched this way. Just me in the dark. It was dancers from Martha Graham's touring company rehearsing before a show. They were going through their movements in total silence. But it wasn't really silence. Even from the back row I could hear the sounds of their bodies, feet padding, the swish of cloth, their breath. When they stopped, posed at the end, I felt like I could hear their sweat droplets hitting the dance floor.

For a few months during one of my many 'run away, run away' life events, I found myself working at the PBS station in Lexington, Kentucky. I was the overnight guard. The only bloke in the place from midnight until six a.m. I had to walk the entire thing on the hour every hour to check for intruders, and the place was big. Big, and dark, and silent, with hallways and closets and a nightmare of a sound stage.

In my mind I even remember a skeleton in one of the offices. A friggin real skeleton.

The sound stage there is impressive and built to strangle sound and squash light. So walking into that huge room, black as black, weighted with the silence of the dead, always felt like stepping into a coffin. I shouldn't say 'always' because I only did it once, the first night I worked there.

I checked the other rooms less and less as the month passed and finally ended up just staying at the front desk the entire night. Nothing in that place was worth getting shot over anyway, let alone getting eaten by a demon for.

I used to think I'd like to see a ghost. At least if you really saw a ghost you'd know for sure that there was something more to this life than a temporary exchanging of chemicals in a somewhat self-aware state and then back to atoms in the void. I don't think that a ghost would need to make any sound to scare the shit out of you.

Sound always accompanies life. A silent ghost would be more frightening than one moaning at you because in total silence your ears would be begging for sound of any kind to make the apparition more lifelike.

Death is the only thing that's truly silent. If you've seen a body you know what stillness is. The same is true with life and sound, they are the same. Only death parts them. If you've seen a body you know what silence is, too.