learning to listen.

There have been two tasks that have popped up as a side adventure in training ourselves to comprehend noise, each time we have donned earplugs for a few minutes to allow us to hear a space with "new ears."

The first was a listening walk on wednesday:
the set task was to follow a defined route and descibe the sounds you encounter on the way. they had to be arranged in a way that could be interpreted in preformance. the whole aural plethora we subject our ears to is a major task to notate. with my notes scale mostly consisting of jolted scribles describing new things I could hear, when I heard them and when I stopped hearing them.

In stark contrast on the thursday we went into a lab at auckland university's archetecture department that was sound insulated, a cube soft inside walls floor ceiling covered with inward pointing wedges of foam designed to test the sound reflection/ absorbtion properties of objects and materials. we sat there suspended by a wire frame floor listening to the sound of silence in the dark. after a few minutes Phil turned on the lights and had a breif talk, its surprisingly hard to listen to someone without all the ambient noises and echos, probably like how people brought up with vinyl records miss the hiss and pops. in someways the interesting part of sound is the imperfections and little variances, its a odd experience being in a space where any noise is evident but the brain has trouble isolating it from the silence.