Audio Art - Oliveros and Listening Excerises
Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros
This article was like smorgasbord of ideas about listening and sound. Sometimes I wondered not what Oliveros was talking about but if there was anything that she wasn't about. I did like her description and instructions for “Compassion” at the end of the piece. That seemed like a very interesting exercise. My eyebrows also went up when she mentioned that the probe NASA sent to Mars only carried a $15 hearing aid module. That was startling and disappointing. I would like to hear what it sounds like on Mars. Lastly, I wasn’t too sure about her idea that babies are the best listeners. However, I think I did develop a very good ability to listen when I was very young. I’ve known for a long time that I have an excellent memory for music. I only need to hear a piece once to recognize it and twice to memorize it. But what I’ve come to understand lately is that I don’t have an excellent musical memory, I have an excellent memory for sound. I figured this out when I realized that I never forget the sound of a person’s voice.
Listen Far
I went out on my terrace in the late afternoon and stood there for about five minutes. Most of the sounds I heard were very common to the inner city: cars, car horns, sirens, church bells, people talking and/or yelling and an occasional birdcall. The one sound that I heard several times which seemed the farthest away was that of a passing airplane. One plane, an airliner, I saw flying over ahead. However, there was another sound that I thought came from a jet that I couldn’t find in the sky. The rumbling tone seemed to fade in and out for a while. I couldn’t tell if that was due to the echoes off the buildings or perhaps the wind. Unlike the sound I normally hear from low flying jets that I can spot, there was no Doppler Affect with this noise as the pitch remained mostly constant.
Listen Close
The object I chose to listen to was a small, metallic hand-held analog quartz clock. Every time the seconds hand moves, the clock emits a click. After listening for several minutes, I suddenly realized that the tone of each click seemed to differ. The tone seemed to oscillate back and forth between a higher pitch and a lower pitch. The two pitches seemed to always be the same although I wasn’t positive of that. However, when I decided to pick the clock up and hold it to my ear, something very interesting happened. The oscillating tones seemed to be the same at first, but then after a few seconds it seemed like one of the tones, the lower one, disappeared and all of the clicks were the same high tone. That led me to wonder whether there were ever two tones in the first place or weather the oscillation was just something my ear and/or mind had made up.