The Awakened Ear

I have been composing, performing, and recording music most of my life at this point. I have studied and practised sound design now for a decade and a half, give or take. I was both lucky and unlucky to have been born with extraordinary ears. My ears are billion-dollar ears and I don't feel bad admitting that to the world.

There's just so much that one doesn't hear in life. Either one never took the time to hear it, to listen to it, to observe and study it, or else one was even unluckier than I and was born without hearing, or has suffered ear damage. I have protected my ears and continue to do so on a moment-to-moment basis, and I have pushed my brain to the extremes of perception, to the point of making myself veritably seasick.

One should never experiment with hearing in this way. I am a professional, I studied computer-assisted sound design and the recording arts at a fine institution. I had teachers and guides, administrators, personnel, who had worked in the music industry for 30 years or more. I have been composing, performing, and recording music now for over 20 years.

This is no laughing matter, your ears are not a toy to be played with. Neither is your brain a toy. But I have studied the human ear and hearing, as well as language, harmony, the psychophysics of sound phenomena, music and noise, and I have always taken good care of my ears. The general rule is simple: If your ears receive more than 1 hour per week of sound at 80 dB or more, then you will suffer permanent damage to your hearing. I am proud to say that after 36 years on this earth, my hearing is almost entirely intact. I basically have the same capacities, the same faculties, that I was born with.

Granted, sounds near to 20,000 Hz are very faint, more than faint, I hardly hear them at all, but I perceive them nonetheless. They are still perceptible, it is just a little more difficult than it was, say, 35 years ago. However, I have developed many more abilities. Frequency is not the only feature of mechanical waves and possibly one of the least interesting when it comes down to it, to me at least.

Surely you have held a seashell to one of your ears and observed the sound it made. It has maybe even been explained to you how that works, how you apparently hear the ocean. They have told you that the rushing sound is the ambient noise resonating in the cavity of the shell and so forth. They maybe even told you that this can be done with any resonant cavity such as your cupped hands or whatnot.

I'm sure they told you how it was that the sound resembled the sound of the ocean. The thing is, it really isn't doing much, the seashell. It is more or less acting as a filter, filtering other sounds, modulating them if you will. What I am sure they haven't told you is that you don't need a seashell to hear such things. If you listen carefully, you will hear the sound of blood flowing through your body, and other such sounds, coming from the inside.

One can hear one's own muscles, for instance. We ourselves are essentially one big resonating chamber. If you listen carefully, you can not only hear your heart beating from the inside, but you can hear the blood flow, you can hear the pressure itself, exactly the way a cardiologist or doctor might hear it with the use of some technical medium or medical equipment.

If you listen carefully, when you are walking, you can hear your footsteps from the outside and then feel the vibrations from the inside. Your feet are communicating with your brain in this way through seismic communication. The heart actually mixes with and modulates the mechanical vibrations from your feet hitting the ground.

Try putting your fingers in your ears sometime, or to be safe, use proper equipment, such as earplugs. For this experiment, I have found soft earplugs to be best because they block the canal, that is they close off the opening of the canal. However, it's always better never to put anything in your ears. You can just block them by pressing down softly on the Tragus of each ear. This will close off the opening and allow you to test your hearing with the canal closed off.

What do you hear? If you're lucky, you'll hear the blood flowing, your lungs, your heart, your muscles perhaps. Try speaking. In any case, I cannot recommend that people begin experimenting with their ears and auditory systems in this way, I can only say that I have done it and have learned a great deal about the human ear and hearing in general. It taught me about sound too, in general, and mechanical energy also in general.

In any case, I will be sharing some of these experiences over the next year or so. Please stay tuned, as they say. :)
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