My Symphony

The wind whistles through my apartment.

The toilet flushes in the apartment above mine followed by footsteps across their floor.

The sound of my keys typing, but right before each click, you hear the sounds of my fingers, skin, hitting the keys.

It’s raining.

The rain reaches under the porch and hits the concrete.

Voices from upstairs are faint.

My music is playing softly in the background.

The rain hitting the concrete sounds like bubbles popping when little kids try to catch them in their hands.

Chill.

The sound of skin rubbing on the back of the chair.

A car starts up, the motor is running, just as a song comes to an end on my playlist.

Now all you can hear is rain and the car motor with the clicking of my keys.

The rain hits the metal rain gutter outside in clip clops of sound.

The ceiling creaks.

People are walking upstairs again. Step step step step

Trumpet interlude.

Squeak of car tires, the a car is pulling in.

A huge amount of rain just landed on the plant outside and sounded like a mini rushing waterfall.

Thud.

Click.

Hand scratching the top of head.

Rubs eyes, the sound of skin on skin.

“Why is the window door open?!!”

Bag crunching closed, lands on table.

Book bag slides off of back, lands on the floor.

Hoodie comes off and is shaken out a few times getting farther and farther away.

Trumpet fades away.

Footsteps on the hard wood floor. Step step sliiide.

Paper is blown off the table by the wind, it’s like hearing a bird fly on a cool day, but so much closer to your reference of sound.

The rain alternates between hitting the concrete, the plants, and the metal raing pipe.

Clop Clop, wooosh, ting tin, clop, woosh, ting.

Toilet flushes adding to the sound of the rain.

A car drives by in the distance.

Woooossssh

Shuffle shuffle sliiiide.

More papper falls off the tables. A pen clanks to the ground. The rain and wind get harder

Wooosssh, clank clank, clanks,

Papers unfurled.

Phone beeps.

Click.

When you take the time to close your eyes and just listen, all of these new sounds pop out around you that you never would have heard before when you are just going through your everyday routines. This is what The Listening Book by W.A. Mathieu is all about. Stepping out of your everyday life to really hear what’s going on around you. That everything from the creak of a chair to the sounds of the words you are saying becomes music of their own, but when combined together, the sounds and music of the natural world around you become fascinating. After sitting down and writing my symphony of sounds, now, even just sitting here writing the rest of this paper, I’m hearing all these little sound that I might never have picked up before. How they interact and create music.

People almost always think of music in the traditional sense of the terms. Instruments, scores, and an ensemble or solo of some kind, but it’s so much more than that. What sounds are really coming from the instruments. Playing the piano, you can hear your skin and fingers hit the keys before the notes sounds and your fingers lifting of the keys have a unique sound of their own. Your foot pressing on the peddles with the soft clank in the background, especially on older pianos. All of these sounds are part of the music just as much as the strings being plucked inside of the piano to produce sound is.

The book goes on to describe what we feel like music should sound like, especially compared to what actually comes out. “There are no wrong notes” We can’t be limited to what we think music should sound like. If every noise that is created by nature is music, than when we fumble through something or “mess something up” it is still music and is therefore right. Free improve, improvised music without any rules beyond the logic or inclination of the musician involved. As musicians we need to think beyond our comfort zone, out of our personal bubble or box, into the world of things that make us squirm and uncomfortable. In retrospect however, you have to be willing to step out of that box and take it on like you are in a new comfort zone.

Every word that people say is music, if you listen closely enough, it’s just a string of sounds together to make what we call a “word”. Well, that word is music and we hear it every day. The book uses the example of saying slowly the word wind. After saying it several times slower and slower you hear every pitch and noise that each letter makes. To most ears, it’s just sounds like we’re saying the word really slowly, but when you listen closely, you hear so much more. The human voice is so intricate and the noises and sounds it can make seem to be endless. Behind even the voice is the body. Every step we take and move we make has some sort of noise associated with it that we don’t even notice. AS the author says, the human body is the first drum. A drum is just skin pulled over a hollowness, our bodies are skins pulled over the hollowness of our bodies and our human existence. Each place you touch, hit, caress, strike, feel, makes a different sound. Your feet beat out the drumming beat of your life as you walk. The air going in and out of your lungs is far from noiseless; you may just not notice it over the sounds of the rest of life. There are different inflections, languages, and sounds that the human body just naturally produces and is very beautiful music.

Music, sound, noise, it’s everywhere.