Hearing parts that aren't there (was: Re: the function of some music)

[Greg House <ghunicycle@yahoo.com>]

--- Tim Nelson <psychle62@yahoo.com> wrote:

> Brian Eno's notes on one of his earliest
> ambient albums (Music for Airports, I think, but I
> don't have it in front of me) describe another
> important aspect of ambient music. Eno was in bed
> recovering from having been hit by a car, and a friend
> brought over an LP of some very quiet 17th century
> harp music, put the record on and left. After she had
> left, Eno realized that the volume on the stereo was
> set much too low, but was not feeling up to getting
> out of bed to fix it. As he listened to the record, he
> could only hear the loudest notes, and had a sort of
> epiphany regarding another way of listening to music
> in the context of ambient sounds. It wasn't that he
> wasn't listening attentively, but rather, the 'local
> soundscape' was an integral part of the listening
> experience.

Interesting, I'd never read that. But this happens to me periodically, in 
fact,
it's something I actively do to stoke my creativity. My car stereo has 
this nifty
"feature" of resetting the volume to some standard (very low) level when 
the car
is turned off. Some of the music I listen to is recorded at relatively low
volumes and at the stereo's "standard volume" I can't hear anything but the
loudest notes in the music above the noise floor of the engine and the 
road. 

What I find happening sometimes is that my mind starts filling in the 
pieces to
construct a more complete musical piece. But they're not the same pieces 
from the
original music! I hear new rhythms, new melodys, and textures that aren't 
there.
Just something my mind formulates while trying to make sense of the little 
bit of
music it's periodically hearing. 

It happened by accident the first time, and I was surprised to find a song 
I knew
well playing away when I raised the volume of the stereo...and kind of
disappointing, since I was enjoying what my mind was formulating on it's 
own. Now
I actively persue finding that magic volume, where I'm hearing enough 
information
for my mind to hear and start working over, but not so much that it starts
latching onto the original song. It doesn't hurt in this discovery that my 
car is
becoming a noisy bucket of bolts, so the noise floor is much higher then 
it used
to be.

Greg



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