Outside, Within-- Pop and Other

Experience is pattern, vibration, vision, sound, and being.

Exposure to diverse musical styles and environments yields receptivity to perspectives beyond those of one's more familiar settings, offering contrasts to both popular and refined sounds with the exotic and obscure, while also inviting comparisons.

There is always more to hear, more to stir curiosity, and more to know.

Audible Emanations

As the perception of music is released from emotional attachments and culturally standard patterns, the auditory faculties may tend to increase in acuity, and the sounds of one's surroundings grow more interesting.

Clear the mind of preconceptions, bring sounds into juxtaposition and balance, and allow for the emergence of compositions that move in all directions, ultimately into their meaningful forms.

Hearing Time Dissolve

Listening, like memory, is selective.

Losing significance, some memories dissipate in fading impressions while others return with force of meaning; similarly, atmospheric sounds of seemingly no import dim to apparent silence in the course of everyday activity, unless sudden changes in volume or tone bring them to the attention.

Observe these minor auditory images and they are suggestive of the uncanny realities of dreaming.

Heightening

Social contexts favor culturally familiar musical forms, while personal environments tend to reflect the state of mind and mood of the listener.

Satellite radio channels, for instance, attract the particular interests of specific audiences, as clubs and coffee houses do their clientele.  Individual audio players, on the other hand, invariably contain highly personalized playlists.

Contemplative music and sound designs are distinctive in their appeal to both public and personal contexts.  Such works are essentially representative of serene and elevated perspectives, whether in conjunction with ceremony and ritual, artistic productions, or in simply enhancing the atmospheres of living spaces.

Narrative, Perspective, Echo

The sounds of nature and civilization encompass concrete auditory imagery; conceptual imagination postulates sound, music, and atmospheric aspects of this reality, and others.

Prehistoric imagination brought thunder to life through drumming, conjuring the rhythms of existence, and found ways to summon the sounds of wind in the reeds by the rivers.  Words came to be shaped in chants and exhortations.  Sounds deep and high, wide and ringing came within cultural expression, vibrations refined over time by human creativity and following the courses of human longing, myth and legend. Simple and sophisticated, crude and sublime, sounds form signs, signals, and symbols of perceptual reality.

Time past, time present, time future are within the inner ear.  Listen, and hear.

Conditions

Perception influences perspective.

Any set of circumstances that impacts society directly will be reflected in widespread culture.

With war and plague emerge the flagellants and the danse macabre; the advent of the printing press increases literacy, then captures and conveys the oral tradition, particularly the ballad form; elevation of reason brings forth a reaction in romanticism, as skepticism and scientific materialism challenge the status quo of faith.  Impressionism, aestheticism, decadence, cubism, abstract expressionism, and pop art follow.  T.S. Eliot expresses disintegration, first shoring the classical ruins with poetic fragments, and ultimately envisioning renewal of psyche and culture.

And as the Age of Empire brought about vast cultural diffusion, so contemporary technology provides for it today, as well as for the greater democratization of communication wrought first by the movable type press.

What comes next, even in modernist terms and the context of very recent history, is beyond what came before, and is already happening.

State of Mind and Sound Art

Ways of listening change with cultural, technological, and social developments.

As forces set in motion by historic ideas meet possibilities engaged in the moment now, so they are fulfilled in the cultural arts.

What the composer hears with the inner ear emerges into being within the atmosphere of the modern, connected world, and will come to influence perceptions in everyday life.