Clean Your Ears
The best way to increase your listening skills is to do some “ear cleaning.” Canadian environmentalist, composer, writer and educator R. Murray Schafer created ear cleaning exercises in the 1970s to help people get in touch with their audio environments and raise their awareness to the dangers of noise pollution. Today, there are many ear cleaning activities to get your ears tuned up and in tip-top shape!
Try some of these activities:
Make a List The Earplug Exercise Figure-Ground
Keynotes & Sound Marks Audio Perspectives
Can you hear the sounds of a Staten Island carnival? Juergen Berkessel. All rights reserved.
Exercise 1: Make a list of your five favorite sounds.
What are your five favorite sounds? Take your time thinking about this, and then write down your answer. Why are these five sounds your favorites? How do they affect your mood and energy level? What makes them rewarding or pleasurable to hear?
Exercise 2: Make a list of the five sounds you dislike the most.
What are your five least favorite sounds? Take your time thinking about this, too, and then write down your answer. Why do you dislike these sounds so much? How do they affect your mood and energy level? What makes them so unpleasant to hear?
Exercise 3: Make a list of five sounds you recall hearing today.
Try to remember five specific sounds you’ve heard today. What was your experience with these sounds? Why were they memorable? Are these the sounds you look forward to hearing tomorrow? Finally, did you find it difficult to remember the sounds you have heard today? If so, why do you think that is?
Can you hear Staten Island’s garden sounds? Photo by Nadine Cintula-Hill. All rights reserved.
- THE EARPLUG EXERCISE
Begin this exercise by taking a couple of minutes to listen to the sounds in your immediate environment and write down what you hear. Now take a set of earplugs—the spongy kind that expand in your ears—and insert them. Listen—yes, listen—for a full five minutes while writing down everything you hear with the earplugs in. Chances are the list will include your heartbeat, your breathing, and other internal or surface bodily sounds.
When you have completed your list, remove the earplugs. Does the audio environment around you sound especially vibrant? Do you notice sounds you did not hear before? Make a list of the sounds you hear and compare that list to the one you made at the very beginning of this exercise. How does your new awareness feel?
- FIGURE-GROUND
Just as landscapes do, soundscapes have figure-ground relationships. A figure-ground relationship “refers to a cognitive ability to separate elements based on contrast, that is, dark and light, black and white. This definition is expanded...to include abstract concepts such as melody/harmony...and positive/negative space.” (Wikipedia)
An audio figure-ground relationship can be demonstrated in the shout that bursts from the general hum of a crowd. Or in the fog horn that carries over a muted harbor. You can identify a sound figure through its intensity (acoustic power or energy), volume (loudness), pitch (the highness or lowness of a tone) and rhythm (the organization of sound in time). Yet, you can also cause any sound to become a figure, simply by turning your attention to it.
Exercise 1: Attention Shifting
Begin by noticing which sounds in your environment dominate the soundscape. Make a list of them. Now make a decision to listen to the less dominant sounds in your vicinity. Notice how your shift in attention moves each less dominant sound from the background to the foreground of the soundscape. Make a list of the sounds you have chosen to focus on. Then consider how your experience of the soundscape was altered simply by turning your focus from one sound to another.
Exercise 2: Audio Compositional Shift
Listen to changes in the sounds around you. Do these changes affect your perception of the soundscape? Write down your thoughts.
- KEYNOTES & SOUNDMARKS
The world of audio experiences can be thought of in visual or musical terms. For instance, R. Murray Schafer imagined the totality of an audio environment as a kind of musical composition. But he also saw audio environments as soundscapes, not unlike its visual counterpart, the landscape.
Keynotes: The Predominant Tonality
An environment’s audio composition has keynotes. In music the term, “keynote” refers to “the predominant tonality of a composition; and although a composition may modulate into other keys, it is always in reference to the predominant key of the work.” (R. M. Shafer, The Sounding City). The predominant tonality in most contemporary soundscapes is the hum of computers, refrigerators, and air conditioners, or the drone of traffic.
Soundmarks: Outstanding Signifiers
In a landscape one sees landmarks: those visible elements that become closely identified with a community or region. A local water fall, for instance. Or the white steeple of the oldest church in town. In a soundscape one hears soundmarks: “prominent sounds possessing properties of uniqueness, symbolic power, or other qualities that make them especially conspicuous or respectfully regarded.” (R. M. Shafer, The Sounding City). One of Staten Island’s most prominent soundmarks is the ferry horn.
Exercise 1: Public Space
Find an outdoor public space where you can sit quietly for a while. This might be a public park, a town green or an outdoor cafe. Listen to your surroundings for ten minutes; then write down the keynote sounds you hear. Now listen to your surroundings for another ten minutes. Write down the soundmarks you can hear.
Exercise 2: Private Place
Find twenty minutes to be alone in your home or apartment. Turn off the TV and radio. Close down your computer games, but not your computer. Put away your iPod and turn off your cell phone. Weather permitting, open the windows. Now move from room to room, sitting occassionally, and listen to the sounds around you. If it helps, close your eyes. Turn your attention to the sounds you hear inside and outside your home. Write down the keynote sounds you hear. Write down the soundmarks you hear.
When you have completed both exercises, think about your experiences and check your notes regarding keynotes and soundmarks. What were the differences in your audio experience of the public and private space? How did paying attention to keynotes and soundmarks affect your impression of each space? Regarding the soundmarks, did you gain any insight on which institutions dominate in your area? Regarding keynotes, did you discover the “predominant tonality” of each space?
What are the sounds of the Staten Island Rapid Transit? sphoto33. All rights reserved.
- AURAL PERSPECTIVE (Thanks to Gary Ferrington)
We have a unique ability to identify the location of things in relation to ourselves, within a given audio environment. We can accurately determine if someone or some thing is approaching or moving away from us. “People have a natural ability to isolate sounds in relationship to their approximate positions be those sounds behind, to the side, above, below, or in front of the head.” (Wenzel) If you’ve ever crossed a street without looking—or risen to meet an unseen train arriving in the station—you have experienced this.
Exercise 1: Distant Sound
Sound Source
Sit in a public park. For ten minutes, listen for sounds in the distance. Distant sounds are often unseen, yet in most cases you’ll be able to identify the source of the sound. If you cannot identify a sound’s source, what do you imagine it to be? How does knowing or not knowing its source affect your experience of it? Write down your thoughts.
Distant and Very Distant
Continue sitting—or begin walking through the park. Compare sounds you can hear block or two away to those sounds you can hear miles away. How do you know one sound is closer than the other? Does the relative proximity of the sounds affect the your audio experience of them? Write down your thoughts.
Distance Above and Below
Stand in a spot that elevates you above your surroundings: a hilltop, for instance, or an upper floor of a high-rise building. Listen for the sounds coming from far above and far below you: traffic sounds, street noise, construction sounds, cranes, helicopters, jets. Does the experience affect your perception of your body in space? Write down your thoughts.
Exercise 2: Intimate Sound
Look for an occasion that allows you to listen to intimate sounds. These sounds may be common—like the sound of wind rustling the leaves—or they may be rare, like the chirping of a single cicada sitting on your window sill. Intimate sounds may be close at hand or some distance away, and are often revealed in moments or spaces of reflection or rest. Certain spaces are designed to narrow and focus your sensory awareness—think of a botanic garden or a house of worship. Sit or walk througha space like this. Do you hear intimate sounds within the space? Can you hear intimate sounds outside it? Finally, take a few moments before sleeping and upon waking to tune in to intimate sounds that are nearby or some distance away.
Have you heard helicopters, like this one at Fort Wadsworth? Tom Turner. All rights reserved.
Exercise 3: Moving Sound
According to educator Gary Ferrington,“exploring sounds in motion adds to one's awareness of aural perspective. We hear sounds everyday which move across an auditory stage. Although sound is three dimensional it is the sound generated by moving objects, or the movement of the listener in relationship to a sound, that strengthens the perception of three dimensionality.... Recording one's observations of moving sounds (with audio recording equipment) is best done using a binaural microphone system if available. Upon playback, the sound is reproduced through a set of stereo headphones and gives the illusion of the original three dimensional world. The listener has an aural perspective in which sound moves in an acoustical space outside and around the head.”
Busy Street / Quiet Street
Begin your walk in a major urban area. Notice the way vehicles and people sound as they approach from directions outside your vison range. Can you tell how fast a person or a vehicle is moving before you see them? Can you distinguish a large vehicle from a small vehicle, a truck from a motorcycle? Now walk to a quiet neighborhood street. What is your audio experience of unseen vehicles and people? How is this experience different from the busy street experience, as it relates to sounds in motion? Write down your thoughts.
Under / Overpass
Stand under or on an overpass or bridge. Listen to the vehicles passing over or under you. What do you hear? Is there a pattern to the sounds of moving traffic? Are there multiple patterns and rhythms? Do these patterns and rhythms change? Note your findings.
Waterfront or Rail Line
With a friend or group of friends, take turns putting on a blindfold. With the blindfold on (and a friend close at hand to guide you), stand in a subway station, or on a railway platform, or near a rail line, beach, or waterfront. Listen to the train or maritime traffic in your vicinity for 15 minutes. How does the speed of a vehicle or vessel affect your ability to discern its movement through space? Is it easier to tell a vehicle is moving left to right and right to left, or toward and away from you? Can you sense when a vehicle is moving slowly or at greater speed? Take the blindfold off and write down your observations.
Ferrington, Gary (1994) Keep Your Ear-Lids Open, published in the Journal of Visual Literacy.
Wenzel, Elizabeth (1992) "Launching Sounds Into Space," published in Cyberarts: Exploring Art & Technology
Schafer, R. Murray (2005) The Sounding City, from “Sensing the City: Sensuous Explorations of the Urban Landscape"
