Sound

Sound is the stream that takes acoustic experience as a primary object, not a decoration. The ear gets to a discrimination the eye cannot reach: it resolves differences of microseconds, it tracks the room, and it does most of this below conscious attention. Listening, trained, is one of the older and stranger contemplative practices.

The work under Sound includes acoustics in the engineering sense (how a room responds to a given excitation), psychoacoustics (how the auditory system constructs the percept the listener calls hearing), and the older craft of arrangement — placement, masking, the difference between density and clutter in a mix.

The position is that the contemporary listening environment is, in acoustical terms, malnourished. Most people spend their days inside small rectangular rooms with parallel walls, sealed against the outside, filled with broadband noise from machines and HVAC. A real listening practice starts with noticing this and proceeds, slowly, to choosing better environments — outdoors, rooms that have been treated, music that has been mastered with restraint.

The same discipline applies in reverse, when one is the source. To speak, to sing, to record: every choice is an acoustic claim about what the listener should be able to hear, and most of those claims are wrong. The training is to make fewer of them, and to make them well.