Listening to silent sound

Seán Street, actor, writer, poet, broadcaster, and Britain's first Professor of Radio, is now retired from academia but vigorously writing, and attentively

Listening to Silent Sound

Seán Street, attentively...

I'm currently working on a book that sets out to explore the relationship between sound and our own selves; that's to say, I'm interested in how much we take our own personalised sonic response units with us throughout our lives, and what triggers these 'receivers' into likes and dislikes. It resembles jazz; we carry our own tune, while around us the world improvises, and at any given time, we may be working in unison, discord or harmony, while all the while extemporising and making new melody threads.

And the sounds to which we react can be in the imagination, often in text; in fact, I'd venture to suggest that the 'silent listening' we employ when we read is about as potent as any sound experience can be.

In May, 1819, John Keats wrote a poem which is as full of sound as any that came from his pen. Yet the key feature of the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', is the juxtaposition of silence and clamorous sound. It's a meditation on the embossed images of a Greek vase of unspecified origin, and The Ode was published anonymously in the journal, Annals of the Fine Arts in January, 1820, just a month before the onset of the poet's last illness.

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

          Thou foster-child of silence and slow time...

When it was first published, a comma was inserted after the word 'still'. In subsequent publications, this was removed. This is highly significant to the meaning of the poem, changing 'still' from an adjective to an adverb. The first meaning implies lack of movement, or more, complete absence of physical sound. The absence of the comma, implies that, as Andrew Motion wrote in his biography of Keats, 'the urn is only touched by damage or interpretation for the time being. Its days are numbered.' [Motion, 392] Now put the comma back:

Thou still, unravish'd bride of quietness...

The virginal quality of the vase remains intact, while its silence touches us with awe in the context of the noisy world in which we observe it. Keats, though, hears another world of sound as he observes the urn, one of pagan carousing and orgy:

            What men or gods are these? What maidens loth,

 What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

            What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

His mind is running his imaginative fingers over the braille of the embossed forms depicted on the vase, resulting in one of the noisiest poems he ever wrote. Yet it is all in the fancy, conjured by the brain from dumb witness. This, for the poet, makes the sounds all the clearer, all the more eloquent:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

             Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

            Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone...

 

This is the silent sound we create when we read, when we view a work of art, or indeed when we mentally interact with the world in general around us. The soundtrack is our own, a response to stimuli either spontaneously experienced or imposed subjectively by the chosen act of concentrated attention on words or images. In other words, we have the capacity to make sounds within our imagination, as well as interpret sounds heard externally.

Those sounds from outside us flood in without our control, enveloping internal silence and placing us in the world. A simple experiment demonstrates this; open your door or window for the first time in the morning with your eyes closed. The ambience of our immediate environment rushes into the head, and at once we know where we are, have a sense of the weather around us, and begin to identify required information that complements our other senses. It's as though inside us there has been a silence waiting to be filled, like a reservoir that the sound world 'tops up' as we engage with the sonic circumstances of where we are. In the case of the imaginative sound that is self-created (or rather created through interaction between the mind and an otherwise silent source – as with Keats's vase) we approach a deeply personalised area of our being, in which each of us may 'hear' something different, or at least a variant of the same sound, 'tuned' by our own imagination. Keats is reading the vase, as he might read a book. As Dylan Thomas in Under Milk Wood makes the connection between hearing and seeing, likewise we may reverse that to identify the link between seeing and hearing. Images, objects and words are a form of notation that may or may not produce a sonic response in the mind.

John Keats, attentively...