A fuller appreciation of the sounds that surround us can transform your life
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that life without music would be a mistake. I agree, but I’d expand the frame to include a wide variety of other human and non-human sounds. For me, the world is often auraculous or “ear-marvellous” – full of noises, which, to cite Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “give delight and hurt not”.
Among my earliest memories as a small child is the sound, on a summer evening, of a peal of church bells echoing off the hillsides around the village in Hampshire where my grandparents lived. Over the years since then I have been intrigued by sounds of almost every kind – though I do exclude a few, such as some of those in the genre of music known as “noise”, which a friend says he finds soothing, but which I find about as welcome as putting my head in a buzzsaw.
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