Summary
Day and night, sounds define and schedule our lives. A bird singing outside a window in the early summer morning heralds dawn. A peal of church bells alerts us that a wedding is in progress, while a tolling bell warns of death. And in some communities, such as the Florida settlement Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote about in her Cross Creek, being able to hear a far-off train whistle means rain is on the way.
In all those cases, sound, whether produced by a living creature or a manufactured object, is a cue for attention, movement, or emotion. Steve Feld discusses two examples of this -- specifically, how sounds produced by birds and bells thousands of miles apart can produce strikingly similar actions or events. The occasion is his lecture "Sonic Time, From New Guinea Rainforest Birds to European Bells" at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 8, in Tipton Hall on the College of Santa Fe campus. Feld's talk is presented by the Acoustic Ecology Institute.See the full content of this document
Extract
Birds and Bells in Time and Space
Feld, a composer and ethnomusicologist, has studied the sound relationship between Papua New Guinea natives and their rain-forest home for a quarter of a century. He has found that certain...
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