thoughts

Today I thought a lot about silence. And what it means to be silent and to have silence. In my experience, i think of a beat in theatre. It’s a pause placed somewhere in the script to give meaning to the words around it. Its as though by pausing at this point you’re saying something, or letting something sink in. I thought about this spatially, as an idea emanating from the person taking the beat like a wave of realisation expanding from their mouth, trailing the sound of the message.

I also talked to a friend of mine who is partially deaf. Potential complete silence! How do you describe sound to someone who knows only silence? Surely we can talk about it scientifically, and reason why someone cannot hear. But how does someone who doesn’t know sound think of sound in a city? I know that this is a primitive and patronising way to think of sound and people who are deaf - but i don;t know how it feels to be deaf.
My friend thought that there must be a way to transfer sound into something that deaf people can ‘hear’. She talked about transferring the meaning of something (a physical apple) into a description(saying an apple), and communicating this spatially through sign language. Would there be a way to communicate this apple spatially through another avenue?

I think I’d like to take the sounds of the city and transform them into something which is silent, but communicates sound.

sound art
speech database