Tag: philosophy

  • Echo and the Eye

    An echo is our own perception of a returning wave. Listening to it is hearing our own hearing happening somewhere, somewhen.

    Listening is a totally different process than recording a sound. If we use a mechanical device to record a wave and its echo (to separate ourselves from the observer’s point of view), we capture a pattern of the wave — an image. But there is no way to truly experience a sound or an echo without experiencing it in time. We may look at spectrograms, but it is the temporal unfolding that makes listening such a delicate tool for observing — lose your focus for a second, and you might miss it…

    Perhaps it is due to the speed of light and the biological structure of our eye that we tend to associate seeing with what happens right now. But from studying visual illusions, we also know that our mind is easily fooled. We might see movement in a still image or make wrong assumptions about the dimensions of the world. But the visual world does not echo in the same way as the sonorous world.

    Jean-Luc Nancy remarks in Listening: “Whereas visible or tactile presence occurs in a motionless ‘at the same time,’ sonorous presence is an essentially mobile ‘at the same time…’”

    For Nancy, listening is observing the internal resonance of a sound within us. To experience listening, we have to co-exist with the sound for its whole duration. A text or an image doesn’t impose a fixed timeline for our perception, although it may hint at one. But a sound, with its echoes, always has a strong temporal correlation. You can’t change the timing (tempo) of the sound without changing its properties; a sound is not as translatable as theoretical concepts — it is much more delicate than that.

  • Surfing at Cosmic Speeds

    Echo is a relational phenomenon, always relative to the observer.

    If we were to surf the soundwave at the same speed it moves, we wouldn’t hear it (theoretically, at least). There would be no return of the sound — only silence, unless we fell, and the wave would crash over us.

    Surfing the soundwave is surfing in complete silence. But surfing the lightwave is even crazier. Because light travels through space at maximum speed, from the point of view of the photon, there is no temporal shift between the moment it is emitted and the moment it arrives at its final destination. Everything it sees on its journey stands in absolute stillness.

    If a soundwave had a memory, it might see you as an echo on its journey — passing you by and returning to you a moment later (after reflecting off the wall). But light appears to exist in a completely still, omnitemporal world. It couldn’t have a memory because, from the perspective of the photon, everything from its birth to its death happens at the same time.

    This difference between the visual and auditory senses has been noted by philosophers such as Nancy, Husserl, Bergson, and Ihde, among others.

    In his book Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “The visual persists until its disappearance; the sonorous appears and fades away into its permanence.”

    And: “Listening takes place at the same time as the sonorous event, an arrangement that is clearly distinct from that of vision […] Visual presence is already there, available, before I see it, whereas sonorous presence arrives.”

    It would be easy to overlook this difference by attributing it solely to the biological differences between the eye and the ear, or by assuming it applies universally to all audio-visually sensitive lifeforms. But I believe there is deeper poetry at play here.

    The luminous world is capable of stillness because the speed of light allows it; the sonorous constantly fades in and fades out.

  • An Animated Wave

    An echo can be understood as a temporal shift in the soundwave. Our minds register the same soundwave returning to us, slightly altered by time and space. From the differences between the original and the time-shifted instances, we are able to read the material qualities of the space we are in. By listening to the echo, we gather information about the space around us and our position in it.

    The fading of the echo is caused by the energy loss of sound as it spreads through space. But while the wave loses energy as it travels, it also gains new information. A sound is not just a wave but also a record of its own journey through time and space. Sounds traverse time and space, but they do not just quietly fade away. They bump into obstacles, rush through materials, losing qualities and resolution, until a filtered, broken, mangled version is left — which, as the energy fades, finally transforms from a lively wave to total stillness.

    For the listener, the fading of energy and timbral changes in sounds are significant markers of their own existence. These changes on our timeline, like the tiny differences between film frames, are what animate our experience. We locate ourselves in time and space by listening to the change of the world.