Sounds

H.G. No I don’t think so. But there’s a huge sound when the ice breaks off when a glacier calves.

The ocean has enormous power as an entity which has agency, that decides. The word ocean is male in Portuguese. The Atlantic is never something that is a given, that can be taken for granted. Being in relation to it is always a fight. It performs its agency quite loudly. It is not a background. It is quite a force. You don’t fuck with it, you have to check it first, you cannot just go in. Boys would do it. They would play with it and its aggressiveness. They would go in and be smashed by the waves.

The encounter with the ocean brings about a silencing. A moment of stopping. You realize that you are surrounded by it and the vastness of the surrounding. It’s too loud.

Notably, in both Melville and Mansfield’s writing, the ocean and the sea actually speak (this might explain my desire to start spluttering and stammering to mimic certain watery sounds). The first voice one hears in Mansfield’s story is in fact the sea, in it she writes “Ah-Aah! sounded the sleepy sea”.

This is also true in life, as the sea and the ocean generate sounds that seem like words and phrases. It is really the case when one spends long periods of time listening to the waves and all the other variations of splashing, roaring, thrashing, whistling, spraying noises produced or accompanied by the ocean and the wind. Really the wind and the ocean go hand in hand.

Fantasies about the ocean are timeless – let me recall just one from 500 years ago, and that’s from Francois Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Throughout this book, there’s mention of many sea voyages to strange and far-flung islands. For instance, in the last part of the book during one such a sea voyage, the ships crew were, I quote: “Feasting and speechifying and telling nice little stories, Pantagruel suddenly jumped to his feet and took a look around him. ‘Can you hear something comrades?’ he asked. ‘I seem to hear people talking in the air. But I can’t see anything. Listen”.

After the crew are overcome with acute states of distress and fear from hearing these disembodied voices, the ship's captain provides an explanation to the source of such noises. He points out that they are sailing very near the edge of a frozen sea and that a year before in that very same spot there had been a bloody and wild sea battle where many men, women and children had been brutally killed. And accordingly, as he explains it, all the frightful noises of the battle had been frozen in the cold sea air and were now a year later beginning to thaw, and this was what Pantagruel and his comrades were now starting to hear.

Rabelais then provides a wonderful description of the crew grabbing handfuls of frozen voices and noises from the sea air and throwing them on the ship's deck, these frozen words he states, “looked like crystallized sweets of different colors”. And then the frozen words would melt as they were warmed by the hands of the crew and then could be heard fully but were all not understandable as they were of ‘a barbarous language’.

One beautiful exception to this incomprehensibility was when one frozen word melted and “made a noise like a chestnut that had been thrown on the embers without being pricked”. For it was assumed that this was the noise of a cannon shot during the battle. Rabelais then gives a phonetic rendition of the noises as they thaw: "Hin, hin, hin, hin his, tick. Tock, crack, brededin, brededac, frr, frrr, frrr, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, bou, tracc, tracc, trr, trr, trrr, trrrrr, trrrrrr, on, on, on, on, on, ouououououon, Gog, Magog and goodness knows what other barbarous sounds". This is in fact an onomatopoetic type sound poem based upon the blood curdling noises of a sea battle. Also, Rabelais has turned the sea and its extreme weather conditions into one giant recording device for transmitting sounds and voices across time itself.

Everything was magnified on the ocean, the waves, the tides, the rock pools, the cloudscapes, the acoustics, the invigorating flights of fantasy, etc.

There is a hippie colony near this beach and I once saw a naked woman park her baby in a stroller on the beach right in front of huge breaking waves. Then she went into the wild surf with the incredible undertow, leaving the baby to watch unattended. The view from the baby’s perspective must have been profoundly impressible and primordial, witnessing her mother disappearing into the massive waves with all the sounds of the breaking waves and wind raging around her. I was the only other person on the beach which was many kilometers long.

The experience of being on the ship, the sounds, smells, vibrations and all the amazing sensory elements that the ocean offered filtered through my state of illness and fever. This all delivered a series of very beautiful histrionic and poetic impressions. For instance, I remember sitting in a muddy paddock in British Samoa and watching through feverish eyes, and with the sound of the sea in the background, a local funeral party under some trees that included the slaughtering of a pig.

The experience of this place retouched on the magic that the ocean had for me when I was a child. To hear the sounds of the ocean was to be in the proximity of an old and familiar habitat. Kangaroos slept right beside the house in Woodgate which was spitting or spluttering distance from the ocean. We slept to the sounds of the breaking waves.

The experience of this place retouched on the magic that the ocean had for me when I was a child. To hear the sounds of the ocean was to be in the proximity of an old and familiar habitat. Kangaroos slept right beside the house in Woodgate which was spitting or spluttering distance from the ocean. We slept to the sounds of the breaking waves.

I was not using the binoculars to look at what was far away but they were blocking the physical reality instead. Because of the blackness within the binoculars. I could hear the sounds of their wings flapping It really felt as if I were amongst them.

A glacier might move at around 1 cm per minute. Within the sound of the legs rubbing against the floor, you might be able to hear a low rumble – the friction of the ice moving against stone, occasional thuds of blocks of ice hitting against each other and the occasional note singing out, ice scraping against ice.

Turn the paper on the other side. Filling the page as much as possible, draw an 8 on its side– the sign of Infinity. Do this continuously. You can choose the pace of Infinity. Increase the speed of your drawing or slow down according to how your hand and ears feel. You could do this infinite times. What’s the sound of your infinity?

Carefully move the microphone into the carafe. When you point the mic towards the water, feedback is produced. You can control its volume and pitch by moving the mic up and down. Try to keep the sound as steady as possible. Be careful not to push the microphone into the water.

Use your voice to produce a high-pitched sound with your soft pallet. Try a sound that's loud and penetrating, as laughing can sometimes be. It can be produced at different pitches and in different colors, shifting registers from a “hahahah” to a “heheheheh” or even a very high-pitched “hihihihih”. You can play with those different possibilities or repeat already used sounds. In case of multiple voices, relate your sound to those of the others.

Breathe in and out through your mouth. Gradually, start varying the intensity, duration and depth of your breath. Focus on its sound. You can experiment with the different possibilities of sounding. Breathe in sometimes quietly and others more loudly; sometimes breathing in with a hiss, for example. Or, initiate the breathing out with a more explosive “p”. You can experiment with the different possibilities. What does the sound of your breath remind you of? How does it compare to the sound of waves as they break on the shore?

Position yourself in front of a table.
Pour some sand on its surface.
Place your palms on the table surface.
Slowly start moving your hands in circles, moving the sand with you.
Focus on the sound this movement produces.
Try summoning the sound of a wave: start silently, building up to a loud turn (or visa versa).
Repeat as often as you want, adding variations to the hand movements, rhythm and sound qualities.