Every cognitive absence contains the presence of our mind; rushing floodwaters of thought gush into our awareness whenever a vacuum prevails. Sounds illustrate the social world of me and you. While the bucolic sound of silence contains a certain valour, most everything that we humans enjoy emits some sort of, if you will, auditory odour. We say much in many ways and the mark we make often is in the way we say what we say.
Society abounds with spectacle, with booms that transcend local regions of the culture industry; changes seep through across the board as times and values evolve. Sporting stadiums are one such arena where combined noise literally can move the earth. In Seattle, the roar of football fans registers on the Richter scale—but only when the team is winning. At rock concerts amplified music combines with cheering fans to produce a raucous harmony with results ranging from swooning fandoms to the notorious bowel-movement-inducing brown note. Young fans in the throes of ecstasy have induced a purge-oriented response by concerned parents since even before Elvis Presley gyrated his pelvis in a manner that would make even the most immodest twerker blush on the dance floor.
What we say in essays or conversation depends on how we proverbially read the room; a faculty of understanding one’s audience is crucial to a successful project of self expression. To make our voices heard by a desired audience, to get though to someone, be it a professor or a friend, we must learn how to make the right sort of discursive noise – that which tinkles its way into their being – making music to their ears rather than dog piddle on their conceptual kitchen floor. Throwing the whole kitchen sink of self into a concept will simply confuse matters; like the sound of a single item of silverware clanging to the linoleum, or a mic drop moment so cherished by the TikTok realm, the idea behind meaningful sound lies in its thematic intent and cultural resonance.
A half century ago, in Chile, Sylvester Allende, a leftist demagogue with a silver tongue and a fistful of ideals, faced an uprising of urban mothers furious at the exorbitant cost of basic foodstuffs. Rather than quietly, in the manner of Marianismo as opposed to Machismo, rolling their tortillas and working on their capacity to endure, these ladies began wagging their tongues at one another and hatching a revolutionary plan. The brave mujeras took their kvetching to the streets. Each day they banged puts and pans out their windows in unison in outrage and shortly thereafter a coup occurred – with mixed results. This protest is in the Latin world known as a “cacerolazo”, and is crucial in the Hollywood classic film Suddenly, Last Summer, when a tourist behaving badly is to receive his comeuppance. “Since then, cacerolazos have taken place in numerous countries in South America, most notably in the 1980s when people protested the numerous dictatorial regimes that covered the continent.”
Sound familiar? During the heady and scary heyday of COVID-19, when anytime a person woke up and couldn’t smell the coffee right away they suspected themselves of having come down with the plague, and when suddenly there were a million excuses not to visit Grandma in the old folks home, millions of us gathered at our windows or crowded onto our apartment decks to, you know it, bang pots and pans as a thank you to the front line health care workers. These workers were being overwhelmed by an influx of a few hypochondriacs and, tragically, a true onslaught of folks sick with a serious virus. And as surely as a bat hangs upside down to sleep and is shortly laid low by ground-based predators if it deigns to tarry on the topsoil for too long (cue: David Attenborough’s voice) this worldwide appreciation outburst occurred for many months each evening at 7PM local time.
And so, with a flourish, the COVID-19 racket entered the history books as an instance of a cacerolazos of people who, told to stay inside if not be quiet, proverbially went to town on utilizing the civil rights skills still on offer. We can’t put a price on moral support, unless it’s in lieu of funds or brains. Herein lies the crux of protestation: it only matters if it has a meaning that others can hear. Otherwise someone can be accused merely of protesting to excess (as the phrase goes, thou doth protesteth too much). Much ado about nothing, like the boy who cried wolf or an earnest activist eager to glom onto the next big moral outrage, adds up to a whole lot of zilch, and is often intellectually bankrupt to boot!
Literal sound’s context, meanwhile, belies the intersectionality implicit in a social science understanding of human issues and their expression. From the terrifying roar of a lion to the insistent squall of a landline left off the hook, sounds contain a lot of anthropology and demography. To most of us, both these sounds are antiquated and irrelevant to our daily lives, but not so in the Kalahari Desert or to a geriatric. Sounds matter, then, if and only when placed onto a cultural pastiche of meaning. And that meaning is personal. Far from a universal language, most sounds mean different things to different people. A buzzing chainsaw, for instance, can, to denizens of hipster coffeeshops, imply the destruction of imagined forests of yore that they ponder as they wander with their prairie gopher sized dogs along paved park pathways. Or that same two-stroke engine racket can bring back loving memories of childhood Saturday afternoons out hunting and gathering firewood, that crucial component of a classic Canadian winter lifestyle. Further yet, chainsaw noise to an artist can bring to mind halcyon nights in a ventilated garage, carving away some masterpiece such as a nude and woody Michaelangelo’s David, all while wearing chaps to protect from any buzzing intrusions into her femoral artery. Only our imagination, and some would say the rock-hard laws of good taste, can limit what a given sound means to them. Just as some folks enjoy a burned hot dog, some people even like hearing nails on a chalkboard!
Sound and meaning are like the conjoined heartbeats of humanity, yet it’s the mind rather than the mouth that transcends both by giving them a purpose. We best bear sound’s purposes in mind in our academic lives because, just as the sound of one hand clapping is a concept deployed with sarcastic tenor, we perpetually run the risk as scholars of distance education repute, of merely droning on and on and on and on. So, hey, if you’ve read this far then I guess my voice in your head was more than an ignoble buzzing noise! In actual fact, though, many a time a meme-sized statement will suffice for us to be heard: maybe more lecturers should deliver their sessions in press release form?