Open Ears by Murray Schafer

This article seemed much more tangible than the other articles I have read about sound and music. Schafer begins his piece by documenting the ringing of church bells, and the significances that go with it. On one hand, the bells were meant for God to know when the monks recited prayers. The bells also served to keep the regimen of the monastery and everyone who lived within that Christian society. Schafer writes, “When the authority of Christianity weakened, church bells grew fewer (pg.260).” Similarly, a people’s political state has a great relationship with their music at the time.
Schafer documented the Ear of Dionysius as the prototype for all future developments in acoustic surveillance.
Schafer’s analysis the “inner voice” was of great interest to me. It is so true that “The steady development of consciousness and rational thought has transformed the inner voice into a symptom of psychic disorder (pg.263).” Rationalism and so-called “modernism” has muffled the rich treasury of imaginary voices. Television has played a huge role in causing people to think less.
Even the small exercise of imagining different sounds (a fish jumping out of water, a woman weeping) helped me focus better on the rest of my chores for the day.
Although we are all physically condemned to listen, we shut our ears to almost everything. The number of things we ignore or refuse to listen to outnumber the things that we do listen to.