As the years go on and as science and research advances, we’re learning more and more about how animals are able to use sound and vibrations to effectively communicate with each other. Elephants, for example, can communicate through seismic vibrations felt through the pads of their feet.
So what do we know about the nature of sound? How has it defined who we are and how we live? What role does it play in the lives of hearing individuals, deaf individuals, and everyone in between?
In his book Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being author Lawrence Kramer writes that “sound is an agent of transformation.” Throughout human history, “sound is one of the fundamental phenomena that links us to the sense of inhabiting and sharing a world.” Of all the human senses, contrary to what we might think, sound is “a uniquely empowered form of sensory experience that links us to our lives and our being more intimately than sight does.”
“Sound is always inside us as well as outside us, and heightened experiences of sound really take that vibratory presence and amplify it so that our most intense experiences of sound are really whole body experiences.”
Composer and music professor Lawrence Kramer, pictured here, says “ if you're looking for a nice definition of music, music is a way of making meaning out of raw sound. [This is] what music fundamentally is” We take sound, we compose with it, bring it together, and it becomes this extraordinarily powerful and meaningful element of virtually every known human culture.” Photo courtesy of Lawrence Kramer
In his book “Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being” author Lawrence Kramer says “ too much sound gives people this anxiety, which was associated at the time with modernity. You have this way in which the auditory world becomes a very powerful shaping force in individual psychology. Everybody should have the opportunity to experience some quiet — which is not soundlessness — it's just sound in an optimized way.”
Carolyn Korsmeyer, research professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo and author of several books including, Making Sense of Taste; Food and Philosophy explains why there’s so much more to taste than flavor. “Taste,” Korsmeyer says, “deserves greater respect and attention.” In addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in the human experience.
“One of the prejudices against taste is that it's all in your mouth,” Korsmeyer shares. “It's only about the flavor that is happening in your taste buds right now. But it is usually outer-directed as well. I am not just tasting, I'm tasting a strawberry. I'm not just drinking, I'm drinking a Coca-Cola — or a beer, or a glass of wine, [etc.] So taste, people think of it as being entirely subjective. By that, I think they mean it's just yours, but it really isn't.”
She also talks about the evocative nature of the human touch. Korsmeyer argues that touch, along with being psychologically beneficial, can offer a deeper and perhaps even spiritual connection. “When you are in the presence of something very old, or very special, or [something] that belonged to someone whom you have an attachment to and you touch it, you are, in a sense, feeling that age. That specialness, that person … There's a proximity and an intimacy that touch permits that I think is often overlooked.”
Carolyn Korsmeyer, pictured here, talks about a hierarchy within the senses: “With touch and taste, certainly you're aware of your body interacting with something. When the body is involved, you start thinking about desire, pleasure, gluttony, sexual appetite, and things that many perspectives would consider to be morally dangerous.”
“Making Sense of Taste; Food and Philosophy” by Carolyn Korsmeyer
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