The Ghost Whose Breath I Can't Hear

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A fair warning, this blog post may trigger existential thoughts (but will provide you with plenty of insight on the struggle of living in my brain on a daily basis)! I live by one truth, and it is that there is not a single truth in this world, and yes maybe that statement is both dramatic and ironic but i believe in it greatly. Ackerman speaks on how sound is registered and processed in our body by sound waves, and how animals and humans vary in the sound waves they have access to. 


Say you find yourself next to an elephant... they are hearing things that you do not have the capability of hearing- they hear at frequencies 20 times lower than humans! And while, yes, that is so awesome- how absolutely and simultaneously horrifying is it!? How many things exist around us that we simply cannot hear, how many things will we never know are making noise? There is a world of discomfort in the idea that things are there that we can't experience- what if there are things out there experiencing us that we have no access to or awareness of? 



To step aside from that disturbing thought, I want to touch on the sounds that we do have access to. We can be listening to the same song, and be hearing it completely differently. We hear voices and sounds differently from one another, and knowing that we can't hear every sound behind them, are we really hearing the sound as it is? What does a birds song actually sound like and how can you judge this? Is it most authentically heard by other birds who access sound similarly to one another? 




Really think about it, we will never even be really be able to hear our own authentic voice. How do we know what anything truly sounds like? Can we ever separate our past experiences, biases, and our individual registration of the sound from the sound itself? 

When talking about sound, as humans, language is a major point of discussion. Language carries huge variations, both within the language itself and amongst other languages. For this reason, language along with accents, tone, rhoticity and additional aspects of linguistics become markers of ethnicity, regional belonging, religion, and more. Attitudes towards language, tone, and accent also vary. In the United States, accents are greatly stigmatized- they are points of discrimination. Tone is widely analyzed and given importance to- something that affects cross cultural encounters and understanding. Not only is tone processed differently around the world and from person to person, but so are different sounds. This leads to the question of whether in cross cultural communication, true understanding can occur. 



This relates to the idea of impossible translations. Words are already a translation of what we experience in our brain- how we have processed the apple in front of us, how we can attempt to describe a feeling we feel, etc. Our definitions for what we can see, what we can feel, can not truly encompass what happens in our heads- but it is impacted by the culture around us. When we must once again translate these translations into another language, we lose the accepted cultural implications of that word too. Language is a result of conditioning ourselves to assign specific meanings to broad concepts that are separate experiences through a pattern of sound. But is there anything in our heads that can ever be understood by anyone else in the same way? 

Sound is a way to connect with others and the world around us, and even though we may not be experiencing the same sounds and way of hearing, we still exchange and share the experience.  

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