“Listening provides valuable insights different from, yet complementary to visual images and language.”
Peter Cusack (Week 3 Readings)

This week I want to reflect more on sound, I have found that I have been noticing a lot more on sound than I would have expected. This came after having a conversation with a cousin of mine who was visiting from interstate.
This particular relative has a partial hearing disability (deafness due to cochlear deterioration) and one of the symptoms is an incurable issue called tinnitus. Tinnitus “is the hearing of sound when no external sound is present.”. It made me think about the way she must perceive the world, she wasn’t born with this disability but it occurred at a young age-  (twelve). Since then she can only describe the sound as normal, It has become in-grained into her everyday life; in fact without the sound the world becomes abnormal as the sound is permanent inside her mind.

Every once in a while her tinnitus stops (due to air pressure, other related issues, etc) and during this moment she describes her senses as imbalanced, as it throws off her perception. I think going back into reflecting on the way we notice it’s important to think about others perceptions and the way they take in their surroundings.

For this post I wanted to experiment with two different audio tracks one of what I would hear in a room and one of what my cousin hears with a hearing impairment and tinnitus, both are normal experiences, they both alter the way we experience the world and the communications we have with people in it.

Through this post I want to point out and remind students that we are unique in the way we experience life, It’s something you don’t always reflect upon as from a physical perspective we can all seem similar. This week I wanted to notice something that changed the way I think and the way I looked at what I want to achieve during my final project-and this has helped me. It is a reminder that the content I create is my idea of noticing. Even when filming another subject and their habits I will be looking through my eyes, be experiencing their habits through my senses and this will determine what I choose to film and what I don’t. If I have I better sense of sound then a visual image I may find myself recording more sound than film- something I wouldn’t have thought about originally as I always presumed my sight was my main sense. After reflecting on this post I have come to the conclusion that I do notice sound to a degree more than I originally thought. It is interesting comparing the audio of what I can sense and what my cousin describes- it reminds me to take advantage of the senses I have and to train them to notice more than I’m currently capable off. From this post I will spent more time each day with my eyes closed in order to develop a wider range of in-taking sound.

“Every sensory interaction relates back to us not the object/
phenomenon perceived, but that object/ phenomenon filtered, shaped
and produced by the sense employed in its perception.” – (Salomé Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art)