Listening Exercise

The bench

In this listening exercise, we were asked to select a familiar place in which to sit with a notebook for ten minutes and “closely observe the sounds around [us].” I chose the bench on the back porch of our house. I walk past that bench many times every day and I’ve never taken the time to just sit on it before. In the ten minutes of this listening exercise, I learned that I have been ignoring a lot more than just the bench.

                The first thing I noticed after I started my timer was the sound of the warm wind blowing through the neighbors’ white pine trees. The sound was long, smooth, and gentle, but also fairly loud in volume, and its constant undulation prevented it from blending into the background. It was enveloping, filling spaces both near and far, and overarched all of my continued observations.

                Beneath the wind, the ducks were murmuring to me from a distance. The sound is very deep in pitch. A few birds were sending out shrill calls from above. I heard the neighbor’s dog barking from farther away and to the east; a sound that I usually try to tune out. Then I heard the light, hollow melody from the bamboo wind chime hanging in a tree in the back yard. It has been hanging there for many years, perhaps a minimum of five, and I never register the sound anymore. It was strange to actually listen to it. It’s a pleasant, rhythmic sound.

                I could hear things at different distances relative to me. Cars were going by on the road. I never notice those either. Their sound was similar to, and almost blended in with, the wind. A few dry leaves were rustling. I could hear clinking from the gate latch, and the high pitched, somewhat alarming call of tree fibers squeaking in the wind. There was the sound of branches high in the canopy clinking against each other. These are all the normal, “everything is right with the world” ambient sounds in the yard.

Evidently I had good timing with my listening exercise, because the train came by. It has rolled by at all hours of the day and night, at just enough distance as to not be overbearing, for all of the twenty years I have spent in this house. I grew up listening to it, and I really do have this sound completely tuned out. Sometimes, as a child, friends that I had over to play would ask me, “what’s that sound?” and I wouldn’t know what sound they were talking about. It would be the train.

                I sat there on the bench and listened to the train. I know every sound, but I never really listen to it. The deep and steady rumble on the tracks is low and distant and powerfully resonant. I would describe it as calming, a kind of reassuring background company, like the sound of children playing in a neighbor’s yard. The horn blew in clusters, a long, blaring, drawn out musical chord.That's the sound of sleeping with the window open on a warm summer night. The sound of the train is not so much a measure of time passing as it is time standing still.

                Finally, I noticed that the most audibly prominent sound of all was that of my pencil on the paper as I took notes. Somehow this most obvious sound of all did not even occur to me until the ten minutes were almost over. Once I had noticed it, the pencil was clearly the loudest sound around me at the time. It made a hollow tapping noise when the pencil met the paper, and a rhythmic swishing as I wrote. This is a sound that I hear every day, and it didn’t even register while I was deliberately listening to things!

                I have learned, in ten short minutes, that my attention is apparently very selective.