What we discovered is that this was a beneficial practice that brought out a lot of emotions and topics for discussion. We explored the differences between silence and sound, and we realized how much we ignore the affects sound has on our emotional, spiritual, and physical development. We often avoid sitting in silence, but we also tend to surround ourselves with noise and sounds that we pay little attention to in terms of our own growth. So much of the noise in our lives is relegated to the background, and we wanted to bring that experience to the foreground. In so doing, we realized how much of our lives are structured by the sounds we choose to surround ourselves as well as the sounds we choose to avoid.
Theologically, we found that sound is an integral part of how we relate to the world around us. Sound effects our various interpretations of the world and our contexts, and it also has a significant emotive power over us. Our perceptions of the world are often guided by the sounds and senses that are occurring in a given situation. Our thoughts about our own journeys, our concepts of God, and our relation to others and our selves are intimately related to sound. As our culture is typically visually oriented rather than orally oriented, this is an important element to incorporate into our own spiritual practices. The music we experienced opened avenues of thought we may not have discovered with silence alone.
Our "playlist" that facilitated this exploration was:
Radiohead - Everything in Its Right Place
Sigur Ros - Takk...
Sigur Ros - Glosoli
Lamb - Til the Clouds Clear
Vast - One More Day
David Crowder Band - Intro (I've Had Enough)
Snow Patrol - Warmer Climate
Muse - Endlessly
Jump Little Children - Cathedrals
For further contemplation: "The inner life is a soundscape that integrates body, mind, and emotion, all of which are revealed in the voice. Sound does not disappear into the inner life like light being drawn into a black hole, sound reaches into the whole body and draws the listener and speaker together toward a new place that neither had previously occupied."
"Voices have timber, tone, and life. Voices can be thought to touch us, indeed to enter into us, in ways that a word does not...All sound, in fact, has a physical quality since we hear different kinds of sounds with different parts of our body, due to the vibratory nature of sound waves. Sound and touch, as with Word and body, can work together to reveal and heal."
Stephen H. Webb - The Divine Voice
Thank you for the playlist. It was werid hearing Endlessly by Muse and looking at in another light. I really enjoyed this week.
ReplyDeleteIn psychology you have to focuss on what the senses do to a person cognitively. Between vision and hearing 90% of sensory input is covered. This sensory input becomes memory in a catalog type of way. So when you consider that, then many of our emotions stirred are somewhat due to what memories are associated with particular sounds. Even though we do not pay attention to sound around us usually, it still becomes associated through experience with particular emotions. We hear a siren and think of danger, we hear a bird and we think of peace. It's an experiential type of stimulation when one listens to music or to the world because ultimately a part of us is associated with those sounds at times through experience and memory.
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