Audio

I’m more and more inclined, as the years of my life stack up, to connect with the world through the sense of hearing. Audio fascinates me now in a way it never did.

I’ve always been a lover of radio. I grew up with it on. BBC Radio 4 was the sonic backdrop to much of family life when I was a kid. I have fond memories – but play me The Archers theme tune and I might turn violent. Radio 1 was more my station in my youth. These days podcasts, radio dramas (mostly Radio 4!) and audiobooks (which I always used to be very against!) keep me happy.

It’s all about the voice.

There’s one audiobook I’m slowly wading through at the moment (Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). The content is fascinating but the actor reading it has just got it completely wrong. Some kind of barking monotone. It’s awful.

On the other hand, Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time read by Benedict Cumberbatch is lively and engaging. Some of the voices I’ve had the pleasure of accompanying me in (mostly BBC) stories, books and dramas have at once soothed my tired mind and sparked my imagination. The human voice is such a versatile tool in the hands of a professional.

But all of our voices are powerful. They are an often overlooked feature, maybe? Not something we generally spend a lot of time working on, most of us. I feel like I’ve discovered my own voice more as I get older. In recent months, I’ve particularly noticed people’s voices as I teletrabajo (work from home), meeting new colleagues on voice-only conference calls. I get a mental image of that person, and we must all be more precise in what we say and how we say it.

For the first time in many years, I’ve got a job that happens on the telephone (I’m an agent for an emergency medical assistance helpline – well, supposed to be, but it’s all rather up in the air at the moment!). Vocal communication is all there is. I like not relying on how someone looks (and all the unconscious micro-judgements that brings). Instead, I must sharpen my listening skills.

Even in the past few years when I was teaching English, developed listening abilities have been really important. To hear exactly what someone was saying and how they were saying it, so I could spot the errors and help them improve. I also learnt about phonemes and the physiology of the different sounds we make in the English language. I’ve just got involved with a language learning app where I’m doing just that. I listen to people from all over the world repeating sentences and give them feedback. Fun!

In my brief spell as a psychotherapist, of course, listening to people’s voices was everything. It is professional listening, after all. Being attuned to how someone says something not just what they say can reveal things that may even be hidden from the speaker’s awareness.

But clearly, blind people have known about the importance of sound all along. Those able to see take the visual landscape so much for granted that hearing becomes an underappreciated sense. I came across a very interesting radio programme the other week about a blind architect and how he designs spaces with acoustics in mind. My dentist’s office could do with a visit from him: when I visited earlier in the week, there was so much background noise I couldn’t hear what the receptionist was saying. Bad acoustics compounded by perspex screens and facemasks (and a snotty attitude) made for a very frustrating experience.

Aural enthusiasts have been collecting various interesting sounds for years, ever since recording equipment was invented. Musicians, sound engineers and others have that highly developed sense for nuances in sounds, which for me would not be something I’d notice (like a wine connoisseur’s sensitivity to flavour notes and undertones, or a parfumier’s refined nose).

Sometimes when I’m lying in bed I like to listen to the ambient sounds around, and try not to attach them to a mental image of what’s making them. (Check out Jen Pod 1‘s exploration of ambient sounds.) Like just listening the the pure sound of traffic as if I didn’t know of the presence of the road outside. I find it quite hard, but it’s really trippy when I manage it!