Time and Sound

I was talking to my students about visual and oral presentations of argument yesterday. I took them back to Elizabethan times when Shakespeare's audiences were more dependent on the spoken word to get meaning than they were on visual effects or the printed word. After all, most people then could neither read nor write. So they took lots of information in through their ears rather than their eyes. Hence, they were more attuned to the spoken language of the play to understand what sort of light was crossing over Juliet's balcony because there was no electrical source of illumination. Props, light sources and pyrotechnics were not part of the way they took in their world views at the time.



Then I brought the students to the speed changes that have occurred in my life time. My parents had an alarm clock. They wound it every night. They could plainly hear it tick, and if they wanted to know what time it was, they had to turn on a light. They were awakened by an ugly and irritating ringing sound that had to be shut off by touching the right switch. So they were very involved in the process of informing themselves about time. Much of what they learned about time depended on sound.



I have a device in my bedroom that looks nothing like a clock. It shines red, digital figures on the ceiling at night that inform me not only of the time, but also of the temperature outside. It makes a steady buzzing sound in the morning that can be easily tapped to allow me ten more minutes of sleep. At this point there is no message on the ceiling but the digits appear on the device itself. I am much less involved in how I get information about time. I simply use my eyes with very little involvement for my ears.



So that's an example of how contemporary people take in information. We are much more used to accessing our experiences through sight. We use flat screens to learn about our daily lives and take in gigantic special effects when we are entertained at the movies. We are persuaded to consume through graphics of all kinds, many of which require no words to influence us.



Tomorrow morning I will experience a more gentle awakening. My sister will rouse me around four a.m. so they we can be at Owl Grove by dawn. We hope to re-trace the parent owls of last spring and discover if they are raising a new family in the same place this season. We will depend entirely on our ears for information access as we hike through the wooded area and strain our ears for owl noise. We will need to depend almost entirely on the sounds in the environment to learn what we need. We'll communicate with each other at a bare minimum. It will be interesting to see how well we take in information the old-fashioned way. No brightly lit trails, no hidden speakers, no road signs, and not a single arrow will point us on way. Our ears will have to do the majority of the work.