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A few bits



Janne Mårtensgård <janne.martensgard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

An interesting question is this: can totally deaf people experience
something that hearing people would classify as sound? This would have to be
completely brain-manufactured, i e  hallucinated hearing ... The only way to
know this would have to be to ask someone who once could hear but now is
completely deaf, since people who has been deaf since birth wouldn't be able
to tell if these "hallucinations" were of the auditory kind or not (no
frames of reference etc).

I've been dipping into a book called 'Seeing voices' by Oliver Sacks (you know, 'Awakenings' etc) in which various post-linguistically deaf (ie. became deaf after learning a spoken language) people attest to having mental records of people's voices, etc. that they "hear" having learnt lip-reading. They also talk of phantom sounds, etc. (like phantom limbs - where people feel a limb even after it's been amputated).


My understanding from what I've read of the book so far is that those who are born without any hearing have so little conception of what hearing might involve or be like that the idea of an auditory hallucination isn't worth discussing... it'd be like asking a person with all senses intact if they sometimes sense the nyeepnyoopnyopness of their surroundings, ie. completely meaningless. :-)

I've just been listening to the Andrew Thomas CDR release on Involve, 'So You Wanna Be a (Death) Star'. Judging-by-peers disclaimer: yeah, it's the same record label that's released me, but, well, it's so utterly different from what I do, or what Aspen (label owner) does that I think the label's as good as irrelevant.

The CDR's 12 very short tracks - it clocks in at around 25 minutes. The majority consist of bass tones, clicking a lot as they stop and start in stereo space, interleaved with sudden bursts of other sounds.. the common element through all tracks is the way the sound sources are chopped nice and roughly so that tracks are defined by constant clicks. Somehow the sound is simple and raw enough to avoid sounding like Oval or something. Apparently most sound sources are from 4-track tape recordings, lending a nice Sigma Editions-style blur to the proceedings that I certainly get right into. This is most evident on a track consisting of stumbling piano lines.. yum.. Some tracks also have what once was a drum machine rhythm somewhere in them. I keep thinking of the Solvent tune called 'Half Eaten Drum Machine', which seems like a damn apt description for this as well... a bit like an incredibly lo-fi Atom Heart work-out, with the over-all result almost more texture than anything else.

Umm.. to be honest I'm never sure how to review this kind of music, because I feel like people approach it for so many different kinds of pay-back. *shrug* I'd recommend 'So You Wanna Be A (Death) Star' if you like relatively "open" or "simple" this-listy music with an affective element to it. Thinking mood wise of eg. Sigma Editions stuff; Neina; and yeah, Oval circa 'Systemisch' I guess.

I also just wanted to say that I'm really enjoying this list. I don't feel like saying particularly much, but look forward to receiving the digests and feeling like there's some people at least engaging with topics in a way I'm interested in, whether or not their outlooks are anything like mine. Yay!

Michael

np. 'There's a Riot Going On' - Sly and the Family Stone (perhaps not _too_ relevant ;-)

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