Sound at the Edge of Perception

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Bell of Józef Czechowicz—The Importance of Minute Sound Moments

   • Seán Street

   Pages 1-20

3. The Notes of Human Music

   • Seán Street

   Pages 21-41

4. Making the Moment Singable

   • Seán Street

   Pages 43-62

5. Signals from Near and Far Shores: Voices from the Natural World

   • Seán Street

   Pages 63-86

6. Speak My Name: The Ownership of Syllables

   • Seán Street

   Pages 87-105

7. First and Last Sounds: Messages Beyond Language

   • Seán Street

   Pages 107-126

8. Back Matter

   Pages 127-138

   PDF

This book is about the tiny sounds of the world, and listening to them, the minute signals that are clues to who and where we are. A very small sound, given the context of its history, becomes hugely significant, and even an imagined sound in a picture becomes almost a voice. By speaking a name, we give a person back to the world, and a breath, a sigh, a laugh or a cry need no language. A phoneme is the start of all stories, and were we able to tune ourselves to the subtleties of the natural world, we might share the super-sensitivity of members of the bird and animal kingdom to sense the message in the apparent silence. Mind hears sound when it perceives an image; the book will appeal to sonic and radio practitioners, students of sound, those working in the visual arts, and creative writers.

• sound poetics
• philosophy of sound
• sensory studies
• sound studies
• sonic signals

“Sound at the Edge of Perception explores the ‘interrelationships between hearing and listening, looking and seeing,’ with the hope that ‘by awakening the faculty of seeing, we may enhance our ability to listen—and vice versa.’” (Ben Monks, Dymock Poets and Friends, Issue 18, 2019) “Seán Street is one of our great listeners and one of our finest interpreters of listening. This book uses literature, the visual arts, music, radio, the sounds of the natural world, and silence, to explore the deepest meanings of sound, or, as he writes in his last sentence, “all the murmurs in the whispering world”.” (Piers Plowright, Radio Features Producer)

“Professor Seán Street is one of our most important philosopher poets. He brings to the art of sound and radio an aesthetic conscience and creative intellect that finds the auricular heart in a grain of sand. He can articulate the meaning in those murmurings of past hearing that rest dormant in our listening memory only to be awakened by the poetic inspiration of our everyday soundscape. This beautiful book explores resonance and advances our understanding of T.S. Eliot's concept of the auditory imagination.” (Professor Tim Crook, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK)

• Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth University, Poole, United Kingdom

  Seán Street

Seán Street is Emeritus Professor of Radio at Bournemouth University, UK. Previous books include The Poetry of Radio, The Memory of Sound and Sound Poetics. As a poet, he has published nine collections, the most recent being Camera Obscura, and has edited an anthology of poems about radio, entitled Radio Waves.

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