I Am All Ears

One night eight years ago, a friend abducted me to see Seven Years In Tibet, a true story of friendship of Heinrich Harrer and Dalail Lama. There was a scene when Kun Dun (young Dalail Lama) asked Harrer what he loved about climbing mountains. That dialogue stayed with that whole night. Several nights ago, I was listening to my iPod, and reminded of Harrer’s answer.

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Bodily cycle is a remarkable thing. Its regulation seems to have purposes. My ears regulate a three-phase cycle. Each phase represents what auditory stimuli I generally long to exploit. I don’t know if this cycle resembles only me or most people, but personally, it helps to know, that every time my ears are fatigue, that means I am at the end of one cycle and ready to move on to the next.

I don’t know which is the first phase, but for a starting-point sake, I’d go with music. Whether I listen to the same or different song(s)-singer(s)-band(s) I seem to have a tendency of listening in restless repetition. Each time, the songs seem to make more sense than before. Each time is more addictive than before, and there is no stopping[1].

I always assume that I exhaust music, instead of the other way around. But music does from time to time exhaust me. There are moments when no matter how soft it is (or low its volume is), it hurt my ears just the same. I push myself to stop listening temporarily fearing my ears would physically be damaged. Instead of relaxing, the void agitated me. At one of my ‘musical weariness’ moments (I forgot when), I realized it was not a muscular issue. I just may need to hear something other than music. I began to realize that at these moments I listened to people’s conversation more attentively. I converse more intimately. It turned out I have been intuitively shifting from music to human speech. That’s phase two.

Being an exploiter, I treat human speeches the same way I do music. I recorded people’s conversations, and listen to them as frequent as I listen to music. Most of the time, I record them candidly, avoiding their awareness turn the conversations awkward and sour. I do various things with human speeches. I have been ripping dialogues from movies since I was in high school. Sometimes I rip only parts I found interesting (audio clipping), sometimes the whole movies, sometimes both. By so doing, I can ‘hear’ my favorite movies, anytime anywhere, as often as possible. After the absence of all the visual distractions, what I hear are the sounds of people trying to understand one another (some succeed, some fail). Every line becomes reasonable, every music’s timing feels more perfect.

When mp3 technology first knocked on my doorstep, as soon as I was done ripping all my music CDs, I converted my audio clippings and stored them also in my PC. Now they are safely stored in audio TV and audio movie directory of my iPod. Among them are the complete first and second season of West Wing, and complete first season of Gilmore Girls, Matrix trilogy, About A Boy, and of course, Seven Years In Tibet. All in all, there are now delicious 46 audio clippings and 74 audio movies and TVs.

In August 2005, Apple Inc. inserted podcasting search engine in its iTunes Music Store, all of which are free to download. My personal definition of podcast[2] is new foreign lands to explore for my ‘Columbus self’ (though most of the ‘lands’ are on the west side of the globe). I encounter many new aha experiences: hourly updated news (and found out that CNN made much progress within one fast hour), archives of radio stations’ morning shows (and found out that most of the hosts are much more content-competent that our all-talk-but-no-sense hosts), supplementary talk shows of tv programs and magazines articles (and found numerous first-hand behind-the-scene confessions), scientific talk shows (and found out that many people whose book I have read in college are very much alive, interviewed, and still pursuing their works) and, my recent favorite, book reading (and relive my childhood emotional experience of being an audience). Apple’s reintroduction of podcasting, for me, is like rain after years of waiting for water.

After a while even human speeches hurt and I decide to rest my ears. That's phase three. The ‘no sound’ experiences always turn out to be just as interesting. I listened, unavoidably, to the sounds of layers of passing cars, my orderly foot-steppings, my friends’ breathing-between-sentences, my sister’s keyboard-clickings at nights. It’s funny that things I generally perceive as silence actually have sounds, even meanings.

Gradually, the sound of silence starts to appear in obvious patterns. When that moment comes, music is again adaptable to hear, and enjoying is multiplied. It is the moment when I say, literally: That’s music to my ears.

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As of for Kun Dun’s question, Harrer’s answer was: “The absolute simplicity. That’s what I love. You have a purpose. Your mind is clear and calm. Suddenly, the light becomes sharper, sounds are richer. All you feel is the deep, powerful, presence of life”

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[1] That may explain why I have been ‘musically’ mobile for ever: past, present, and probably even future. In the 80s my favorite gadget was Walkman, the 90s was Discman, my present one is easily guessable, and my future one is predictable.

[2] Podcasting is audio broadcasts uploaded to internet servers, safely stored for us to catch missed episodes or simply collect. At its early age (around 1999-2000) podcasting was simply an audio version of blogging (that’s why its original name is audioblog). Later on, podcasting became alternative for indie radio stations. Now, everyone seems to podcast –from personal to commercial, from radios to magazines to TVs to movies­, from random ranting to national security. What iTunes did was simply making podcast-googling whole lot easier.