Sound is the captive animal of space. It will only consent to propagate when space is absent to at least some degree, and the less space there is, the more sound can multiply.
I say this as a kind of a scientist. Right? Sound does not propagate in a vacuum; it can’t, because a vacuum has no medium with which to transmit the vibrations that constitute sound. So the less of a vacuum a given region is, the more at ease sound will be, and the better it will propagate.
But actually, this is completely untrue. And discovering why it’s untrue helps us understand space even better, and what “space” means … because don’t we say, as I did in my earlier post, that sound actually fills space? That sound banishes space? That it crosses the lines dividing the senses by filling a visual void with aural matter?
Now, you could dismiss these musings as sophistry or mere semantics. “Space” in the scientific context doesn’t mean the same thing as it does in the humanistic context. You’d be half-right; but this sophistry of mine is justified because it lets us look at space in a new way, a meaningful one.
Because just as the contemplation of sound and space lets us throw down the barriers between the senses, also it lets us see in a new way that the concept of “space” encompasses both emptiness and its opposite. Think about this statement:
The more compressed or filled a given space, the better sound can propagate within it.*
Not an entirely accurate statement, but accurate enough to show that “space” can actually mean anti-space. In two ways:
- A
compressed
space is a small space … so an infinitely compressed space would actually not be space at all. - A
filled
space contains no emptiness (if it’s fully filled), and thus no space.
All this just leads me to believe that, when perceiving space in any context whatsoever, we actually aren’t perceiving either the enclosure or the enclosed, but rather the border between the two. A hovering sphere would be a space of fullness within the emptiness of its surroundings.
* A smaller space, or a space more dense with matter, transmits sound more effectively.
1 comment:
I have never "heard" it this way before.
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