What we are looking for are traces of the evolution of our relationship to sound, whether there is a kind of experience, some way of listening, some special situation or particular inclination. Perhaps age (read generation) and gender to some extent also weigh into the question.
We hope that you have considered a sound experience in such a way that you find it meaningful to describe it to your colleagues - and perhaps also how this leads into computer music activities (if it does that).
I hope that you want to take some time with this now, and that this pondering can also help enrich those with days off in the sun, the rain or the overcast. We would like your contribution at the beginning of September.
All the best,
- Joran Rudi and Mara Helmuth
Shortly after my wife (Jill) and I were first married, we travelled a bit through middle Europe. We spent a fair amount of time in the northeast corner of Switzerland -- Jill's family is originally from the Appenzell canton. When we first arrived in the town of Appenzell, the weather was rather poor. It had been raining steadily for most of the morning. By the time we parked the car, the rain had dwindled to a fine mist, but enough to soak us both to the skin as we walked around. We happened to stop outside a smallish cathedral to debate what the heck we were going to do the rest of the day when the rain started to fall more heavily again. About the same time the church organist began some warm-up exercises that we could faintly hear on the street. Maybe a minute later this group of about ten silly Swiss men in full Appenzell regalia came marching around the corner playing a variety of brass and percussion instruments *in* *the* *rain*, and somewhere off in the distance we heard one of those amazing Alpine horns being sounded. Something about the absurdity of the situation combined with the amazing bounty of sound and the state of my life/mind to make me really happy to be alive -- one of those particular epiphanies that makes everything luminous for some time afterwards. Context, eh?