Sound Stage

Ok, so I love sound. Yes, I’m glad that I can physically hear and cognitively decode the mechanical waves into chemical signals my brain then interprets, and I’m fairly confident that if you can hear whether you’ve thought about it or not you’re thankful for the ability. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. What I’m talking about is some subjective, intimately subtle and barely noticeable quality of certain sounds.

Leprechauns that only make themselves known on blue moons when Democrats are in office, the sounds I love require just the right conditions to be detected, and may likely never be detected again. They aren’t everyday honks or bangs or screeches but minute vibrations of atmosphere which are to be captured and relished in memory, not in the prostitution of recording. They are the naked sound of cigarette paper and tobacco crackling as the smoker inhales. The unsullied sound of a knife being whet, grinding viscously and then emitting a slight ephemeral ring as stone releases steel. The felt more than heard sound of a bat’s super-sonic squeal just behind my ears at 3:47 am above Little Yosemite. These are the sounds that I love and with them I am never alone, and rarely bored.

My favourite sound, however, is found in College Station, TX. Rudder Auditorium still sports a very fashionable décor from 1972, and as such is usually as silent as a tomb. While outside the darkened neo-Stalinistic glass walls the free speech area throngs and sizzles with fish and fools, inside you can feel 68^o F silence as you move through the cool stillness like a gauze curtain you can’t quite make out. There is one exception, however. The air conditioning ducts lightly ping, a hollow resonance which somehow only enhanced the quiet. Rudder Auditorium is the best place in the entire world to take a nap. I used to walk through Rudder for a distance of perhaps 87 yards between classes, cherishing every step and trying my best to muffle every thunderous footfall, stifle every hurricane gale breath, shoe-lace ends intermittently providing staccato artillery blasts to my heresy. The sound of Rudder’s silence still takes my breath away.