Listen to yourself: Hear in relationship with the world
Nahun’s sonic journey
Who: Nahun
What: Designer and sound artist
Where: Spain
Why: For better relationships with each other and the environment
Listen. Do you hear that? If you’re indoors, near a computer, you might hear a bit of humming. The whirring of your computer fan. The buzzing of lights or refrigeration. Side conversations. If you’re outside, maybe you hear cars, leaves, trees, animals. Can you listen for more?
Nahun, a resilient designer and sound artist with a background in social communication, challenges you (and everyone) to listen more closely to everything around you. He’s built a diverse career that spans sound art, communications, user experience and advertising, but “Always in my career the music is part of my life,” he says, from his early days as a hardcore punk and metal drummer in Peru’s underground scene to his current work making music from the sounds (and silences) of nature. This musical thread travels through his work to emphasize the skill of listening: a practice that can fall by the wayside in our increasingly busy world.
“Always in my career the music is part of my life.”
When it comes to technological experiences, we often think about a visual “user interface” for software platforms, something that users can see and touch or at least click, visually. At the same time, new technologies are enabling voice interaction as an interface, which has a lot of promise for improving accessibility and enabling convenience and safety at times when people may be driving or using their hands. Sound clearly touches all facets of our lives, even if we don’t think of voice interactions as sonic experiences.
By listening closely to the world around him, Nahun also aims to help reshape it in a more sustainable way. He’s worked with companies to help “redefine products and services to create more synchronization into the circular economy,” and thinks about the importance of shifting from a platform-centric ecosystem focused on producers and consumers to a community-centric ecosystem where we all play interlocking roles. His artistic and work experiences alike challenge him and others to experience the reality that we are all part of the same system, natural or financial, and how each move we make can have a reverberating impact as intense as the slam of a drumstick.
Recognize yourself in sound
While we all need to work to live, the modern world is full of noise, whether audible or energetic: mobile notifications, whirring machinery, conversations, discussion threads, a constant push for more. Taking a moment to slow down and listen provides a unique opportunity to notice many sensations we typically overlook, and provides an opportunity to better connect with and understand our surroundings as well.
“If we have more care about the importance of silence in our life, it’s really interesting because you can recognize new sounds if you keep the noise out,” Nahun says, a sentiment that applies to sonic noise and metaphoric noise alike. “The problem with noise is you need more noise” to be heard over the cacophony, he observes, which is a deep echo of the overtaxed modern life, overburdened with interaction and inputs yet too often ending up devoid of meaning.
“You can recognize new sounds if you keep the noise out.”
Many of us have the experience of being in a job that requires us to generate yet more “noise” in the world: not beautiful music, but social media buzz, press coverage or industry conversations, made possible by constantly producing more and more content, products or just (half-baked) ideas. What would happen if we all paused for a bit, slowed down and listened instead?
Coded communications
Nahun has family roots in the deep jungle in Peru, the home of the Ashaninka people, and he has gone to the jungle to record many different types of sounds that can help us reflect more vividly on ourselves and our relationship to our environment. On his website, Nahun describes how ”The sound exists in a conducting element such as air or water, and can never happen in an empty space.” Similarly, we all exist in community and connection with one another, our current context and our past, and we can’t make any progress without connections between us. Just like sound can’t be heard in a vacuum, we can’t exist in a vacuum, either. We require connection to thrive – to make the good noise that we are meant to.
Many indigenous cultures, including the Ashaninka, use specialized sounds as communication, similar perhaps to local birdsong. These coded sounds allow the Ashaninka to communicate in ways their enemies cannot understand, particularly “an enemy coming from the city, [who’s] not part of the ecosystem” of the jungle. This complex communication system shows how “a deep understanding of your environment provides more power to protect your environment.”
This understanding requires some degree of silence. Nahun has actually found that people farther out in nature can “identify the steps of their neighbors,” showing the precise listening that becomes possible in a truly quiet area. The sonic “sensibilities with regard to city people are totally different” due to the change in their surroundings.
“A deep understanding of your environment provides more power to protect your environment.”
Conservation as sound
Nahun has come to “view conservation as sound,” thinking about the sonic aspects of preservation. While conservation can be thought of as a legal concept, conserving sound can also mean conserving nature, especially when you consider concepts like noise pollution. The greater the noise pollution, the less likely nature is to be untouched. Preserving (relatively) quiet spaces can give nature space to continue revealing all the complex sounds that lie within it.
Quiet Parks International is an example of an organization working to help promote quiet places, similar to the way Dark Sky International protects our ability to see the stars. In the face (or ear?) of too much noise pollution, often caused by the very vehicles and machinery that also generate air pollution, it’s important to retain the ability to create a listening practice that cuts through the noise around us.
Nahun sees “possibilities of potential new solutions if we can use sound as a tool to understand more of our environment.” As someone who works to promote electric vehicles, I’m also interested in the way that even as EVs can provide a quieter (as well as less polluting) ride, they may also require the development of additional noise for the safety of nearby pedestrians. What happens when the lack of sound creates the need for more? How can we think about creating or noticing sounds that add to our lives, rather than detract from them?
Learning to listen
No matter where you are, you can always hear something. In an empty room, you can “listen to the vibration of breathing, your organs, your blood.” Every sound “has a rhythm,” a way to “identify the tempo.”
Nahun invites us to practice intentional listening, going out in the same place regularly to notice “each week the same sound but a different rhythm.” Maybe “one week there’s a very slow tempo,” maybe the tempo changes the next week. Just as the activities of our lives ebb and flow and we have more or less sunlight each day, the sounds around us change too. With practice, we can “Tune into the typical sound of nature,” Nahun promises. Some people can even identify their surroundings by sound, having learned how to “identify different tunes in different morphological areas,” learning “the personality of the landscape/soundscape.”
Listening can also “improve our relationship with our ecosystem.” helping us learn to “recognize more sounds” or see how the “sound changes with weather or over time.” Nahun gives a nod to R. Murray Schafer’s concept of “acoustic ecology,” or the relationship between humans and their environment, as expressed in sound. This relationship exists in urban and rural environments alike, although it can take time to train the ear to hear beyond human sounds in the city.
“If you disappear the human sound, you can start to appear the natural sound,” Nahun says, and his phrasing reflects how different senses can overlap, with sound almost becoming visual or tactile. The practice of deep listening allows us to ”understand more of the nature behind the typical human sounds,” broadening our experience and reshaping our relationship with our environment. Nahun observes that “School teaches us to speak well and write well, but never teaches us to listen,” at least not beyond what we need to know to pass tests. Instead, we have to teach ourselves to listen deeply.
“When I see the same feeling, I think maybe it’s possible for something to happen.”
Many people love to listen to music, and it’s often thought of as something that brings us together. What if other sounds can do the same? Nahun sees sound and nature as important ways to bring people together, having interacted both with indigenous people who want to preserve their land and professionals worrying about natural resources from a corporate perspective. They share “the same perspective for different reasons–indigenous people for life, workers for their company.” Nahun observes, “When I see the same feeling, I think maybe it’s possible for something to happen,” even among people with really different perspectives.
Ready to practice listening?
Here’s an exercise to promote sound awareness.
Sit out in nature.
Identify 5 sounds in 3 minutes.
Then try to identify 10 sounds.
Imagine the shapes of these sounds and draw them.
I’ve found that this exercise is calming and increases my appreciation of nature. I’ve also started recording sounds and videos on my phone with the intent of capturing interesting sounds. If you try the same, let me know how it goes.
Resources from Nahun
The Tuning of the World and other work by R. Murray Schafer