Sounds beyond our reach.

Threshold’s Year of Sound Journal

Episode I: Bells to Ring In the New Year

Most sounds in our world are beyond our reach; what each of us hears is local and ephemeral: the sounds of the forest remain in the forest and urban sounds may never reach the next block.

Help us celebrate 2020 by sampling sounds from around the globe. We’ll use each as a springboard to contemplate the tiny and massive, the common and rare, where we’ve come from and where we are going. We’ll muse on how sound is used to measure time and space; how amplification changed culture by making music tactile; how acoustics influence the way we learn, worship, love, and listen.

For January, we offer something to ring in the New Year.
 
Bells are made to grab our attention. In warning or in celebration, they carry a message: a new year, a call to worship, the end of the trading day, a good tip for the bartender. They mark events big and small and trigger reactions in us that resonate with our individual and cultural upbringings.
 
The bells of Chiesa di San Giorgio can sound the way they do only in Varenna, shaped by the cobbles and moss, the cedars, the stone and plaster facades which uniquely define the piazza in this lovely town.
 
Every place has its own sound. Surfaces and shapes, big and small, are there to be heard as well as seen.