Sounds beyond our reach.
Episode V: A Year in Review
2020 did not go as expected. Like it or not, a culture that was beginning to accept the idea of ‘virtuality’ – of being very close to becoming something without actually being it – got unceremoniously thrown into it last March, when we were all sent home. Our meetings and family gatherings are still through screens – something a bit short of real – as we come to the end of the year. It’s the sound that has kept us together.
Our biases were starkly revealed to us in the summer which made us think differently about our places and power in society, the power that we hadn't recognized as ours but that our equals have felt painfully and profoundly for a long, long time.
And still, we are surrounded by the richness of a world that persists in the face of our self-absorption. Life underwater reveals itself to those who jump in. Wind in mountain pines or prairie cottonwoods makes us linger for a while. The nighttime call of a great horned owl or a coyote in the suburbs (and even the city) reminds us of resilience and timelessness.
Sound in 2020 has helped us escape to other places and defy our physical boundaries, through music, storytelling, travelogues… through the small sounds that emerge in city neighborhoods gone quiet in a strange time.
What is there to be seen is there to be heard. Savor it. Let it run off with your mind when the Holidays give you the chance.
We’ll listen for you next year.
Uncover More in the New York Times “Quarantine Sounds” collection.
Sounds of the Forest is a growing soundmap bringing together aural tones and textures from the world’s woodlands. The sounds form an open source library, to be used by anyone to listen to and create from. Selected artists will be responding to the sounds that are gathered, creating music, audio, artwork or something else incredible, to be presented at Timber Festival 2021.