Sound

"Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?"

"A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself."

"Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound."

"Trust your ears: Meters and scopes are tools, but if it sounds right in context, it probably is. Let what you hear guide you more than any readout."

"You know the sound of two hands clapping; tell me, what is the sound of one hand?"

"Carpenters' and ironworkers' shops are dominated by the heavier sounds of machinery and occasional yells across the floor; in goldsmiths' shops the silences are punctuated by more delicate work noises, but the apprentices' sullen silence and the artisans' grim absorption in the work at hand are, if anything, more oppressive, although there may be a little amiable banter between a master goldsmith and an older apprentice clearly already in possession of advanced technical skills."

"His feet were like fine copper when glowing in a furnace; and his voice was as the sound of many waters."

"Whenever you wash dishes, cook, or clean, if you make no sound, this is smartness itself. A person who enters a house and makes a lot of noise is revealing a lack of spirituality; even cats and dogs do not make unnecessary sounds, and man as he naturally is does not make any either."

"I have for a long time been of opinion that the quantity of noise anyone can comfortably endure is in inverse proportion to his mental powers, and may therefore be regarded as a rough estimate of them. Therefore, when I hear dogs barking unchecked for hours in the courtyard of a house, I know what to think of the mental powers of the inhabitants. The man who habitually slams doors instead of shutting them with the hand, or allows this to be done in his house, is not merely ill-mannered, but also coarse and narrow-minded."

"They say gravity is the centre of attraction ; I rather think that noise is. Nothing so soon assembles the inhabitants of a house as a loud and sudden noise:"

"If we come down to the other end of this great gamut, to very slow vibrations, we shall find a certain number so slow as to affect the heavy matter of the atmosphere to strike upon the tympanum of our ear and reach us as sound there may be, and there must be, an infinity of sounds which are too high or too low for the human ear to respond to them; and to all such sounds, of which there must be millions and millions, the human ear is absolutely deaf. If there be vibrations so slow that they appear to vs as sound, and other exceedingly rapid ones which appear as light, what are all the others? Assuredly there are vibrations of all intermediate rates We have them as electrical phenomena of various kinds; we have them as the Rontgen rays. In fact, the whole secret of the Rontgen rays, or X-rays, is simply the bringing within the capacity of our eyes and within the field of our vision a few more rays, a few of the finer rates of vibration, which normally would be out of our reach"

"All music is just performances of 4'33" in studios where another band happened to be playing at the time."

"Doctor: It plays music. What's the point of that? Oh, with music, you can dance to it, sing with it, fall in love to it. Unless you're a Dalek of course. Then it's all just noise."

"Could we not imagine that noise...is itself nothing more than the sum of a multitude of different sounds which are being heard simultaneously?"

"If a tree falls in a forest, and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?"

"Now I will do nothing but listen, To accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it."

"A thousand trills and quivering sounds In airy circles o'er us fly, Till, wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die."

"A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune."

"By magic numbers and persuasive sound."

"I hear a sound so fine there's nothing lives 'Twixt it and silence."

"Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever."

"And filled the air with barbarous dissonance."

"Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds, At which the universal host up sent A shout that tore hell's concave, and beyond Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night."

"Their rising all at once was as the sound Of thunder heard remote."

"To all proportioned terms he must dispense And make the sound a picture of the sense."

"The murmur that springs From the growing of grass."

"The sound must seem an echo to the sense."

"The empty vessel makes the greatest sound."

"What's the business, That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley The sleepers of the house? Speak, speak!"

"Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound."

"My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred, For the same sound is in my ears Which in those days I heard."