Reading Blog Post:

I found the reading “Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred David Dunn,” interesting but hard to digest. It goes along with what we were talking about in class. Everything we hear can be considered music just like everything we see can be considered art. The introduction was one of the most confusing parts. The author writes about how you can hear foxes and it is both beautiful and “grieving,” and similarly Mozart and his music was both beautiful and angry. This basis helps the hearer connect to the sound in multiple aspects. Music helps bridge communication barriers and David Dunn is trying to use music to do this. In the assumptions section, Dunn is comparing sound and vision and says that sound can blend together, unlike Dunn’s window frame metaphor for vision where you can really only see one thing at a time. Our ears can hear relationships between sounds where as our eyes can’t do the same with vision. Music is a parallel way of experiencing the world (parallel to vision and writing) that is much more whole, and includes us as a part of the whole, with a relationship in that world to other non-human living systems. Dunn thinks that music, and its ability to affect/change brain development, might help in our future survival by broadening how humans relate to the world around them. Dunn then goes on to describe how most of the music now is made for entertainment, and it isn’t art. Art requires discipline but adds to our lives. It can remind us of our connection to the environment and help us integrate with the broader world (broader than humans). He then talks about sounds in nature and how they increase our awareness in the world around us. Environmental music and sound art have developed and Dunn thinks there’s an important role for the evolution of an art form that can address sound integrating into the whole biosphere. In other words, to save our world we can’t just look at it we’d have to see ourselves as being part of the biosphere. If the biosphere is going to survive, then we as humans need to hold up our responsibility to protect our world and not damage it. Everything has to be thought about in a way that includes life beyond humans and not a human centered world or else our world won’t survive. Dunn then explains that music is the best way we have to expand this way of thinking. The rest of the article is examples of the authors works where he actually engages and is able to create sound art where human generated sounds interact with animals in natural environments.