{"id":40796,"date":"2024-07-04T09:28:11","date_gmt":"2024-07-04T07:28:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/de\/?p=40796"},"modified":"2024-07-04T09:34:43","modified_gmt":"2024-07-04T07:34:43","slug":"the-sound-of-breathing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/the-sound-of-breathing\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sound of Breathing"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"project":[353,860],"project_type":[725,726],"class_list":["post-40796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","project-online-publications","project-a-sound-was-heard","project_type-formats","project_type-text"],"acf":{"bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","custom_color_css_variable":"","content_type":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":6,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"Getting into places was difficult too, however, I\u2019ll try to draw them out here as thoroughly and carefully as possible. A special wood was dehydrated and carved for the purpose of sustaining extraordinary metallic tonal qualities. Once metals are twisted and stretched, their alloying elements are plucked to resonate.\r\n\r\n[Notation: At this moment, that fullness bears no fragrance but wood and metal do \u2013 made up of properties that change when damp, wet, or rusted.]\r\n\r\nResounding chords ascend and diminish, and in time, a quaver suspends until a single keystroke plucks at its corresponding twine \u2013 burgeoning, crescendos, and all over. The flight resembles prickly timbres emanating from a knife gliding atop another metallic surface-thing.\r\n\r\n[Interval: Skirt any urge to craft an object, instead, work to bluff perceptivity.]\r\n\r\nThis wooden surface has survived one place and time. As a series of simultaneous and successive chords, perfect fourths, scales, and their replications, this remarkable thing breaks away from its anchor.\r\n\r\nAn oscillating theater of permanence and sensation. Embellished inside an era, \u00bband [brought] home with us.\u00ab As cunning as trailing noises moving over epochs and gravel. [A break or snap.]\r\n\r\nFluttering notes, flickering sequences, blazing timber \u2013 like scratching.\r\nPinpointing, piercing sodden earth, sottobosco releases some mulchy tinge.\r\nWhatever else arises from corrosion \u2013 sheer strings tangle and coil to form a silken sheen above the brush.\r\nSuddenly, a sigh clears the hazy air to an expansive terrain.\r\nDew, well, any atmospheric performance is also a radiant and conspicuous place.\r\nAnd inside, droplets fall like notes or characters \u2013 abruptly turning over toward another room.\r\nI am supposed to coalesce into or feign a timeworn situation.\r\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">\u2014 from <em>Antechamber Music<\/em>, 2021<\/p>"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"The protest became quiet and still, the leaves no longer rustled. They were just carried around by the wind. Rain fell unaccompanied by a thunderous roar, and occasionally chaos broke out, but it wasn\u2019t riotous. A body produces voices, growls, squeaks, bellowing, purrs, hissing, chirps, buzzing, howls, chatter, and so on, but we couldn\u2019t hear them. What could be moved no longer made noise. Any awareness of the wind could only be felt like a small caress and without its whistling soundings through grassy fields of grass or nearby tree branches. The sense of sound had changed, and since the onslaught of sound sweeps and ultrasonic technology, listening was obliterated. Now, the air is thick and inaudible.\r\n\r\nThe early side effect of heavy sound sweeping was tinnitus, which also caused migraines. The sonovac was created and swept away any and all background noise. This sort of silencing sanctification, the absence of sound, is what caused ringing, buzzing, hissing, or other noises in the ears. This ringing of their ears that induced migraines was treated with regular sessions with a <em>sound-off<\/em> device specialist. Meanwhile, ceaseless sound sweeping carried on. The frequent use of sonovacs, designed to clear away unwanted noise, would eventually silence voices over time. Voices were swept right from the mouth. However, with the introduction of ultrasonic technology for faster sound transmission, people stopped caring about having a voice.\r\n\r\nThe effort it took to speak became too laborious for many. There was no need to process or generate sounds through the manipulation of airflow from the lungs through the vocal cords in the larynx, followed by shaping these sounds in the oral and nasal cavities with the body\u2019s innate use of various articulators such as the tongue, lips, and palate \u2013 since the rise of ultrasonic technology. The production of speech sounds that convey meaning, which is further enhanced by intonation, rhythm, and other prosodic features was not and is still not possible to achieve with ultrasonic technology. Technology, policy, and governance took sway, which so readily relied on quantitative methods based on manipulated sentiments. Everyone seemed to prefer ultrasonic technology for its time-saving results, leaving communication and exchanges with others to a cognitive process of comprehension, thought formulation, and conceptual transmissions.\r\n\r\nI was the only speaker I knew, as in the only person who could use their voice, and I wanted to know why. What determinants impacted this current and alienating space? My fixation grew, since I was no longer able to tell what something meant once I voiced it. Every time I tried to open my mouth to speak, my breath was obstructed. My ability to comprehend or hear what I said was difficult to discern from my voice. There were no other embodied representations or sources for me to refer to; no one I could speak with, like a fever that doesn\u2019t break.\r\n\r\nLong after the pacifist propagandistic warnings that led to the suppression of noise, toxicity replaced the ambient noise that once filled the atmosphere, and the impossibility of discerning breathing and sonic characteristics was more common. The air itself no longer moved.\r\n\r\nMy grandmother, the sister of a defamed Metropolitan Opera House singer, led a loud and resounding protest after her sister\u2019s public betrayal by a top ultrasonic record label company. The media portrayed my grandmother and her sister in a derogatory, slanderous manner, likening them to having the candor of banshees, associated with wailing and bad fortune, simply for insisting on the importance of vocalization. My grandmother later went on to be a poster child of the bigger issues arising from the incessant use of sound sweeps. She warned us about the existential threat to the experience of being human, \u00bbWe need all possible sensory registers, drifts, and import-exports. These are the driving force of life,\u00ab she once exclaimed during a rally, \u00bbthere are no technological fixes to our social problems!\u00ab\r\n\r\nBy the time of my grandmother\u2019s death, the anti- sound sweep movement had dwindled. She was portrayed as a tyrant and thoroughly smeared by major ultrasonic industry campaigns for attempting to incite revolt and chaos.\r\n\r\nOur DNA defines us to some extent, but breath is what sustains us. Before the sound sweep, the air was usually only associated with nasal passages and sensory connotations like smell. A sense of the world that is lived and made vulnerable by the atmosphere. And while the temperature declined, causing the clouds to form and settle over the hills, and the sun fell behind them each night, the thick layer of haze was noticeable on that horizon, the constant blurry and heavy density of the air. This haze is the air that muffles a voice, this sort of airflow when it enters the body makes it especially difficult to produce sounds using vocal cords.\r\n\r\nI never understand why someone wouldn\u2019t keep a memento, <em>m\u0259\u02c8men\u02cct\u014ds \u2013 k\u0113\u0113psakes \u2013<\/em> making<em> \u02c8in\u02ccdeks<\/em>. Often, I try to remember how things sound by outlining the vowel and consonant arrangements of the word. Acknowledging the significance of pronunciation, which is likely attributed to my own recorded history, my mementos consist of a family archive of sound recordings dating to my grandmother\u2019s youth before the sound sweep. Maybe it\u2019s a grounding practice, tuning in from the newfound era of loud silence, and feeling like I\u2019ve never really had ground to stand on in the first place. Without the voice, all that we can do is observe.\r\n\r\nMy grandmother\u2019s voice is played on a digital file of a voice note she once sent to a friend:\r\n<p class=\"is-intended\">I only ever hear cars in this city, their alarms, police sirens from time to time, and the sound of tires moving over asphalt and cobblestone. I supposed that type of noise is what reminds me that I am in this bustling eternal metropolis. When I\u2019m walking around aimlessly here, attempting to take in the scenery, I\u2019m mostly just looking out for cars \u2013 the hotel is lovely, a room with a view over Rome\u2019s rooftops. On the fourth floor, I\u2019m often visited by chirping birds fluttering their wings excitingly. It\u2019s also very bright here in the mornings, despite the smallish windows in my room.<\/p>\r\nIn the background, the noises from the street are also audible from this MP3 file. Suddenly a car horn breaks up the city\u2019s white noise as the driver, obviously annoyed at some hold-up, presses on their horn for what feels like three minutes. I can feel his fervor and the annoyance he caused others \u2013 maybe keeping these mementos is affecting me, moving me toward anger. I am haunted by the question of why I still have a voice, even if I barely know how to use it.\r\n\r\nIn silence, the way light travels over surfaces becomes discernable. There never seems to be enough light because of the toxic haze that fills the still air. I could alter the stillness of light if I am deliberate in my movements, deep breathing, and mental focus, and shaping a different configuration of myself, the air, and the space. Similar to ways that the moving car tires over asphalt rattled the windows of my grandmother\u2019s hotel room in Rome.\r\n\r\nThe days are let go by the light and the night does what it does, a new configuration forms. With all my might and effort to conjure the ability to move the air forcefully, I begin to speak, sing, and shout around. I fill up the night with what was swept away."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_txt","bgcolor":"","bgcolor_custom":"","layout_col_size":8,"txt_cols":"is-1-txtcol","txt":"<p class=\"is-size-6\"><strong>Jazmina Figueroa<\/strong> is a writer based in Berlin.<\/p>"}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40796"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40955,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40796\/revisions\/40955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project?post=40796"},{"taxonomy":"project_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akademie-solitude.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_type?post=40796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}