Stand at a busy intersection in the city and close your eyes and listen to the sounds...

Stand at a busy intersection in the city and close your eyes and listen to the sounds of traffic. As you listen, create an inventory of the sounds...a one to one relationship between each sound and its source, in the same way that our eyes and our internal dialogue work together to interpret the world by creating a one to one relationship between what we see and the objects in our inventory.

As you isolate each individual sound, your ear strips it away and slowly the world becomes apparent not visually but aurally...you feel yourself as a sound in a world of sounds. And listen for the breaks... I don't really know how to describe this... find the emptiness. The places of silence in between the noises. Sounds are just made up of various moments of vibration and lack of vibration, on multiple scales, both in terms of the frequency of the sound...oscillating back and forth to determine the pitch, and in terms of how the sound hits our ears. Our brain perceives in sound in patches, but the same way we string together individual bits of light to make the fabric of our visual field, we string together all the various pieces of sounds to make the constant hum, the background music of our lives.

As you identify and isolate a specific sound, for example a car alarm or a particular conversation, or a truck passing, you should be able to hear underneath it. Break through the fabric and the break the world down into bits and pieces...differentiate the competing sounds and they cancel out.

And at the bottom what is there? Underneath the city, beneath the barking dogs and the chatter of pedestrians and the whooshing of cars and the slow click of changing traffic lights and the flapping of birds wings and the airplanes going overhead and the dull thud of the road just sitting there...what is there? there is the silent, imperceptible hum of the ground of the city, of the earth itself...and what is under that? Continually strip away the sounds, deeper and deeper and what is at the bottom of the pile...silence?