Excerpt from One Man's Noise, by Tim Wilson

As a producer of documentaries for radio and television, most of my programs have to do with psychology and spirituality. But somehow or other, they almost always end up coming back to sound and listening. Because for me, sound and spirit are intimately connected. And I’m fascinated by what the sounds we make say about us at the deepest level.

There’s a peculiar thing about reminiscing in sound. It’s not the same as looking at old photographs. The minute you take a photograph, it’s already in the past. It has a quality of being dead. But recorded sounds remain alive. Maybe it’s because we have to give over an equal stretch of our present life, of present time, to listen to them.

“Quick now, here now, always” said T.S. Eliot about birdsong heard in the garden.

I recorded everything around me: my mother at the piano, my brothers and I singing, programs off the radio and TV.

I hauled my father’s ancient Philips reel-to-reel tape machine a lot to church, which may explain a good deal of my early association of sound with spirituality. We had a pretty good church choir, actually a very good church choir, and I was forever recording it: The Nine Lessons and Carols, weddings, and my favourite, Evensong. There's something about the soft-lit quiet that the sounds seemed to nestle in.

The music of that church, even now, remains mostly the sound of men and boys. Women’s voices, in the tradition I grew up in, were shunted off to the side, you could say they were an “unwanted sound” i.e. a Noise, except on special occasions. Such as on every Easter, when our choirmaster’s glamorous young wife would sing I Know that My Redeemer Liveth and all us choirboys would swoon in ecstasy. For me the thrill came especially, God only knows why, when she’d get to the line “though worms destroy his body,” and I’d feel a guilty little wow and flutter. As if there were some primal fusion of sex, death, religion and sound. As if there isn’t.

Wolf meets the Three-Horned Enemy in a staging of R. Murray Schafer’s wilderness epic Princess of the Stars. (photo courtesy Andre Leduc.com)

No modern person regards as magical or strange, of course, the “canning” of our voices and their projection over vast distances, or their storage in time to be played back, even after our death. I have a feeling, though, that the indigenous part of ourselves, the part with the hundred-thousand year old ears that’s still startled at a sudden rustling of leaves, is deeply dismayed by all this sound sorcery. That the pervasive disembodiment of electronic technology, being surrounded by people who aren’t here although their voices are, might involve a soul loss. A psychic disruption every bit as traumatic as the fear felt by primitive peoples who don’t want their picture taken.

Stephen Scobie, an english professor at the University of Manitoba, has given a lot of thought to this. He says that the ability to play back the recording of someone who is not present in the room with us necessarily involves the possibility of our repeating it after their death. “A singer must die,” wrote Leonard Cohen, “for the lie in his voice.”

Then, a sound. “I don’t mean to scare you,” I say to my wife by the side of the gurney, “but I think I hear angels.” I am terrified. But then, the producer takes over from the poet. They don’t sound as good as the tapes I’ve made. Couldn’t possibly be the real thing. Must be air-pressure variations in the hospital corridor. The doctor’s look says he thinks I’m bananas. But the voices fade out, and they don’t take me with them.