The Perfect Response | EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

Most of us are not very practiced in using a tool that have we’ve been given. We listen to others. We notice sounds. But we’re not very sophisticated in appreciating what pristine sound can reveal.

Imagine a relative who rarely strays from home and who has also just bought a luxury performance car. It will transport him to and from the grocery store, along with a few other places in his community. But the car will probably never see the open road. So it all seems like a mismatch. The owner will ask so little of a car that is designed to do so much.

The same can be said for how we use the miraculous sense organs thoughtfully attached to both sides of our head. We and most animals are binaural listeners. We hear in stereo. And that gives us the ability to locate where sounds come from. But that’s only the start. The mechanical bones and nerves of the middle and inner ear are amazingly sensitive. They are—pardon the pun—perfect windows fully open to mere whispers coming from the outside world. Admittedly, if you are my age, they are mostly open. Hearing acuity is best in children, which is one reason they are easily startled by the rude noises of the everyday life.

Here’s the point. Most of us are not very practiced in using the tool that have we’ve been given. We listen to others. We notice sounds. But we are too accepting of assaults on our ears in places where we work and play. These intrusions into our aural space may come from motorcycles, lawn equipment, loud restaurants, car horns and a hundred other sources. We tolerate loud noise and constant sound—frequently frying ears and brains in the process. A result is a dulling of our hearing, forcing us to miss what pristine sound can tell us.

All of this forces us to overlook the pleasures of natural sound layering, where ambient sounds can mix or contrast with dominant foreground source. For example, stand in a quiet forest long enough, and our aural sense of depth can open up. In the woods, air moving through trees has its own auditory signature. Add in a pair of birds calling back and forth to each other over a distance, and the whole scene seems richer and more interesting. This is dimensional listening, reclaimed when we liberate ourselves from the racket of a world.

The organized sound of music is where we are more likely to pay attention to the spatial capabilities of the aural. But even here, we frequently ruin the experience by depending on cheap electrical devices that distort, or are too loud for the delicate mechanisms of the ear. The result flattens music into a one-dimensional experience.

Putting ambient noise into the mix helps us hear the dimensionality that we have often trained ourselves to ignore.

Consider a variation on this problem. If you view nearly any Hollywood film produced after 1950, the sound of the actors singing will usually not match the space they are in. Most were recorded on a sound stage first, lip-syncing later on the set. So at the start of the landmark musical Oklahoma! Curly rides his horse across the open prairie gloriously singing Oh What a Beautiful Morning, but in the incongruous acoustics of a reverberant studio. The same is true with most action sequences, where dialogue is re-recorded later on. “On location” sound is difficult to capture. There is an old assumption that “pre” or “post” dubbing will not be noticed. But your ears can easily recognize the aural discontinuity of different spaces.

Try this simple experience. Listen to a good acoustic recording on good headphones. And see, if over time, you can place the layout of the players or singers. Are they all in the same acoustic? Who is in front and who is in back? Where is the piano on the ‘sound stage’? And what is the room contributing to the sound? Hearing dimensionality recovers what we have often trained ourselves to ignore.

Listen to the iconic recording of Chan Chan from the Buena Vista Social Club below. You can hear the musicians spread out in the space of an old Havana studio once owned by RCA. The recording, like some live concerts, is a feast of coherent aural information. To use the old cliche, it seems like we are with these musicians, some of whom remembered when Havana at night was a rival to Miami.

Our’s is a language of binaries. English makes “clear thinking” obvious, easy, and often the stuff of complete fantasy.

It’s an obvious feature of our national politics that we tend to place two very different individuals in two mutually separate camps. We know the problem. Characterizations of and by the President, members of Congress, and even news sources tend to be framed in “we” versus “they” terms. Only in moments when we can think more clearly, do we understand that our boxes of categorization are not very helpful.

Part of the energy for this categorical thinking comes from what I’ve described elsewhere as the dark instinct to scapegoat our problems to “them,” thereby transferring any guilt or responsibility to others. It’s an ancient impulse: one of the unpleasant effects of self-identifying with ideological and religious communities. Scapegoating helps us define where rigidly observed property lines are, and who lives “out there” beyond them. We need not spend time with those on the other side. Indeed, it is easier to maintain the purity of a rhetorical scapegoat if it isn’t fouled up by the complexities of real experience. We like our villains pure. Thus our epidemic of drug abuse and crime are caused by “them;” Americans can insert their favorite ethnic, racial or corporate villains. Similarly, underemployment and low paying jobs can be scapegoated to a fantasy of Mexicans flooding across the border, the Chinese stealing our technological secrets, or those wily Canadians using tariffs against our home-grown products. Take your pick. Dualistic thinking usually springs from a degree of intellectual laziness, and from the intellectual monoculture that is English grammar. It’s easier than the more open-ending thinking motivated by genuine curiosity. It is also sustained by the ease of finding partners with the same thoughts. Complexity drains away in favor the comforts of a world made simple.

A language of binaries turns short-form media like Twitter into perfect carriers of distinctions pitting the desirable against the despicable. The easy comfort that results is only undermined if we open ourselves up to more information, or the work of reporters who have bothered to test conclusions against the available evidence. But all of this can be unsettling to those of us who have grown comfortable with mental furniture we are not about to move.

Some languages carry a greater appreciation for bridging apparent dichotomies and transcending narrow categories.

If we look for useful ways to shake up cognitive habits that have grown stale, it can be useful to be reminded of more open-ended intellectual traditions, such as Confucianism or Taoism. It may be enough to know that these belief systems carry a greater appreciation for bridging apparent dichotomies and transcending narrow categories. In addition, the structure of various Chinese dialects encourage a degree of ambiguity, making the urge to express two mutually exclusive choices–“is” or “is not” statements, “yes” or “no” dichotomies–more awkward to render. As a colleague who grew up near Shanghai noted, “‘To be or not to be'” is probably not a phrase that comes easily to the Chinese. Broadly speaking, language can helps the Chinese mind entertain more nuanced possibilities. Views put on offer are expressed as more contingent: better understood as joined rather than isolated. All things considered, this probably makes English a language that is a better for debate than for reconciliation.