In Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred, David Dunn explores the relationship between sound and communication. He focuses on the barriers within sonic communications between living beings, how we perceive and interpret alien sounds, and how different forms of sonic communications should be viewed through the context of life as a whole.
Firstly, I enjoyed this work for the most part. I feel like I learned something and gained respect for the way that all life forms have unique ways of communication. Dunn is quite obviously an environmentalist, and his perspective on communication through this lens was interesting. I even found myself laughing out loud when he mentions that he has heard mockingbirds “imitate washing machines and Volswagen[sic] motors so there’s no accounting for taste even among mockingbirds” (Dunn, 6).
However, the most powerful part of this writing was the conclusion, which reflects on how we should practice acceptance towards alien communication because it may be a lens through which we can see ourselves through.
There was one major thing, however, that bothered me about this article. I found it both starkly ironic and irking that a piece on communication uses such convoluted language and sentence structure (and is prone to typos). Eloquence and vocabulary are two very different things, and while Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred had many eloquent moments throughout, I found Dunn’s vocabulary to simply be overkill. Scholarly writing should be clear and concise in order to accurately convey the meaning behind the research/hypothesis; it should not be the author’s chance to roleplay a living thesaurus (and dude, use an Oxford Comma and spellcheck, these will add clarity and will not sacrifice any literary integrity).
Essentially, while Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred may itself be guilty of the same “grief of incommunicability” it comments upon, its content, context, argument, and philosophical musings make it quite an interesting piece.
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