Reading Blog #1

I found it very interesting when the author discussed how all living things experience a different multiverse of what they hear in life. I never really thought about how an insect or any other type of being that is very different than humans has a totally different perspective of what they hear in their day to day lives. A human walking down a path in nature might hear the quiet sounds of themselves walking but to an insect, it may sound incredibly loud. I also found it fascinating how humans are better at discriminating complex sounds than complex images. The author makes a good analogy at explain this when they describe how a musician can easily tune two different frequencies identically while in order to do this in the visual domain it requires sophisticated tools.

When the author began to describe his work I was really impressed by the amount of effort and attention to detail that he implemented. But overall, I found the experiments themselves a little confusing to picture how they are actually done and what they are actually set out to achieve. I think maybe a visual representation could have helped me visualize what was going on. But I did find the overall objectives and underlying ideologies for these experiences very interesting. I especially liked how the Entrainments 2 performance borrowed metaphors from feng shui and geomancy. I never really thought it would be possible to contact the “spirit of a place” but I feel as if Entrainments 2 is as close as you can get to achieving that. My key takeaways from this reading are to always listen to every detail of the environment around me, you never know if you will be listening to the complex communication of nonhuman entities.