Every sound with a new clarity

 

Crow and Reeds by a Stream, by Kawanabe Kyōsai, ca. 1887

In "How to Do Nothing," Jenny Odell writes about how a John Cage performance caused a change in how she perceived sound.

Instead of the customary rows of musicians dressed in all black, the people onstage were dressed in plain clothes, moving about various props and devices like a typewriter, a set of cards, or a blender. Three vocalists made strange and haunting sounds while someone shuffled cards into a microphone and another walked into the audience to give someoneone a present -- all, in some way, part of the score... [laughter from the audience erupts when] Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor of the SanFrancisco Symphony, used the blender to make a smoothie....

More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity -- the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses.  Actually, it wasn't so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all.  How was it, I wondered, that I could have lived in a city for four years already -- even having walked down this street after a symphony performance so many times -- and never have actually heard anything? (102)

I especially like the detail that Odell emphasized -- that it's not just hearing things BETTER, but that she hears them "at all."  Like T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution, things that have always been background appear for the first time... maybe not even as background, but as anything that enters the sphere of attention (the "dome" of attention).  

Until I typed the lines above, I hadn't noticed that the "instruments" weren't just "random things," but things that could be considered "musical" in some way.  (So, in a sense, a second reading can make things that were "background" or "unimportant" become more important.).  Odell cites Cage's "philosophy that 'everything we hear is music.'"