Acoustic Experience Quotes

I am very honored and excited to have 'Devotion' released as the first DVD Audio disc... surround sound is amazing... The music comes alive and is so vibrant - it's unlike anything you've ever heard before!

Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

I trust microphones, speakers and recordings less and less, and no longer buy into the idea that I can recreate at home, or in my earphones, the experience of hearing live acoustic instruments. The orchestra is already a set of speakers that react differently to each player, each room and each concert - it's that high level of uncertainly and unrepeatability that I like. The music is just soaked into the walls of a room straight from the instruments - and it's a one-off deal. The alternative - left speaker, right speaker - is kind of a compromise.

The way we look at it, everything is a sound.

I never made a distinction, really, between music and sound. Let me explain what I mean by that. I grew up near to a train station, and the sound of the trains became a very important part of my world. It was a very musical sound to me.

The power of live music is vast. Live music is a wonderful way to spend some time.

Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft–and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.

When you hear a large symphony orchestra. for instance, in a concert hall, there's a big, sweeping sound that just doesn't get on to a record.

Electric guitars are an abomination, whoever heard of an electric violin? An electric cello? Or for that matter an electric singer?

I'm usually more concerned with how things sound than how they look on the page.

Music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it's not my world.

People aren't hearing all the music.

I love to hear a cool ambient sound at runway shows. It creates a good energy.

I'm always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you're drowning, and it's there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music.

There was an era when people would turn on their radio and hear a radio drama. Now, you could be as scared by that as seeing it filmed. In those days, people used to sit by the fire and imagine what they were hearing. Everything is its own art form.

When I am willing, all sound is available to me.

Music, I say, the most divine striker of the senses.

Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff. And things normally experienced as acoustically experienced becomes visibly beheld, and it's quite spectacular.

To me, an untrained ear, a young person at the time, I would hear off the different feels, all these different sounds, and then years later realize that everyone had used the same equipment, just to their own ends.

With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That's why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.

Beautiful music plays, but not everyone with ears can hear it.

We cannot describe sound, but we cannot forget it either.