Sound

Sound is the vibration of matter, as perceived by the sense of hearing. Unwanted or annoying sound is often called noise.

Sourced

• Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
  • John Cage, "Communication", the third of the Composition as a Process lectures given in Darmstadt in 1958 and published in Silence. Many of Cage's works use sounds traditionally regarded as unmusical (radios not tuned to any particular station, for instance): he really did believe that the sound of a truck and the sounds made in a factory had just as much musical worth as the sounds made in a music school. There is also a suggestion expressed in the quote that in order to determine the artistic worth of something, it is necessary to examine the context in which it exists.

• A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.
  • John Cage (1955), quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

• Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.
  • Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK 66840.

• You know the sound of two hands clapping; tell me, what is the sound of one hand?
  • Hakuin Ekaku (1686-1769). The phrase is a Kōan, an irrational comment used in Zen Buddhism in order to assist practitioners in reaching enlightenment.

• Whenever you wash dishes, cook, or clean, if you make no sound, this is smartness itself. A person who enters a house and makes a lot of noise is revealing a lack of spirituality; even cats and dogs do not make unnecessary sounds, and man as he naturally is does not make any either.
  • Michio Kushi (1926), Spiritual Journey (1994), p. 4.

• Could we not imagine that noise...is itself nothing more than the sum of a multitude of different sounds which are being heard simultaneously?
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de Musique (1767).

• If a tree falls in a forest, and no-one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?
  • Source unknown, but apparently originating in the twentieth century; a 1910 physics book asks "When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is near by to hear it, does it make a sound? Why?" Charles Riborg Mann, George Ransom Twiss, Physics (1910), p. 235. See also: If a tree falls in a forest.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 740.

• A thousand trills and quivering sounds
  In airy circles o'er us fly,
  Till, wafted by a gentle breeze,
  They faint and languish by degrees,
  And at a distance die.
  • Joseph Addison, An Ode for St. Cecilia's Day, VI.

• A noise like of a hidden brook
  In the leafy month of June,
  That to the sleeping woods all night
  Singeth a quiet tune.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798; 1817), Part V, Stanza 18.

• By magic numbers and persuasive sound.
  • William Congreve, Mourning Bride, Act I, scene 1.

• I hear a sound so fine there's nothing lives
  'Twixt it and silence.
  • James Sheridan Knowles, Virginius, Act V, scene 2.

• Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
  • Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, Enigma. "Cut off my head, etc." Last line.

• And filled the air with barbarous dissonance.
  • John Milton, Comus (1637), line 550.

• Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds,
  At which the universal host up sent
  A shout that tore hell's concave, and beyond
  Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book I, line 540.

• Their rising all at once was as the sound
  Of thunder heard remote.
  • John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book II, line 476.

• To all proportioned terms he must dispense
  And make the sound a picture of the sense.
  • Christopher Pitt, translation of Vida's Art of Poetry.

• The murmur that springs
  From the growing of grass.
  • Edgar Allen Poe, Al Aaraaf, Part II, line 124.

• The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
  • Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1709), line 365.

• The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry V (c. 1599), Act IV, scene 4, line 73.

• What's the business,
  That such a hideous trumpet calls to parley
  The sleepers of the house? Speak, speak!
  • William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act II, scene 3, line 86.

• Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound.
  • Isaac Watts, Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Book II. Hymn 63.

• My eyes are dim with childish tears,
  My heart is idly stirred,
  For the same sound is in my ears
  Which in those days I heard.
  • William Wordsworth, The Fountain.

Unsourced

• Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she has laid an asteroid
  • Mark Twain