Reading Response: On A Clear Day I Can Hear Forever

For my first reading response I chose an essay titled On A Clear Day I Can Hear Forever, by Gary Ferrington. This essay was a great choice for me because I absolutely love how he goes into detail about the various sounds he hears from his high rise apartment. Instead of simply saying that he can hear the wind, he relates the sound to how the wind carries storms from the coast and cools the air heated by the hot pavement. I also chose this article because I like how it makes the point that sometimes the best time to listen is when it seems like there is no sound at all.
This essay has a few main points. One of these main points is that an absence of sound is far more impressive the an abundance of sound. The author details how in the winter when kids are not playing and people are not out and about he can hear the Willamette River in the far off distance. These far off sounds are only heard during this time when the normal sounds are nowhere to be found. Another main point of the essay is that not all ambient city sounds are bad. Even though they are abundant, things like cars and the low hum of human conversation can still be interesting.
This essay and the ideas it contains are relevant to my practice as a media artist in many ways. It relates to how I try to completely identify and visualize what I hear. I feel that the author does a good job of showing how this is possible when he goes into detail about how he can identify what train is passing based on the sound it makes. As a media artist, I can see myself trying to do this with many things other than trains. To me, this ability to put an image with a sound is very important. This essay is also relevant to my practice as a media artist because it describes all the sounds in a very detailed manner. The ability to express sounds in words is an amazing skill that is useful to any media artist.