Students learn the meaning of sound at the National Day on Writing
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug" was written on a poster in an office of the Writing Center located in Anspach Hall.
The room was lit with lamps emitting a soft yellow glow, and the faint hum of the radiator vibrated in the background. In the left-hand corner, a coffee pot was bubbling with dark brew. A painting of the Earth hung on the back wall. A blue and green lava lamp glimmered, and several fans spun overhead.
A man wearing a beret with a gray button-over sweater and sneakers stood in the front of the room, uttering strange, nonsensical noises.
The occasion is National Day on Writing, which took place on Friday.
“How does sound happen? What is it?” English Language and Literature Faculty Robert Fanning said. “Do different sounds make us feel differently?”
The audience stared back. This man was asking questions that had never crossed their minds.
“If you’re really listening, you hear so much,” Fanning said. “Sound is vibration in our bodies. Poetry (is) units of sound, and language comes out of our primal emotion. Our bodies are chambers for sound.”
The professor instructed the listeners to close their eyes as he moved about the room with various vehicles of sound. The audience heard laughing, strumming, grating, scraping, ringing, humming.
“It’s not just about the ideas,” he said, after they had opened their eyes. “It’s about the sound.”
The professor passed out slips of paper to each person. On each paper was a different set of instructions: to write about a specific topic using only sounds. “No real words allowed,” the professor said.
One woman volunteered to read her poem out loud. The listeners fell silent as soft, rhythmic noise poured into the hollows of the small room, filling the ears and bodies of each audience member with tranquility.
Another volunteer offered to read her poem, and the audience grimaced as she screeched and squealed.
The professor discussed the impact of the poems, and the feelings provoked by the noises.
“I know (now) that different sounds give me different emotions,” English Language Institute student Wang Zeming said. “It’s interesting.”
Her ELI teacher informed her about National Day on Writing, and she attended the event as a result of it.
The seminar also inspired ELI student Eman Alshami.
“In a way, to be able to see people coming in tells me that writing is still important,” she said. “Even with new technology available.”
In just an hour and a half, the professor taught every person in the room the meaning of sound, and the powerful effects of it on listeners.
“Words are sound,” he said. “Feeling, image, concept translated to someone else’s ears.”
