Sound, part of nature…

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How often do we have the chance to be lost far in a forest, completely isolated by the rest of the world, the noise of the cities and modern life? Not as often as I would like, I admit. But for the last few days, I had the luck to experience it to the maximum, lost in the forests and slopes of mount Olympus. What is astonishing is how fast one feels part of it, part of nature. It is as if our body keeps memories of other lives, when our everyday life was close to nature and part of it. It is easier to adapt than one could think, and so much more exhilarating. After you pass the fascination of colours, magnitude, diversity, grandeur, you realise that the sound scape you are immersed into is equally fascinating, if not more than the imagery. Everything makes a sound all around you. People survive or die by sound, you listen or you don’t to the enemy approaching, or to help coming to rescue you. Our hearing adapts to the lower level of sound in nature, our hearing sensitivity increases to levels we thought never existed (even us, professionals working with sound every day). What is most fascinating of all – at least to me – is the rhythm of nature. On the surface one thinks there isn’t one, and sound events just happen randomly. Then if you stay long enough and listen carefully you understand that each element has its own rhythmic structure. Some of them slow in pace, relaxing, slower than our heart beat, some faster, making it more frightening. We even feel it louder than it really is because of its rhythmic structure. And it is by far the ultimate surround experience! Not just 7.1 or even today’s 11.2. It is more closer to 1million.1thousand if you see what I am trying to say. It is close to the concept of DTS ‘object’ based system where all event are individual, but once this is multiplied by the forces of nature, it all becomes unified. It becomes such a dense sound universe, that makes you ‘sense’ the forest, not just hear it. You feel it by sound much deeper than you eyes can describe it to your brain. Then, once left to the tangled arms of the sounds of nature you start decoding what you hear… you start recognising familiar rhythms. Rhythms you remember from music you like, music that you’ve heard and some of music that you imagine it could be composed. And then you realise why these rhythms exist inside of us: it is because we all bear them inside us, in our DNA, in memories of body and mind that belong to the social sub-conscience that Jung wrote about, from thousands of generations living in the forests, out in open nature. Elementary? Maybe. But thinking or reading about it is one thing, discovering and experiencing it, is a totally different. It is like returning back to lives you’ve never lived, meet pre-descendants you never knew you had, or even better, feeling it deep in your guts that we, humans, no matter how arrogant we became, we were once part of this planet, possibly in harmony with it, that we are made out of the same fabric. It makes you feel that you really belong somewhere! You may even think that you can relate to your species… or even accept others…