Find a familiar sound. Something archaic. Something that resonates from childhood, or from long ago. Something you don’t live with anymore. Something you know in your bones. Approximate that sound with your body and repeat it until you feel satisfied.
Montreal, Nov 8, 2018, 9:15 pm (action for the past; after travelling the city at night)
Action notes: On the way home this evening (in Montreal, the city of my childhood and not the city that I currently live in) the sound of the Metro taking off took me by surprise. Every time I visit my hometown, which I left over 25 years ago, and hear those three notes as the train starts up, something happens to my body and I am 9 again. Research tells me that the sounds are limited to older MR-73 trains, and comes from a piece of equipment called a “peak chopper” that is used to power up the motor in stages in order to prevent a power surge. I was 9 when I started taking the metro alone daily to get to school and maybe something about navigating the world alone as a small little creature in a field of big creatures made those comforting tones mean more. Or maybe I just love them because I have never been anywhere else in the world where these three tones tell me that a train is taking off. They are, as the Metro is, for me, synonymous with Montreal. They are Montreal’s “Mind the Gap.” They locate me in an urban soundscape unlike any other. Anyway. I decided to try and find the tones by ear with my voice when I got home, and then, once I found them, I lay on the couch with one palm on my chest and one on my diaphragm, and hummed them over and over, hearing the notes and feeling them resonate throughout my body: “dah, DAH, duh…” And as I did so, I found myself feeling more and more childlike and gleeful. I am still smiling.
Action constraints: None really. Except to the extent that I noticed, as I was doing it, that what I was doing was more of a “sounding” exercise than a listening one. Listening is, of course there, and I worked to listen as I was sounding, but, strictly speaking, the first registration of the sounds of the Metro (and the desire to honour them through an action) was more of a “hearing” than a “listening” engagement, and the action itself was more of a sounding one. So: hearing to sounding with an overlay of listening?