This paper was interesting to read because of the author’s unique perspective on sound, although I didn't necessarily agree with all of the author’s assertions.
Particularly in part one, the author makes grand conclusions about how different life forms experience different multiverses through sound and how our perception of sound is representative of a grand harmony between all the things around us. While there are many experiential qualities to sound and its use in art can take many forms, the biggest assertions in this section of the paper seemed to be mostly theoretical and not necessarily consistent with reality. The point that our ears are better at discerning complex phenomena than our eyes seemed particularly strange and not very well supported. Although fun to think about, I thought it was unlikely that music is a way to map reality through metaphors of sound. Sound, and to some degree music, are of course a big part of how we perceive the world, but I thought it was more likely that sight and sound have a symbiotic relationship to form how we perceive the world around us as opposed to being completely separate experiences. Especially given how complex and individual everybody’s brains are, perhaps sound plays a bigger role for someone who learns well auditorily, but less for people who learn most effectively through visuals.
Later on in the paper, the author goes into the influence of John Cage on our understanding of sound and what it means for something to be musical. I appreciate the risks he took in his work, pushing the boundaries of what everyday people considered music, but again I think the author might be jumping to conclusions without necessarily having all the information to back up his conclusions. Although John Cage deserves credit for pushing the boundaries of music with his art, I am a little skeptical that he alone redefined the cultural codes of music. It seems inevitable that the understanding of music at that time would shift and evolve just as music today shifts and evolves. Although his work was an important exploration of what defined music at the time, I am almost more inclined to see his work as part of the incremental evolution of music and human understanding over time than an existential revolution of how humans understand music and sound.
Overall I thought this paper was interesting to read and presented a new perspective on how humans relate to sound that I had not heard before. Although there are a couple areas where I think the author might have been a little quick to establish his conclusions, they were an interesting thought experiment to explore.
