Lee Konitz Quotes

Hearing is a form of touch. You feel it through your body, and sometimes it almost hits your face.

I'm an acoustical person.

As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?

All things are in a state of vibration. Vibrations from objects in our surroundings are constantly impinging upon us and carry to our senses a cognition of the external world. The vibrations in the ether act upon our eyes so that we see, and vibrations in the air transmit sounds to the ear.

There is something very basic to the sense of listening. The sense of hearing is the only one that operates totally from vibrations, without other physical or chemical reactions to receive the sensations.

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.

I am very emotionally affected by sound. Sounds are the inexplicable... There is a sound you hear in your head, it's your nerves, or your blood running.

I had really good hearing and when you're scared it gets heightened so you hear scratching noises or something.

Music is just air moving around.

How nice the human voice is when it isn't singing.

Harmonics are vibrations a fraction of the length of the vibrating string, which add higher-pitched and more complex content to the notes. With a dull instrument, the harmonics die out, but with a sustaining instrument, the harmonics continue to sound along with the fundamental note.

It's all about sound. It's that simple.

The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

The body's like a huge ear. It's as simple as that.

Sounds always fascinated me.

Music is a physical expression that has a physical impact upon the listener. Sound travels in waves through the air. This is not abstract. This is scientific fact. And it makes physical contact with the eardrum... and with the heart... and with the rest of the body.

The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch.

It's not like I actually understand the properties of sound.

Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?

The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.

Through seven figures come sensations for a man; there is hearing for sounds, sight for the visible, nostril for smell, tongue for pleasant or unpleasant tastes, mouth for speech, body for touch, passages outwards and inwards for hot or cold breath. Through these come knowledge or lack of it.

I don't suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don't have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn't hear.

When I am willing, all sound is available to me.

A person does not hear sound only through the ears; he hears sound through every pore of his body. It permeates the entire being.