Walter Murch Quotes

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.

For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.

When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic - here on Sixth Avenue, for instance - I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound... I don’t need sound to talk to me.

Each environment has its own signature. Sound tells a story: You make choices about what you're hearing, where to look, how you want to feel about what's going on.

I think anything you listen to is going to be different. You're going to listen to a song differently if you're just sitting around somewhere listening on your phone as opposed to sitting in a dark room listening to a vinyl album. It's going to be a totally different experience.

You cannot hear music and noise at the same time.

For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.

I can hear the music all around me.

If you don't have the possibility of listening to music, you can't know if you love it.

Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.

When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.

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.

The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.

You don't need to be a performer in order to dive into the sensory experience of music. Simply get as close as you can to the source of the music.

I write what I hear.

The world is full of sounds. We just don't usually hear them as music.

The key concept is to open your ears. Music can be here and there, anywhere surrounding you.

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

You wish to see; listen. Hearing is a step toward Vision.

The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

I should feel the air move against me, and feel the things I touched, instead of having only to look at them. I'm sure life is all wrong because it has become much too visual - we can neither hear nor feel nor understand, we can only see. I'm sure that is entirely wrong.

Silence is our enemy, and sound is our weapon.

If sound is music and came from silence, then silence is potentially greater than sound. If the sound is effective, it should actually have a chemical - some sort of physiological - effect on the listener, so he doesn't have to hear that sound again.

Listening is like running down a mountain on a switchback trail, the sound of surprise generating its own momentum. There’s a punk glee inside the bluegrass craft–and a punk vehemence inside the bluegrass smile.