Aural Experience Quotes

I actually hate lyrics, and I hate it when they're quoted in reviews. I don't think they matter that much; it's the sounds of words - not the words - that I look for.

Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.

The sound and music are 50% of the entertainment in a movie.

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.

The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

I'm not really interested in music. Music is just a means of creating a magical state.

I never go back and listen to the recorded document. The thrill comes when the balance can be attained. Everyone in the room can have a shared, communal rock experience.

When you go to a great concert, you feel this arc, almost like the music of a well-chosen set takes you on this trip through emotions and through various forms of intellectual engagement.

At Bloomington, Indiana, I was invited to listen to music written in quarter tones for four harps and voices. I had to go out to be sick.

I spend just as much time on how people hear my music as I do the actual music, no matter how long it takes. I'm such a visual artist as well that it always goes hand-in-hand.

I've always said if I had to pinpoint what's more important in a scary movie, the soundscape or the visuals, I'd pick the sound.

Few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to [hear it].

Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable; it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.

But in the end, music is ultimately an aural art, pure and simple.

I remember as a student going to Covent Garden, where they took out the stall seats and you hunkered down on the floor - I heard Pavarotti in Tosca there, and the experience of being in that same room with that astonishing voice has never left me.

Music is the noise that surrounds the stillness of the art form.

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.

I went to see Alison Krauss and Union Station at Disney Hall and I would say it was one of the most astonishing sonic experiences I have had. It's an enormous room that's acoustically perfect. My interpretation of receiving music as a layman is that the way the music kind of settled on me in that room was perfection.

I hate this idea in the Cinematheque that you must watch silent movies with no music, like it's a piece of art. It's not true.

I enjoy co-directing or even being there just for support because you get to see your script come to aural life in front of you.

If you're writing a song, you have to write something that can be understood serially. When you're reading a poem that's written for the page, your eye can skip up and down. You can see the thing whole. But you're not going to see the thing whole in the song. You're going to hear it in series, and you can't skip back.

Opera - above and beyond anything else - is about the music, and it should be about the music.

What a blessing it would be if we could open and shut our ears...as easily as we open and shut our eyes.

There's always an added element of a poem when it's read aloud because then you can really hear the rhythm, and the cadence, and even the pronunciation sometimes adds another layer to the poem.