Noise, Sound, Silence

 Event 

Tim Ingold - Noise, Sound, Silence

Life begins in the noise of birth and ends in the silence of death. In between is sound. Both noise and silence are experiences of hearing nothing. But blinding white light and the pitch black of night are also experiences of seeing nothing. How then, can we tell noise from silence, or black from white?

In this talk, Tim Ingold will focus on the meaning of sound, but do so by way of its comparison with light. He will show how in the case of light, it is necessary to distinguish between the ray and the beam: the first a line of emission, the second a line of combustion. He will also argue that to grasp the full experience of sound, pitch and timbre must be rejoined, just as it is necessary to reunify colour with lustre if we are to grasp the experience of light.

About the speaker 

Tim Ingold is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Following 25 years at the University of Manchester, Ingold moved in 1999 to Aberdeen, where he established the UK’s newest Department of Anthropology.

Ingold is currently writing and teaching on issues on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. He is the author of The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013) The Life of Lines (2015) and Anthropology and/as Education (2017).