On Hearing

I have a textbook for my digital media class titled, "Audio Culture, readings in modern music" by Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner.
It is a compilation book of essays written about modern music.
The assignment I just read was incredibly interesting. It was about how, over the years, silence has steadily been removed from our society. We fill our lives with noise, which makes it more difficult for important sounds to have any meaning. The author referenced "signal to noise ratio" a few times, but giving it a new meaning in what we hear with our ears.
Very cool.
What was most interesting to me, thought, was a paragraph that i'm going to reproduce here. Read it all. I dare you:

"We will not argue for the priority of the ear. Modern man, who seems to be in the process of deafening himself apparently regards this as a trivial mechanism. In the West the ear has given way to the eye as the most important gatherer of information. One of the most evident testaments of this change is the way in which we have come to imagine God. It was not until the Renaissance that God became portraiture. Previously He had been conceived as sound or vibration. In the Middle East the message of Mohammed is still heard through the recitation of his Koran...."
"Clairaudience" from The Music of the Environment by R. Murray Schafer

how cool is that?

I've heard it said that blind people have a much easier time interacting with the world than deaf people. Because the ears are, inherently, much more useful than the eyes.
Think about this.

All art conveys emotion. That's what makes us look at it or listen to it. But visual art and musical art are inherently different: most people can't look at a bunch of colors on a piece of canvas and understand what the artist was thinking. Visual art usually represents something: pictures of objects that we already recognize, shapes with lines that our eyes follow to perceive thoughts, and colors that influence our thinking.
Music is different.
You don't have to recognize sound for it to convey emotion.
You could be a time traveling blacksmith from the 1650s and listen to ambient electronic music and still feel the emotions of the composer, without ever knowing what you were listening to.

Our ears are rooted to our subconscious. They are sensitive.


So many problems that people have with God would be nonexistent if we were better at using our ears instead of our eyes.
You can't see God. But you can feel him. Like you can feel wind.
And you can hear wind.
God's name in Hebrew was a bunch of "breath noises"-no vowels. His name was literally breath. Vibration.
God is much more fundamental to life than what we can see.