CROSSTALK No 013 “Without glasses I can not hear well.”

Taking advantage of my lens renewal and return to the only real sponsorship I’ve had, by the optics of the Serrano family, I remembered the phrase “without glasses, I do not hear well”. This based on a real feeling, which came to my mind when the eye operations began to become more routine and the family ophthalmologist asked me if my glasses bothered me. My negative response was immediate, followed by that famous phrase that links sight to hear.

It may sound absurd, but it is a fact and I know that it happens to many people who wear glasses. It may have to do with our concentration being affected, but it is that one of our 5 basic senses is diminished and therefore it is taking energy away from the other 4, being the case of hearing probably the main one for me. Because taste, smell, and touch are not being used constantly, even if they are always active. That can be an explanation.

Many times we close our eyes to listen better and focus on what is sounding, especially today, thanks to technology, we “see” the sound. That waveform that appears on the computer and that we can easily distinguish phrases without listening to them, only with recognizing the drawing of that “little fish” that appears on the screen. This practice sometimes makes us lose objectivity because we see what is sounding and let ourselves be carried away by that image. And what do we do when we close our eyes? Deactivate the view to pay more attention to the ears. To me particularly, I do not like so much to close my eyes to listen, because my nature is to have my eyes open, that’s why I concentrate on a point and I do not take my eyes off of that, but there are people who have taken it as a habit and It works very well. However, when we close our eyes, we sometimes lose our balance, which indicates a link between sight and inner ear.

To this, we add the analogy of giving colors and tones to sounds. For example, if something sounds “opaque” it is because it lacks “brightness”, thus incorporating visual characteristics to express sound properties. The sounds of low and high frequencies are related to dark and bright colors respectively. It also happens that something may sound sweet or harsh, where we use taste or touch as a reference. And we do not have to go to the extreme of a client who asked me to raise 2.5 db in 2 khz to the trombone so that it would sound more “ecological”!
What I want to achieve is that we must “listen” to the music, not only with our ears and our brain, but with the skin, the stomach and all the senses that we have at hand in the best possible way and not let ourselves be carried away by what we can see now, in meters, screens and algorithms. Music is made to generate feelings that we must accept and perceive freely.

Dedicated to Javier Aponte