Attention to birdsong converts undifferentiated noise into discrete meaningful perceptions

Evidence

What amazed and humbled me about bird-watching was the way it changed the granularity of my perception, which had been pretty “low-res.” At first, I just noticed birdsong more. Of course it had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time. And then, one by one, I started learning each song and associating it with a bird, so that now when I walk into the Rose Garden, I inadvertently acknowledge them in my head as though they were people: “Hi, raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch, towhee, hawk, nuthatch…” and so on. The sounds have become so familiar to me that I no longer strain to identify them; they register instead like speech. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 63

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the Deep Listening/Pauline Oliveros theme in the reader’s knowledge base — the transformation of a soundscape from lo-fi undifferentiated noise to hi-fi signal distinctions. Also mirrors the discussion in ‘The Soundscape’ about keynote sounds becoming noticed only when classified. — connects to: Genuine bird communication resists capture by checklist and phonetic paraphrase — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 565; Bird song masks noise better than water by adding meaning, not just energy — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles,…, 2408
• DEFINE: Granularity of perception is the key operational concept here — attention as a resolution-raising faculty, which the reader will need to pin down precisely for the defense of Odell.