Experiencing Cage’s music reawakened Odell’s hearing of ordinary city sounds

Evidence

More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity—the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all. How was it, I wondered, that I could have lived in a city for four years already—even having walked down this street after a symphony performance so many times—and never have actually heard anything? — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 369

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates the reader’s soundscape/Deep Listening material on keynote sounds being heard only once one attends to them. — connects to: Cage’s silent piece frames ambient noise as the musical content — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 366; Cage’s silence turns out to be not an absence of sound but an opening to unintended yet palpable sounds that saturate our perceptual field. — John Cage and the meaning of his silent piece
• SEED: The contrast between hearing and merely registering — a return from a frame-shift experience where the familiar literally becomes audible — could anchor the ‘attending vs. going through the motions’ distinction central to Odell’s defense.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Cage’s silent piece frames ambient noise as the musical content — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 366; Cage’s silence turns out to be not an absence of sound but an opening to unintended yet palpable sounds that saturate our perceptual field. — John Cage and the meaning of his silent piece