Some years ago, I came across an instrumental track while studying. It was sweet and sad,  the kind of art that makes you stop, makes you conscious of your hands and arms and the rise and fall of your chest – art that makes life brighten in colour and heighten in sensation. I felt incredibly moved by the cinematic, deeply heartfelt, and orchestral arrangement of the track, and so I turned my phone on to see what was playing. It was Hearing by Sleeping At Last, and I remember thinking how poetically meta it was for an artist to produce such a beautiful listening experience, and name it after the act of listening. It was simultaneously melancholic and hopeful in the attention it brought to the introspective nature of the act of music listening specifically. I was intrigued enough to see what sort of wider project the track was a part of. My findings, somehow, were more moving than the song  itself. 

Hearing is the eighth track in Atlas II, Sleeping at last’s twenty-five track album, where all the tracks are named after the five senses, human emotions, and numbers. The album relies on highly orchestral, emotional instrumentation, accompanied by deeply moving and meaningful lyrics. Hearing thus finds its place in a larger musical project concerned with an exploration of human experience through relatively abstract concepts such as emotions, which nonetheless make up much of our lives. Ryan O’Neal, lead of the indie-rock group, shares that the song had to be instrumental as, ‘Though our voices are a vital part of our experience of sound,  typically when we think of our sense of hearing, we aren’t thinking inwardly of hearing ourselves. We are more often thinking outwardly, of the sounds we experience’. O’Neal further chronicles how he found it ‘incredibly beautiful’ and heartbreakingly poignant to witness people who were able to hear for the first time in their life after having cochlear implants installed in their ears. He felt as if the raw emotion accompanied by hearing for the first time, a thing easy to take for granted when one has never experienced the lack thereof, was best represented through sound itself, without any voices. Yet, there is one recurring sentence at the back of the instrumental towards the end of the track – ‘love is an echo’. The four words attribute a softness and vulnerability to the experience of hearing which we would normally not pay much attention to. O’Neal’s genius in the track truly lies in how he, as he reveals, structures the entire song as an echo to mirror the recurring ‘love is an echo’, by repeatedly using one melody and chord progression throughout. This self-imposed limitation allows the music to structurally represent the lyrical theme.

The reason why Hearing is a particularly beautiful song, even removed from its wider meaning, and stripped down only to its careful production and delivery, is because it is deliberate art which, in today’s age of capitalism, consumerism, and commercialisation, is rare to come by. It is not that people are no longer producing good art; it is that there is too much impersonality attached to it due to the primary goal being to sell it. Everything seems to have a self-imposed renewed importance on consuming, and not nearly enough on digesting. Hearing, focused on the seemingly banal and obvious privilege and joy of the experience of listening, makes listeners take a step back from the expansiveness of media to the experience of the self, and just think. It instills gratitude for being able to listen, without making one experience the loss of it. Especially in the current geopolitical state of the world, it is paramount for all of us to cling on to the slightest moments of peace, solidarity, and gratitude, even if they are with regards to the otherwise overlooked joy of hearing, and of listening to art in a commercial age.

Image Credits: Geordanna Cordero via Unsplash