We have also sound houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise divers trembling and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear to do further the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as if it were tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in tubes and pipes, in strange lines and distances...
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New Atlantis (1627).Francis Bacon
» Francis Bacon - all quotes »
Music has to do with sounds, so we need to find them somewhere and it is preferred to find musical ones. You have two sources for sounds: noises, which always tell you something — a door cracking, a dog barking, the thunder, the storm; and then you have instruments. An instrument tells you, 'la-la-la-la.' Music has to find a passage between noises and instruments. It has to escape. It has to find a compromise and an evasion at the same time; something that would not be dramatic because that has no interest to us, but something that would be more interesting than sounds like Do-Re-Mi-Fa...
Pierre Schaeffer
If [music] has that tag on it, regardless if it sounds like that or not they’ll never go and find out what it really sounds like. To be labeled “emo” is sometimes very apropos, because there are a bunch of bands that actually sound like carbon copies of each other. But again, that’s music, so.
Joe Trohman
They say, "you mean it's just sounds?" thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless, whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more than what they are. I don't want them to be psychological. I don't want a sound to pretend that it's a bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.
John Cage
It's not what you've been taught - in the conservative sectors - that you have a poverty of materials. You're all healthy, you're all strong enough to make sounds until the end of time. The only problem you have is deciding whether your sound is any good. What I'm encouraging you to do is not to think about that too much, not to reevaluate the sounds, but just to examine them, and see what the structure is. See what's actually there, before you start this process of trying to ask yourself whether Nancy Reagan would like it, or Mrs. Bush. Just take the whole big first chunk, and then break it down. Follow what you know about it to where it goes... The music's there. I'm not trying to be weird, but it's there. I was taught that I didn't have anything, and it was my job to work hard and get something, and that's just not true.
Robert Ashley
Not many sounds in life, and I include all urban and rural sounds, exceed in interest a knock at the door.
Charles Lamb
Bacon, Francis
Bacon, Francis (artist)
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