The Sound of Less
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
- Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
What is the sound of less and how would you know if you heard it? Would it arise merely from lowering the dial, from the supposed silence that follows? What kinds of resonant hums would ring out? If the autotuned noise pollution of our days dissipated long enough that our ears adjusted to the melodies murmuring beyond it, what might we hear? Among the whispering, trilling, warbling and crooning, a different question erupts: who might we hear?
The vast majority of our human ancestors lived within ecospheres of sound that were principally sung by elemental, animal and vegetal kin. The rhythms of rivers, the crows of winged ones, the susurrations of wind through grass, the voices of four-leggeds. Little of the sonic resonance of our forebears’ days was heralded by humans, at least in comparison to our times. Their music often emanated from birdsong, hisses and howls, clicks and croaks, heartbeats, wind whispers, and incantations from the deep blue below.
For countless generations, human harmonies conjured the remembrance and relationships of those who sustained us. They were often offerings and invocations made for wild and divine others. Those masters of ceremony usually carried a small repertoire of stories and songs that themselves were evocations of their place. The village ceremonies coaxed them from the soil, from memory, from the furrow, inviting people to remember where and whom they came from.
Their songs were rarely if ever written down, inherited by and guarded on the tutored tongues of each new generation. This isn’t to say they weren’t recorded, not in the sense of affixing them to a man-made medium. Rather, the medium was the human. Such songs were rehearsed, recanted, and remembered, calling forth the roots of the word “record”, which signal a “restoration of heart.” Such songs were cherished, practiced and remembered as the memory of a people in place.
The Spells
Compared to the Babylonian towers of song we have access to today, such anthems were probably few in number. How might those elder enchanters (i.e. etymologically “those who sing”) have come to their music when ‘looking something up’ or making a copy isn’t possible and never has been? What begins to happen to a people’s ancestral auditory memory when libraries and recording devices begin to replace cultural and ancestral memory? What is lost when the sounds of our other-than-human kin are fully eclipsed or erased by those of the human? What form does the sonic shape of that absence take?
We can try to tongue the grooves in our mouths for signs. We might taste how those hollows itch when we hear timeworn chants, mantras, and music. We might unbridle the throat when we sing with our whole beings and bodies. We might in turn note how the breath of our ancestors took shape, speaking and singing to and not just of the wild world around them. Without the aid of the internet, playlists or catalogs, without headphones, blueteeth or even vinyl, with the only speaker box being our bodies, we could throw listening parties for long forgotten sets.
In places muted by the machinations of modernity, we can ask how the answer to the question of sustainability might properly include less. In a greenwashed world, the dilemma of “what to sustain?” casts two spells: one, that we can only sustain what already exists, and two, that we don’t require less of what needs sustaining. The former whispers, “we don’t need new ways of listening, only new songs.” The latter says, “keep the hits, but keep them playing 24/7.”
Could it be that to sustain the relational resonance required to compose the worlds we wish to live in, our ears require listening to less? Not less listening, but listening to what “less” sounds like in our world. What if, in harmonizing older ways of being, in listening to elder, lyrical lineages, we’d be able to hear more? Not more of the same. More of what (and whom) has been silenced by the techno-sonic cultures of our times? What if we replaced the question of “what do we need to sustain?” with “how can we sustain less?”
Deep Time Murmurations
Imagine, if you can, that for the duration of your entire life, you only have access to a few albums of music. Imagine, for a moment, that they don’t have eighty-minute time limits. Imagine that the verses are only ever sung and never recorded, never “played back.” They’re always performed and listened to live and in that sense alive. Imagine that some, but not all of these songs are reserved resolutely for weddings, funerals, births, initiations, agricultural seedings or harvests. These are the only times in your life that you’d hear them.
Imagine that this handful of treasured tunes is sung to you in your mother’s belly, as you are carried into this world, as you drink her milk, as you slowly grow into your adult human body, as you become a spouse and later parent and grandparent, still. By this point, you know these songs by heart. They synchronize yours to your people and theirs to yours, rooting you in place and place in you.
You hear them sung at the ceremonies, the cadence slightly shifting as each new generation of voices arises. When appropriate, you sing along, witnessing their choral consequences cast upon the community over time. You recognize their lilts not just as songs, but as psalms and dirges, calling forth the lived memory of those who came before you, the lyrical lineage that binds you to them and them to you through tune, tongue, and terra. This is how music resonates among your people, through your life and into your death.
What if those songs hold codes and conditions for how to live well, for what it means to be both a steward and a guest among your people? What if they are the ciphered result of countless generations of kin ensuring that you learn from their mistakes?
What if their being sung is the signal – the bronze bell invitation – for the wild, the divine and the dead themselves to show up, to be sung to (and not just of) in a hymnal homecoming wherein they can recognize themselves? What if this is how music was understood in other times, and what if the desire and need to record instead of remember compromises all of that?
Against Access
These provocations are laid at your eyes, stranger, in part, because most of us are utterly inundated by noise. Concurrently enriched and polluted. As of 2024, “More music is being released (in a single day) than was released in the calendar year of 1989,” says former chief economist of Spotify. Today, our voices and chords are silenced by a staggering surplus of song and speech. “Access” to tracks, playlists, samples, instruments, lessons and concerts, all of which are understood as products or services in our time, has become synonymous with freedom and equality. Like many, I am grateful for such privilege and connection. Music has saved my life on more than one occasion, as perhaps it has yours.
At the same time, the quasi-religious mission of access has also become a way to ensure that what gets sustained in our time is nothing less than the status quo setlist of Everything Now, a supermarket selection of anything that’s ever been recorded. And yet, if the privileged access that most modern people enjoy today can’t be extended to everyone everywhere, if we can’t make Spotify Premium free for all or ensure that every single person can play a trumpet, then access was never sustainable in the first place. This is the museumization of music, whereby the exhibition glass case is your screen, and the principal effect on the life of the song is to reduce it in scale and scope to all others, as long as you watch this advertisement first.
In our time, what access does is sustain our ability to hold steady on a runaway train. Music moves us. It acts as sanctuary, as refuge. We can wonder, though, alongside such gratitude, if this shelter we’re cradled in doesn’t also immobilize us from slamming on the brakes. To paraphrase the central tenet of philosopher Bayo Akomolafe’s post-activism, what if the anthems we orchestrate to lead us out of the echo chamber of our times are ensuring our permanent residence there? What if the sanctuary of sound that so sustains us in dark days is an asylum, where the overmedication of music ensures no one can hear the sound of less? Moreover, with all the white noise of our screened-in worlds, how would we know?
The Consequences of More
This is not a rebuke of the incredible moment in which we live that allows so many to choose their instrument, genre or voice. Nor is it an endorsement of it (despite the personal praise and awe for being born into such a time with the privilege that our times can endow). Instead, this is a plea for wonder around what is lost by mandating more, ad infinitum. It invokes philosopher Byung Chul Han’s claim that “the pathology of today’s society is the excess of positivity. It is a ‘too much,’ not a ‘too little,’ that is making us sick.”
So, let’s return for a moment to imagining a life with only a handful of albums or songs and consider different contexts. Let’s consider the loss of less in our lives. Assume for a moment we’re not in some imaginary past, but the herenow – twenty-first century modernity. Ask yourself: what has social media and hypermobility done to my ability to care and commune with my people, in person? What has having thousands of online “friends” done to the quality of my friend-ships? Are they still moored in port together, their crews singing to life in a local bar, or are they all out to sea, each sailing alone through the storms of an archipelago age? What has my ability to register for a hundred different learning traditions done to my ability to properly honor one? What has my desire to live in a hundred different places done to my capacity to be of one? What about my privilege to eat at a restaurant any day of the week, with a menu from any part of the world – what has that done to my capacity to cook?
These questions are not rhetorical. They aren’t written to induce guilt about the world you’ve been born into and your place in it. They are asking for your deep consideration, consternation, and a way of imagining other worlds of being (and being together).
The Possibilities of Less
With these provocations in mind, let’s return to music. What has the cultural programming inducing us to play other people’s music done to our ability to sing our own songs? How many among us can recognize, let alone sing the songs of our old ones? What happens when even our ability to listen to the music of a stranger or a friend is muted by the noise of our time? What then becomes of community and our capacity to commune?
If you could only listen to a handful of albums for the rest of your life, which would they be? How would you choose, knowing that your tastes would likely change as you get older, as they already have? What if you could only listen to them a few times a year? How would the quality of your listening change?
Would you then sing more often, when that sonic sustenance wasn’t just a click away? Moreover, would you sing alone or would there be a choir? Would you sing only your songs or would you cross the threshold into the songscape of another? What might such a chorus begin to sound like, if not a communion?
These questions are laid at your eyes, stranger, so that they might be asked, so that they might be heard, so that the wrung resonance that results might be something akin to remembrance. This is a call for less: the ability to sustain less that feeds and fosters more. That is, more of what might be needed, as opposed to simply desired. It might mean moving out of the content of our listening and towards its context – a kind of echolocation that not only emits the full spectrum of the way things are, but the muffled movements of how it could be otherwise.
And so the questions extend as they bend: what if what requires sustaining is something we can’t immediately identify? What if what needs sustaining is something that we’ve forgotten, mostly by trying to sustain what we’ve been given? How would we go about remembering?
The Sound of Sustain
If “sustain” were a sound, perhaps it would not be ours. Perhaps, it would not be human. A terse translation might only become available upon our willingness to compose less. Until then, however, we can recall the verbal spirit of “sustain,” which still resonates as “to hold, hold upright, to bear, endure.”
If we can listen carefully enough to the word and to how the world can only sustain so much, the sounds that surround it might be asking us to let go. Then, we might hear our yearning for the human, the individual and the programmed platitudes that resound at the center of the song, we might finally hear them decomposing, descending into the place where all life goes. A kind of prayer for the unsustainable.
To break these sonic spells, we can ask what "less" sounds like, how it resonated in the aural relationships between our ancestors, the lands that sustained them and their wild neighbors. Imagining the lives of those whose place-borne and bound melodies orchestrate a biocultural harmony with home, we don’t romanticize the past, we remember the enduring commitment to the world that is required to sustain it. In so doing, we remember possible futures.
If music holds a keynote in our collective redemption, it might do so by having less of it conjured. Less playlists, speakers, recording devices, shows and more deep listening through limit, locality, and attunement. Less, not loss, composing polyphonic paths toward a communal chorus of repair.
Chris Christou
Chris Christou is a cultural ecologist, storyteller, and writer. He is the founder of Oaxaca Profundo Learning Journeys and the host of The End of Tourism Podcast. A graduate scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School, Chris writes about the crucible of culture, from food to psychedelics, exile, media and myth. www.chrischristou.net