Selected sound quotes

1. The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.

2. Rap is poetry set to music. But to me it's like a jackhammer.

3. Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor. Why, Italian Futurists, have you slavishly reproduced only what is commonplace and boring in the bustle of our daily lives. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

4. Music is organized sound.

5. Soun is noght but air ybroken, And every speche that is spoken, Loud or privee, foul or fair, In his substaunce is but air; For as flaumbe is but lighted smoke, Right so soun is air ybroke.

6. The very day I purchased it, I christened my guitar as my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.

7. In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!

8. When you hear an instrumental song someone is singing over, you know right away it's wrong.

9. A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

10. I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.

11. Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day.

12. Oft, on a plat of rising ground, I hear the far-off curfew sound Over some wide-watered shore, Swinging low with sullen roar.

13. Who publishes the sheet-music of the winds or the music of water written in river-lines?

14. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.

15. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.

16. Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

17. Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . .

18. From the walls of Baidi high in the coloured dawn To Jiangling by night-fall is three hundred miles, Yet monkeys are still calling on both banks behind me To my boat these ten thousand mountains away.

19. Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.

20. Brute animals have the vowel sounds; man only can utter consonants.

21. Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.

22. The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story: The long light shakes across the lakes, And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

23. Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorled ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear.

24. Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?

25. Summer - summer - summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!

26. 'The water in music the oar forsakes.' The air in music the wing forsakes. All things in move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.

27. Rough wind, the moanest loud Grief too sad for song; Wild wind, when sullen cloud Knells all the night long; Sad storm, whose tears are vain, Bare woods, whose branches strain, Deep caves and dreary main, - Wail, for the world's wrong!

28. George is a radio announcer, and when he walks under a bridge you can't hear him talk.

29. I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after.

30. Two Voices are there; one is of the sea, One of the mountains; each a mighty Voice.

31. Listen. With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall.

32. Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells.

33. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

34. And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.

35. There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces. The form of the work is a consequence of this interaction. Possible musical forms are as limitless as the exterior forms of crystals.

36. It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune.

37. Wild is the music of the autumnal wind Among the faded woods.

38. Eee-nee-mee-nee-my-nee-moe

39. I heard through the night The rush and the clamour; The pulse of the fight Like blows of Thor's hammer; The pattering flight Of the leaves, and the anguished Moan of the forest vanquished.

40. I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, Which melts like kisses from a female mouth, And sounds as if it should be writ on satin, With syllables which breathe of the sweet South, And gentle liquids gliding all so pat in, That not a single accent seems uncouth, Like our harsh northern whistling, grunting guttural, Which we're obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all.

41. His pen squeaking like a demented wren as he wrote copious notes.

42. Pigeons on the grass alas. Pigeons on the grass alas. Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass. Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass.

43. The two sounds frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters 'Cthulhu ' and 'R'lyeh .'

44. Most English-speaking people ... will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful,' especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful that, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful... Well then, in Welsh, for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.

45. 'Also, if I recall, there was A LOT of concern before STS came out that it would be basically an industrial/electronic album.'

46. Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don't have any surface noise. I said, 'Listen, mate, life has surface noise'.

47. On my recent course of antibiotics, every record sounded like that. (After playing an excerpt from 'Hairway to Steven' by Butthole Surfers)

48. Kevin (one of the engineers), our man in the studded leather bracelets and AC/DC tour jacket says that they sound like a very sick Judas Priest, but of course in my estimation Judas Priest sound like a very sick Judas Priest.

49. Really needs to be played loud enough to start a civil defence alert.

50. 'All the technique in the world don't mean shit if it don't sound right.'

51. One ringy dingy... two ringy dingy.

52. What music is more enchanting than the voices of young people, when you can't hear what they say?

53. Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

54. [He] made a little whimpering noise that meant everything she wanted it to mean.

55. What do you mean, 'ah'? Just 'ah.' does every 'ah' have to mean something?

56. You don't know what I'm up against. Because it's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. 'Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp' Ooh, 'crumb-crisp coating.' Ahh, that's tough, 'crumb-crisp coating.' I think, no, because of the way it's written, you need to break it up, because it's not, it's not as conversationally written.

57. Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance Everybody thinks its true.

58. He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.

59. My sound is really a fusion of reggae, hip-hop and R&B, with a little something different thrown in.

60. Rising and leaping, Sinking and creeping, Swelling and sweeping, Showering and springing, Flying and flinging, Writhing and ringing, Eddying and whisking, Spouting and frisking, Turning and twisting, Around and around With endless rebound: Smiting and fighting, A sight to delight in; Confounding, astounding, Dizzying and deafening the ear with its sound.

61. And so never ending, but always descending, Sounds and motions forever and ever are blending All at once and all o'er, with a mighty uproar, - And this way the water comes down at Lodore.

62. With whisper of her mellowing grain, With treble of brook and bud and tree, Earth joys for ever to sustain The bass eternal of the sea.

63. The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves.

64. Faintly as tolls the evening chime, Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time.

65. Most snoring is composed by Beethoven or Wagner, although a few times Wiggs had heard heavy metal rock performed on the somnambulate bassoon.

66. I heard them cry - the peacocks. Was it a cry against the twilight Or against the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, Turning as the flames Turned in the fire, Turning as the tails of the peacocks Turned in the loud fire, Loud as the hemlocks Full of the cry of the peacocks? Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

67. At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind.

68. That scrawny cry - It was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun, Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality.

69. Fantasia, to me is a whole new opportunity. For my medium it opens up unlimited possibilities. Music has always played a very important part since sound came into the cartoon. Now, the full expression that comes from the new Fantasound opens up a whole new world for us.

70. Knights of Columbus that hurt!

71. ??????,?????!? (From a Chinese skimming drink advertisement)

72. Down beyond the haven the tide comes with a shout.

73. I hear the little children of the wind Crying solitary in lonely places.

74. 'Shutdown the devil sound'

75. The musical equivalent of St. Pancras Station

76. 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...

77. ... the beast made the noise of a cat being shampooed, a lonely wail of horror and outrage, of shame and defeat.

78. He described the sound of the harpsichord variously as

79. There was such idiot minstrelsy in rain, So many clappers going without bells, That these bethous compose a heavenly gong. One voice repeating, one tireless chorister, The phrases of a single phrase, ke-ke, A single text, granite monotony

80. There were many seas. The sea roared like a tiger. The sea whispered in your ear like a friend telling you secrets. The sea clinked like small change in a pocket. The sea thundered like avalanches. The sea hissed like sandpaper working on wood. The sea sounded like someone vomiting. The sea was dead silent. p. 215

81. Rrrryyaaahh! I'm off of hold again.

82. The last thing I heard when I walked out those gates was Walter Bellhaven's howling laughter.

83. Music is not just sound.

84. If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

85. Records have images. There are wet records and dry records. And big records. [2]

86. I heard the sighing of the reeds At noontide and at evening, And some old dream I had forgotten I seemed to be remembering.

87. Music, from being an ordered succession of sounds, has become a matter of 'sonorities', and anyone who can produce a brightly coloured brick of unusual shape is henceforth hailed as an architect.

88. My first memory was of the sound of bugles.

89. It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing).

90. It was on the train,with its rattle-ty bang,that is often so stimulating to a composer that I suddenly heard the complete construction of the Rhapsody. Comment on his Blue Rhapsody composition.

91. Sphere Music - Some sounds seem to reverberate along the plain, and then settle to earth again like dust; such are Noise, Discord, Jargon. But such only as spring heavenward, and I may catch from steeples and hilltops in their upward course, which are the more refined parts of the former, are the true sphere music - pure, unmixed music - in which no wail mingles.

92. A slight sound at evening lifts me up by the ears, and makes life seem inexpressibly serene and grand. It may be Uranus, or it may be in the shutter.

93. The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one.

94. I cannot resist ordering them. The words are so lovely to say.

95. The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.

96. O'er folded blooms On swirls of musk, The beetle booms adown the glooms And bumps along the dusk.

97. 'Writing' is the Latin of our times. The modern language of the people is video and sound.

98. My music must be an artistic reproduction of human speech in all its finest shades. That is, the sounds of human speech, as the external manifestations of thought and feeling must, without exaggeration or violence, become true, accurate music.

99. The watchdog's voice that bayed the whispering wind, And the loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind.

100. A sort of gulpy, gurgly, plobby, squishy, wofflesome sound, like a thousand eager men drinking soup in a foreign restaurant.