I suppose my entire professional life revolves around communication. As an opera singer and voice performance major, my primary goal after all is said (sung) and done is to communicate the text of a piece with an added dimension: music.
I also greatly appreciate listening to music, which communicates emotions. Occasionally I actually feel a little strange because I can tell that music affects me in a different way than many people.
When I hear some pieces of music performed with artistry, I feel an almost debilitating pleasure, and I have trouble focusing on anything else.
Another component of my interest in singing is my love of languages. By the time I graduate SMU, I should have at least a year of French, German and Italian as well as diction classes in each language. I enjoy the feel, look and especially sounds of languages. I love to see similar words in different languages, and I have a secret passion for etymology.
At The Daily Campus, my job is to communicate through written editorials and to share other students’ opinions.
With the exception of my job at this paper, the vast majority of my life involves communication through sound. I use sound so frequently in my life that I learned to take it for granted.
This was brought to my attention when I recently went on a date with a guy who cannot hear. Although my uncle is deaf, I do not know American Sign Language. Suddenly, I was forced to communicate visually instead of orally and aurally.
The effects of this rapid transition to a different mode of communication were surprisingly positive and the date was much less awkward than I expected.
At first, we sat in a coffee shop and typed to each other on my laptop. Within a few hours, I had learned a rudimentary amount of sign language. By using a combination of written and visual communication, we were able to correspond quite clearly, albeit slowly. Because I could not communicate in the same way that I normally do, I really thought about everything that I wanted to say. As hearing people, we seem to have a fear of silence. Particularly on a first date, silence is deadly and painful.
Most of us avoid awkward silence by filling our time with insignificant chatter. I know I am guilty of speaking for the sake of making sound. I really should record myself on first dates, because in my attempt to mask silence with my voice, I probably spew out enough opinions to fill this newspaper for a semester.
But as soon as communication became more difficult, I quickly and necessarily adapted. By the end of the day, I felt like I knew this guy more than I know most people in the same amount of time, even though we exchanged a fraction of the words that one would use in a spoken conversation. There was something incredibly different and intimate about trying so earnestly to communicate with someone.
As we go about our daily lives, we should remember the importance of sound. Many of us use sound wake up in the morning, communicate during the day and relax before bed. But more importantly, let’s remember the value of silence. This experience taught me that sometimes the moments in which nothing is said are the best moments of all.
