If we were to start here and now and you were free to concentrate solely on what is written here, quietly reading this text to yourself and hearing these words in whatever voice you should choose and at whatever intensity you choose, perhaps even rising in volume, you would still be the only listener, the only body capable of hearing this.
We might then say that what you are hearing has zero dimension, the equivalent of a point in Cartesian space, that the sound generated by your reading is non-physical, describing a lower boundary of the nature of sound in space. This is subject matter. Above this, physical sound emanates from, describes and is described by space on differing levels and in various scales — minute/personal, internal/contained, external/immense — we may have innate relationships with all of these, formed by repeated use and handling and amended and augmented by devices which pervasively deliver ‘background sound’ from distance. Laplace’s relational view compounded by a very lack of objective silence! And all of this existing within the constraints of Newtonian space and time, conforming to the notion that reality is what we experience it to be. With sound’s requirement of a propagating medium, an upper boundary will then be the thinning edges of the outer atmosphere. In our space and time this describes travel, movement — a quaint reassurance that there is direction and continuity in times arrow. In listening,
are we placed?