TRANSLATIONS - A Sound Practice

This game is for the Voiceweaving meet-up group and for you too, if you like to play vocally.
Here’s a little exercise you can practice as it strikes your fancy. It’s called TRANSLATIONS.

It’s a very simple practice, and one that’s quite engaging. It’s all about listening, tuning in and getting comfortable sounding out what you sense. While doing that, you’re also adding to your personal sound vocabularies.
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Here’s why I like this exercise. It helps me connect with perceptions and responses I may not be aware of, or, those that make me feel something I try to ignore like – irritation, or moments of light I’m too preoccupied to notice.

Walking our dog, a little elderly Cairn Terrier, is an experience filled with erratic rhythm. We walk 10 paces then he stops to sniff and pee.  We walk 4 more, then it's sniff, stop, sniff, stop. Look around. Walk. Walk. Stop...

​What an incredible opportunity to work on rhythm. During a 30-minute walk I can explore sense and feeling through sound, shaping rhythms as we go. Irritation melts and I have much more fun on our sniff and pee walks.

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But there's more. He bounces when he walks, with JOY! He rolls in the grass and I feel simple pleasure in that moment. He greets everyone with delight, tail wagging, big smiles. And I benefit when I let myself open to the moment and let it touch me. Inevitably, when I do, the music bubbles up as another gift in that simple moment of life.

I think our senses are always inviting us to become Translators of the world we live in and in doing so, they help us become more aware of our ongoing engagement with life, whether we're doing it consciously or not.  And through our expressions we are, even momentarily, transformed, connected to the ongoing flow of creativity and potential.

Just below is a (very rough) recording done on my iPhone with the Music Memos app while walking with Mani. If you listen closely you can hear birds tweeting in the background. The rhythm jumps around here and there as I just watch him do his thing and play with sound. 

With the recording as a point of reference I created a sound sketch using a snippet of the rhythm and feel of our walk together. If I had used another section from the recording, a uniquely different sketch would have resulted.