Dissonance

Dissonance: when sounds collide. If dissonance is a collision of sound can it move beyond sounds to what those sounds mean, in other words is dissonance not just a clash of vibrations that do not mesh, do not converge but a clash of sounds that represent opposing meanings, can it be the content, and not just the medium that clashes and creates dissonance.

Several days ago I was sitting on the beach, it was a Sunday afternoon, many beachgoers were frolicking on the sand and in the water. The sounds of children screaming and girls laughing as boyfriends splashed them with water and mothers yelling at children to come back to shore all filled the air and created a dissonance with the sounds of the waves and the wind. The natural vibrations fought against the human ones. I listened to the sounds and the thought about the idea of chaos in sound waves—no logic guided the human voices as a whole. Each voice had its own logic, but all together, when listened to as a whole, there seemed to be no principle behind the sounds, they were discrete and offered no transitions, no logical relations to other sounds, they existed in their own right, within their own rules and did not mingle nicely. This is the idea of chaos, the idea that is represented in the story of the tower of babble and repeated to different affect in the story of Pentecost. Chaos is each person or entity operating in apathy of others, without regard to the motion or intention of others around it. And yet, something happened upon that beach that Sunday afternoon. As I lied there observing this cacophony of sound and sight, there seemed to occur some strange convergence, as if the sound that was on the surface dissonant and chaotic, became intertwined. Suddenly there seemed to be harmony, as if all the sounds worked together to form a coherent pattern. And I began to wonder is this a natural occurrence or is this a human need to form order from chaos. Is this my brain creating an overlay to create this harmony, because to the human chaos is unacceptable. The story of creation is a story that makes this clear to me. God can’t abide the chaos, He must bring order to the disorder. Harmony to discord. We might hear dissonance, but we try to find a harmony behind or within it. It’s like a scene from High School musical, one repeated in countless films and television commercials, where busy kitchen workers making dissonant noises with their tools, suddenly hear the music, the harmony, and play along, creating music from the noise, order from chaos.

Perhaps, I am being too simplistic, too religious in my approach to the word. As if dissonance doesn’t exist, but is only imaginary, as if chaos is only our misunderstanding, our failure to see order. Chaos does exist, and perhaps it’s only our failure to recognize it, our forcing order over it, that stops us from seeing it. I believe we have an underlying, irrational fear of dissonance. We try to crush it wherever we see it, find ways to avoid it—through institutions and civilized rituals, through ipods and cell phones and normalized communication. The music industry is an example of how much we eschew it. Listen to local rock stations—they all try to have a distinct identity, but the music they play all sounds the same. Anything that is different, employs a different set of standards is labeled indie or alternative, as if it is the other, some foreign object. It is a form of dissonance. Same goes with film and literature. Anything in discord with what we consider normal is pushed away. Eschewed with apathy, with indifference