vocabulary of sounds

i wonder if the same distinguishable sounds i presently know will still be relevant years and years from now.

on the train to beacon, a girl sitting behind me drops her phone. without turning around to see it for myself, i knew it was her phone that had dropped just from the sound of it hitting the floor. from the weight of that sound, i conceived it to be an iphone... lo and behold, when i did finally turn around for a quick glance, there she was - finger to touchscreen, flipping through her apps.

there is so much noise pollution in the day to day that it becomes difficult to filter new sounds from old ones or timeless sounds from those that will eventually become period pieces. but finding myself cognizant of this realization, a few moments come to mind. first-time audio moments that i've always attached to a particular emotional experience. not all pivotal happenings, but significant in the sense that i can pinpoint these as moments of awareness of such discernible sounds.

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when i was 11, my family took a trip to isla grande, a remote island off the coast of panama. after a long drive through rugged jungle terrain to get to the island, we had to leave our van on the mainland and hitch a boat ride from some of the local fishermen. we crossed the water and were greeted at the dock by a few younger boys who helped us gather our things ashore. my dad thanked each of the fishermen and the young boys with a generous tip, doling out a number of balboa. my mom, being such a mom, wanted to thank the boys with an additional treat. she pulled 3 cold cans of coke from the cooler, one for each boy. in the light of the tropical sun, the cans gleamed and sweat with condensation. brisk, shiny objects that didn't quite fit in with the secluded backdrop of the island.

this was something new to them. they recognized the coke branding of course, but the canned packaging was so foreign. they were accustomed to drinking soda only from glass bottles. one of the boys slowly turned the can in his hands, mouth agape in fascination, while the other two teamed up to try and split the cans open by smashing them against the boat's edge.

realizing the absence of familiarity with these cans, my dad quickly stepped in to show them how to open it. he pulled on the tab and 'tssssnap-pah'! there it was, the sound. it certainly wasn't my first time hearing this, but it was the first time i placed phonetic syllables to it.

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when i was 18 and first moved to philly, i quickly learned the sound of mice pattering around in the darkness of my apartment late at night. i became so attuned to it, that the weight of their tiny, feeble bodies racing across the floor could wake me up in an instant. this became a sound i abhor.

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when i left philly and moved to new york, i learned the sound of a water heater. i always remembered climbing over my grandparents' water heaters whenever we would visit as kids, but we always visited in the summers so i'd regarded them merely as playground objects rather than functional devices for temperature control.

that first new york winter, i finally learned how it hisses and squeals while water rises in its tank, building pressure to be spewed out into a forcible steam. water heaters are nothing like central heating. sometimes, by morning my room is a veritable sauna. the bolts behind the walls are sweating through the plaster. i'm tucked in with a moist warmth and there is the heater, singing its working presence - clanging and hissing and sighing with release.

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i'm sure these are sounds you could pick up from movies or recordings or even books. though, until you're able to attach first-hand context, they are simply meaningless reverberations. sound painted on a flat canvas like the "bam!" and "pow!" of an old comic strip brawl.

the sound of a soda can under your tapping fingernail. the sound of the tab pulling back and turning into a lever that rips through the thin metal to quickly release a vacuum of gases in a single exhale. the snap of the metal dam. the collection of rising fizz and exploding bubbles. there it is in the breakdown, the sound of opening a soda can.

each experience of sound has its own collection of sounds that feed into an opus wave of something memorable, something worth adding to your audible vocabulary. and how different are each of our vocabularies.