Have I Said Something Yet? About Music?

I often love it when the soundscape makes itself heard during a contemporary music performance. In fact, I delight in it. Especially when individual sounds like a car-horn, a siren, a bird-call, a train-horn, people's voices, or a single, passing motor-bike reach into the concert hall. It is as if the windows have been opened for a short moment and the music has been placed squarely into a larger sonic space and we, the listeners, are reminded of where we are. Everyday life and cultural activity are meeting in a magical sonic moment, no matter how hard the organizers tried to separate them.

But all too often these moments are perceived as "interference". Ironically, in our eagerness to prevent such interference and to isolate musical performance from the acoustic environment, much of our music is put into air-tight, artificially lit places, where the music ends up competing with the hums of air-conditioning and electrical systems anyway - where it is more than ever encircled by the most bland of urban soundscapes. Is that not an interference? In fact, in such situations the air-conditioning functions as a soundwall, that obscures the musical subtleties and silences inside the concert hall, and masks the often interesting "real-life" sounds that could otherwise reach in from outside the concerthall