Sound

Use in the book

Anaximander’s reported explanation makes thunder the noise of wind escaping from a dense cloud. The rupture also accounts for the accompanying flash in the ancient account. Sound here belongs to a physical explanation of weather and should be distinguished from the communication conveyed by a voice.

Places to read

1. I.29.1.1Thunder is explained as the noise of escaping wind.

Translation in this edition

“Noise” emphasizes the rupture; “sound” is the more general equivalent.

Use in the book

The notebook’s hearing is remarkably analytic even when it disclaims analysis. A wave arrives with a deep voice and retreats with a thinner stony sound over sand and shells. A drop resonates on smooth water; bare branches whistle; dry leaves answer a passing person or breeze. Timbre, duration, recurrence, and material contact distinguish the parts.

The great December enumeration then spans the whole scale, from a spring in moss to the ocean, with wind playing instruments distributed through terrain. Thunder becomes the voice of a sea above the listener’s head. The paragraph stops because the sequence might be infinite, not because nature has exhausted its possible sounds. Hearing produces expansion and astonishment but can also gain an unwanted dominion over attention.

Harmony is not merely quiet concord. The goose’s intrusive cry contributes by contrast, and a storm’s wild harmony can be delighted in with terror. Nor is the human always a triumphant centre. The later image of a shepherd as creation’s deep echo is qualified by the admission that the actual shepherd and writer may simply watch clouds and hear wind instinctively. The notebook preserves that gap between exalted interpretation and modest embodied activity.

Places to read

1. 25 April 1833 · ¶1Contrasting bird voices gather into an orchestral effect
2. 9 December 1833 · ¶2Incoming and retreating waves are distinguished by timbre and contact with the shore
3. 21 December 1833 · ¶2The scale of natural sound expands beyond a complete enumeration
4. 10 December 1834 · ¶5The ideal human echo of creation is set beside an ordinary listener
5. 13 October 1835 · ¶1Ocean and great woods answer one another through extensive, continuous sounds
6. 21 December 1833 · ¶1 · 1861 variantThe separate 1861 witness develops winds as breaths, waters as a range of voices and a midnight harmony felt as delight within terror.

Translation in this edition

Rumeur becomes murmur, sounds, or rustlings according to the passage; it usually does not mean a rumour being circulated. The main sea analysis renders bruit grêle et pierreux as thin, stony sound, preserving an unusually material description rather than smoothing it into generic music.

Use in the book

Theophrastus says air moved by voice rings inside the auditory structure. The moving structure then beats air against solid parts and makes a sound. The sequence is mechanistic, but its verbs and nouns should not be translated into a modern account of acoustic pressure waves without qualification.

The critic returns to sound twice. An ear already containing a ringing grows duller rather than better at judging sound, challenging a simple interpretation of like-by-like. And the internal sound itself still needs to be heard, so explaining how it is produced does not complete the theory of hearing. Sound therefore appears both as the proposed physical carrier and as the object whose perception remains at issue.

Places to read

1. A 86 § 9 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 9. Distinguishes initiating voice, moving air, and internal sound.
2. A 86 §§ 18–19 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 19. Uses ringing in the ears as a counterexample to unqualified perception by like.
3. A 86 §§ 20–21 (polemical)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 21. Separates making a sound within from explaining why it is heard.

Translation in this edition

The translation's different English words should not imply that Empedocles himself supplied a fixed three-level acoustic taxonomy. They preserve distinctions in Theophrastus's report.