Quotes About Sound

I was honoured when they asked me to appear at the president's birthday rally in Madison Square Garden. There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing 'Happy Birthday,' like if I had been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing or something. I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, what if no sound comes out!'

I heard 'Get Lucky'; it's just not my taste. It's great what Daft Punk does and the sound quality is great, but that whole disco vibe is not really my thing.

Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.

Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.

Sound as medium has an incredible elasticity. So, of course, it is tempting for artists of other fields to try something with sounds. Why not? We are living in the age when there is no limit in gathering all forms of art and music to mix it together if you so desire.

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth's plant and animal population. I hadn't anticipated it would be so loud.

Enya was a huge deal for me. That kind of woman vocals and how wide those productions were.

If you grew up in London's East End you'd probably be inclined to be into something like grime music. But if you're removed from it, like in Guernsey, you can have a wider set of influences, and you're not tied down to any genre or any scene. I think that affects my sound, for sure.

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

I really think the acoustics that Gibson's been making for the last ten years or so are as good as any the company has ever produced and that's saying a lot.

Pianos tend to get better as they age, the more you play them. They grow into their sound.

A lot of modern amps and preamps sound great when you're jamming by yourself, but don't hold up in a band situation. The sound isn't dense enough, and the lows and highs tend to get soaked up by the bass and cymbals.

Doing the acoustic at Carnegie is basically advised because electric music tends to get, let's just say, acoustically unsound.

I don't have that kind of voice, the big baritone or rousing tenor sound. My wheelhouse was in the frothier pieces. So my appreciation for those older musicals and revivals grew.

The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.

I suppose I was interested in creating a vision; in the same way, I was very drawn to tension within cinema. Hitchcock was my other early obsession - 'Psycho' and its score. So there was the sense of trying to create an atmosphere: how a sound resonates and makes an effect.

For me, I always have looked at 'indie' as a term of 'independence.' Never associated a sonic gesture with that in the same way that pop music has always meant 'popular' to me; you know, it didn't define a sound.

I'm fascinated by the notion of a perpetual sound: a sound that won't dissipate over time. Essentially, the opposite of a piano, because the notes never fade. I suppose, in literary terms, it would be like a metaphor for eternity.

One thing I can say about the French language is that no one in the world loves their language as much as they do. It doesn't matter if you're close - it still sounds terrible to their ears.

Minecraft has a terrible sound engine. Imagine a looping sound file that plays for two seconds and then just starts over.

I was two years old when I saw the mandolin for the first time, and I just loved it. I just loved the sound of it, the shape of it even, and the way it looks. And I still love it, which is a testament to something.

A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.

What it all comes down to, as it so often does, is the very beginning of the universe. This, say the big-heads of the scientific fraternity, all began with a big bang. Wrong! The universe, in fact, began with the sound of a duck call, followed by a whistle and an enormous cosmic wind-break. Had anyone been around at the time to overhear these sounds, they would probably have received a pretty good indication of what God had up his sleeve, amongst other places.