 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|
||||||||||
| Hear Anything? |
Using Imaginary Sounds
To Tell Stories
Odds Bodkin
Think of your favorite piece of music. Anything you've heard recently will do, or an old favorite. Now, can you play a brief selection of it in your mind?
Sit back and try a second.
Hear anything?
There it is, a musical memory.
I offer this exercise to children in school workshops; nearly all of them raise their hands. They sit back and smile, each listening to a music memory unspooling in their neural fields.
If music isn't your thing, try evoking the sound of a traffic jam in a major city. When I do it I hear honking horns echoing off buildings. An army of wingtips walking the sidewalks. The occasional screech of tires.
Thousands of auditory images like these lie dormant in our memories--church bells, claps of thunder, sizzling bacon, balloons popping unexpectedly. For most people, evoking them is as easy as thinking about them.
These mind sounds, or Auditory Images if you like, are very useful for storytelling. Imagination often lifts off from memory images. Using Auditory Imagination, you can listen your way into a story.
For instance, if I imagine the sound of moaning wind, my visual imagination will start wondering where it's coming from and will offer up an image. The one I just saw was the weathered corner of a cabin somewhere. Something's going on inside the cabin. I'm listening again. What is it? It's a creaking rocking chair. Someone's in there. Who is it? A story begins to appear.
If I want to make my story creepy in order to thrill a child who loves to be a little scared, I'll drop a skeleton into the rocker and try to figure out how it got there.
If I want to dream up a softer tale, I'll fill the creaking rocker with a Mother Chipmunk in her bonnet, worried about her son Livingston Capricorn Chipmunk who is, of course, out on adventures only chipmunks can have.
Or I can alter the sound inside the cabin to, let's say, a Chicago Bulls game on TV. The skeleton and rocker disappear. In their place sit three guys with Doritos and a half-empty case of Samuel Adams.
Very different story.
The point is, when dreaming up stories for your child, learning to listen to the story is a powerful way of creating it, and of learning to trust your muse.
Interesting word, muse, by the way. It's the root word for music, amusement, and musings. The ancient Greeks believed that nine demigoddesses--The Muses--came to the assistance of mortals during artistic creation. Calliope--whose name later came to denote a portable music machine--was in her time the Muse of Eloquence. So, like Homer, who does it on Page One of The Odyssey, go ahead and invoke your muse. All storytellers do it in one way or another. It helps get them going.
So, once upon a time a Queen stood on her balcony by a deep lake and threw something in.
When I make that picture in my mind, I hear something. How about you?