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If you try to listen with your eyes closed for a little while, you can hear various kinds of sounds coming out of your body incessantly. Breathing, pulse, sounds made by slight moves of your neck, waist, arms, hands, legs, and even internal organs. When you put your palm on your heart gently, you may feel the sounds of your warm body through it.

Those sounds are so warm that they remind me of my mother's tenderness I felt when I was a child. They are not just parts of a whole but the elements indispensable for forming the whole and the deed of making sounds itself is a proof of our living. Whenever I see something beautiful, eat something tasty, touch something nostalgic, or smell good scents, I always wish my mother were alive and could share my feeling. When she was alive, I did not experience this kind of emotion so often and even when I did, not this strong . As time passes, her memory is becoming clearer and clearer, strange as it may sound.

Sounds are uttered, heard, felt and then lost. All musical performances will be gone. But the fact that sounds have to die out affects us so strongly that they come back to our ears so many times. Man is also destined to die. That makes his memories much dearer and we miss him all the more often.  

Out of all the sounds made by our bodies, voices would be the clearest. Using voices we can make songs and words. We use words such as "songs" or "singing", but it is not that simple and actually we have more than seven Chinese characters to express these human vocal activities. Some of them have English equivalents, such as chants, ballads, and poems. We might as well say the human voice is the mother of all the musical instruments that man has developed through our long history.

Yukio Mishima described the tune of a stone pipe as follows: nobody but he who has ever heard the tune of a stone pipe could appreciate it. It has such a divine tune as shakes our hearts and souls. It sounds extremely clear but at the same time has a warm and opaque pool like a jewel stone in the depth. It pierces our inmost hearts......" He stares at the tune firmly with his mind's eye. Among numerous descriptions about sounds are Jun Takami's "the sounds do not go up to the sky but creep low on the ground", or Motojirou Yokoi's "a sound as if wrapped in cotton".

A cry of "Ah", too short to be a word, could convey various kinds of human emotions such as surprise, sorrow, disappointment, accusation, anger, awe, fear, grief, and joy. Limitless possibilities for improvision lie behind this simple "Ah" sound. The same possibilities are in one music note in a staff notations.  

Five senses gather at one point in the heart and the tuition inspired out of this crossover stimulates our creativity , which then produces sounds. Man catches sounds with his five senses and utters sounds using his intuition. Briefly speaking, to utter sounds is to live, and to live is to create.

According to the concept of European music in the Middle Ages, there existed a special dimension where we could hear inaudible sounds of Musica Mundana and Musica Humana through audible Musica Instrumentalis . We think the same way about art, seeing things hidden behind the works. Some may find the similar philosophy in Chinese Reiraku thought. And this is where we are moved most.

We utter sounds, feel sounds, play with sounds, create sounds, express ourselves with sounds, and live with sounds. Because being alive means being with sounds. We live and create sounds. Sounds become man, and man becomes sounds.
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