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[xmca] How can we sense sound meaning?
Are we already aware of all that affects us? My experience shows me that probably, we are not. Are we aware of how we are affected by the sounds of our own voices? It seems as though we should, by rights, be. Do we for a minute, suppose that we are not? I doubt that any honest person would maintain that. There are some vocal exclamations, the feelings/effects of which we are cognizant. "Ahhhh", "uggh", "mmmmmm", and "rrrrrrr" are examples. We sometimes utter those sounds simply as emotional expressions, separate from formal words. Since they are not words, we are not preoccupied with thinking about that to which they refer, and therefore are able to consciously experience their emotional meanings. We can treat any and all vocal sounds that way and thus gain an understanding of their emotional meanings. Saying vocal sounds not as words enables us to experience their meanings in terms of the emotions which they correlate to.
We project familiar images onto ink blots: the blot patterns suggest archetypical patterns. How much more identifiable they would be if they were created by the contents of our archetypical mental "library", rather than being the product of simple happenstance. With our speech sounds, we use products of our own bodies, sounds that are related to our emotional-feeling states, to label the things that make up our world. Who can pretend that that does not influence our perception of those things? However, when we verbalize, we are busy following our conversations, and therefore, are unaware of the deep feeling-emotional effects of our own vocalizations. Every verbalization is enabled by a vocalization. vocalizations are not dependent upon verbalizations. The foundation upon which our language is built is vocalization. In order to understand what exactly is communicated by verbalization, we need to understand what is communicated by vocalization. In order to do that, it helps to separate it from verbalization. Doing that helps us to sense the effects of our vocal sounds without the distraction of our words. Vocalizations are heavily laden with verbalizations and we typically cannot feel the vocalizations' effects because of the weight of the necessity of paying attention to the contextual meaning of our words.
I suggest we take a trip, a "safari" if you will, into the unexplored territory of the affects on ourselves of the sounds of our own voices. Once we gain that primal understanding of our own inner workings, we will be better able to really appreciate just how we are affected by our spoken-word language.
Joseph__________________________________________
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