Sounds of place

I think I may have once or twice decided that I’m not really an auditory person, whatever that means. We’re given these divisions from time to time, divisions like the introvert/extrovert binary or the Myers-Briggs racket. (When it comes to the intro/extro versions, I most align with Annie Dillard’s “gregarious recluse” identity. As for Myers-Briggs, I can’t decide if I’m INFP or INFJ—which probably makes me INFP but what do I know.) At some point, I was told that there are four types of learners and decided, because I forget much of what I’m told but remember much of what I read, that I’m not an auditory learner and therefore not an auditorily inclined person.

Horses of different colours, à propos of nothing.

(And yet, the sound of my father rolling his own cigarettes—the crackle of dry tobacco amplified by the walls of the can, the shuffle of empty filters in the cardboard box, the click-slide-click of the plastic lever on the filling machine—is alive in my brain today, decades since I last heard it.)

This week, Carol sent me a link to the Cities and Memory project, a collection of sounds from around the globe.