Equally important is the element of time that continually reminds us of the physical reality of sound. For many who have grown up in rural surroundings, there was always a guide to the shape and scope of the environment through sensitivity to sound. To hear a clap of thunder rolling across the horizon was to be reminded of the full breadth of one's surroundings. For many musicians, the experience of sound has always been primarily physical. There are accounts of people's first conscious memories of the effects of slow, soothing tones or the impact of heavy, driving beats on the body.
Eager parents subscribe to the practice of subjecting the foetus to early classical music lessons.
The Romantic concept of absolute music, restricted solely to the intellectual where no metaphor exists, only sound, holds little ground here. A singer's voice sets up vibrations and resonances in the listener's body . . . . The singer, through osmosis, passes through the self's porous membrane, and discredits the fiction that bodies are separate, boundaried packages. The singer destroys the division between her body and our own, for her sound enters our system. The practice of sampling the voice has become a standard compositional device.