Ear Cleaning The first task of the acoustic designer is to learn how to listen. Ear cleaning is the expression we use here. Many exercises can be devised to help cleanse the ears, but the most important at first are those which teach the listener to respect silence. This is especially important in a busy, nervous society. An exercise we often give our students is to declare a moratorium on speech for a full day. Stop making sounds for a while and eavesdrop on those made by others. It is a challenging and even frightening exercise and not everyone can accomplish it, but those who do speak of it afterward as a special event in their lives.

Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic E…, loc. 679