Hello again, it’s been a month. Longer than planned, but I’m still getting into the groove of things.

One of my favourite books on listening is the straightforwardly-named The Listening Book by W.A. Mathieu. There’s a chapter in it called ‘Symphonies of Place’, and it talks about a practice of simply writing down what you’re hearing. By translating sounds into words, you become more aware of your surroundings, and can expand your sound horizon way beyond what your brain normally registers as ‘foreground sounds’. If you’re able to flip your thinking for a minute and think of everyday sounds as a song, it can bring joy even to the simplest soundscapes.

I recommend you try this out, or if you’re not writing it down physically, mentally note the things you hear at that moment.

Here’s one I wrote the other day:

I’m walking the dog

Someone is cutting a tree with a chainsaw

Busy traffic below, the squeaking of a car’s brakes

A couple chirps from a bird

I walk further

The traffic noise lets up, more birds

Plane overhead, its sound rises and wanes

Chatter and a laugh from a run club across the park, someone says ‘come out to the sun’

Thud of our dog’s paws on grass, then their clacking on concrete as we stroll

Faint dog barks, the swooshing of a bird’s wings as they fly past

A mysterious machine sound from the right, its drone makes an almost perfect I-V power chord

Loosely based on Mathieu’s term, I’m calling these ‘Songs of places’, and I just write them into my phone occasionally. I find that this habit alone makes me a more conscious listener even when I’m not actively jotting down a ‘song’.

Sound #2

I recorded a lot more sounds in this past month than I usually do, largely thanks to this newsletter. Here’s one of me standing on a street corner, while passersby suspiciously eye me and my recorder.

There are a lot of layers in this one, so I encourage you to listen multiple times and focus on individual elements. What are the children doing? How far away are they? What kind of shoes is the person walking by wearing? Can you trace how the siren moves over the course of the recording?

Until next time,

Bye

Hello, I’m Kin Teal, and I’ve been thinking a lot recently about listening, and being present (AKA the real world™️).

My mission with this newsletter is to help you awaken the joy of truly listening, and to bring you back in sync with yourself in the process.

I imported my email list from Bandcamp to get started, so if this feels random, feel free to unsubscribe at the bottom.

What’s this thing?

I came up with this idea in December 2025, at a time of the year when blasting content onto social media platforms usually reaches a fever pitch.

I feel very detached from social media, detached from my sense of time, and from real conversations on the internet. When making an Instagram post, usually I’d like to say so much, but then I censor myself, because the format is just not good for any sort of extended thought process. Also, like most others, I don’t want to transform myself into a content machine, producing videos for the sake of a giant advertisement platform, that get seen for a day or two before disappearing in the deluge of other videos. I’d like to bring back a bit more thoughtfulness to how we think about sound and music, even if it means that my social media reach won’t be sky high.

I just want to listen, and be listened to.

As an electronic musician, sounds fascinate me, be it a cello, or the dishwasher making a weird noise. Sounds take you closer to your body. If you really listen, sounds make you feel viscerally that you’re alive in the world right now, which is a beautiful feeling, and one we’re moving away from as a society. More and more of life is happening online, in these placeless spaces that pull your mind away from where your body actually is.

Sounds also take you closer to your emotions. What you hear is incredibly subjective. You can imbue anything with meaning, even though someone else next to you hearing the same sound might not feel anything at all. Since seeing takes up so much of our brain, it’s hard to actually listen, and maybe that’s why it’s easier for sound to reach across to our emotional selves. What your hear has to carry so much meaning, or so much energy that it gets through to our normally vision-addled brain.

There will be a short essay or a thought in each post, as well as a sound I have recorded, or one I just found fascinating. I might also attach short segments of music I’m writing currently, if I find it interesting for some reason.

I constantly record little snippets of my environment with my phone or portable recorder, and listening back, I can often only vaguely guess what the context was. This is beautiful, because it breaks the barriers of preconception, and allows me (and you) to hear without knowing what to expect. I’d like to instill this same curiosity in you.

Sound #1

Here’s the first sound:

When you listen, try to feel each material, how it interacts with the world around it. Have a listen, and then another one where you pay attention to the sounds beyond the obvious ones. What’s the environment? What’s happening far away? What could the weather have been like that day?

See what you notice.

Until next time,

Bye