Audio schemata

While messaging with a sir a few weeks ago, I mentioned loud Isaac Hayes playing at the office driving me slightly nuts. He asked if my lax work environment ever gets to me because of this, because he needs 100% quiet to work. I actually prefer having sounds around when I'm working; I get restless and fidgety when there is complete silence.

Then I got to thinking about audio environments. I mentioned coffee shops as my favorite place to get work done. People milling around, turning pages, putting a mug down, popping the cash register drawer back in, tossing change into a jar, etc. Even though I live most of my life with music playing in some way (through headphones, through my piano, from my computer, and so on), my favorite work audio environment includes no music. I like it when the iPod has been forgotten at Naked and papers are shuffled around, people are talking and heels are walking across the hardwood floors.


Well, said sir brought up that there is a word in French – bruitage – referring to a collection of sounds that make a whole. Once again with the tiny explosions, one went off in my head. I asked my friend Alex (from Paris) about the word, and she said:

A person who does "bruitages" is a person who collects or create sounds and then integrate them in movies. For example, if you want to recreate the atmosphere of a restaurant... you would do bruitages with like voices, and sounds of glasses, forks etc

Audio schemata of a place. Isn't that brilliant? One of my favorite things in the world is when I learn a word in another language that stands for an entire thought or concept.

What is your favorite audio schema?

state schemas

Sometimes this wonderful transcendental thing happens to me. I wrote about one of those instances here. They don't last for too very long, but the happiness I feel in these moments is so concentrated and specific, that I wanted to think about it more and hear other people's stories. I am calling them state schemas.

Let me rewind a little. I loved the concept of schemas so much throughout my study of Psychology that I use the term all the time, forgetting that it's not a widely-used word. Schemata (when we're talking about Psych) are a thing our brain does; a method of organizing information and our knowledge into little packages that help us remember things and interact with the world. Stereotypes are the best example I can think of, even though they are not always used in a positive way : a collection of ideas, thoughts, phrases, sounds, visuals, etc. of a certain type of person. It's one big idea that holds many little ideas together and makes sense as a whole.

A state schema is an occurence. It is a moment in which everything is in alignment - the sights, the smells, the temperature, the lighting, the music, what you're thinking about, where exactly you are, and so on and so forth. Everything fits together in that moment; it's almost like feeling you're in a movie because everything seems to fit together perfectly. Like a successful Tetris game. This seems a little synaesthetic to me, since each element blends into the next.

Now, read this entry again, if you like, and see the elements of what made it wonderful to me. I wrote about it being 8.00am. It was sunny. It was 30-something degrees. The smell was clear. The pace at which I was walking made the sunlight come through the fence to the exact beat of the song I was listening to. It wasn't about the sun, the smell or the song - it was about that stuff working together as a whole to create one instance. State schemas are one of my favorite things in the world, and I cannot predict when they will happen; they just hit me like a delightful little surprise in the middle of my days.

Am I alone here? Does this happen to anyone else?