Yesterday the family went on the London Eye. Everything about it is geared towards the visual. The name, the glass pod and the vending of views. I tried to listen to the experience.
The moment that the glass pod shut its doors, it seemed to shut out London. You couldn’t hear the incessant traffic or the raucous touristy crowd. Just the twenty of us murmuring… ‘Oh that’s the…’, ‘There’s …..!’. The silence of that the pod brought quietened us as well. Even my boisterous 4 year old was lulled by the odd experience.
I wondered what it would be like to hear all that I could see. Could we hear anything more than the wind? I suppose to truly find out we would need a balloon tour over London to hear it. Then probably we would see it differently.
The London Eye also showed the sheer amount of investment that’s gone into making sights better. Everything has to look good. And we must be able to see it from all angles. We have rather sophisticated set of systems that ask us to look, charging us a bit of money on the way. Tourism as a whole seems to be based around sight. After all sightseeing is the word we use. And does our ubiquitous lust of sight reduce our ability to take in sound?
So, an interesting question : what would a tourism based around sound be like?