Otoacoustic Ear Symphony #1

According to medical science, the human ear produces continuous reference tones known as otocoustic emissions. Apparently, our hearing apparatus uses this tone as a kind of baseline against which to understand incoming sounds. This sound is so incredibly quiet, that its discovery was fairly recent. Apparently hearing researchers had never thought to look for sound coming out of the ear.

In silence, most of us have experienced our own otoacoustic emissions as tinitis, the persistent "ringing in the ears." But who has heard the sound of another's ear? What if we could experience the otoacoustic emissions of other people?

We propose to do the following: gather five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people in a single place. We place a microphone in each ear of each person. These microphones are very sensitive and transmit all of the ear tones to a central location. Mixers combine the many
signals signal into a single sound. The 1,000, 2,000, 20,000 ears produce a single, giant chord. The world hears music which has never before existed.

Perhaps the speakers are positioned just barely within hearing range of the thousands. Perhaps the ears, hearing their own sound, respond. For the first time in the existence of the world, twenty thousand ears, singing to themselves and one another, in harmony.

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