SLOWSOUND MANIFESTO

"Movement for the promotion of conscious listening and sound as culture."

What if sound was food?

We know that in some ways it is. Music and sound, like other Arts, are food for thought: that is, sustenance and gratification.

SlowSound was born in 2015 from an idea which came to Maestro Igor Fiorini through his work as a Sound Producer, through his collected thoughts and lived or shared experiences. What he wishes to promote is the following: conscious listening and tasting of Sound.

 SlowSound, therefore, is a movement that has many connections with Slow movements, and in particular Slow Food, which we are all acquainted with and whose purposes we know.

Listening in a state of awareness and consciousness has many parallels with tasting an award-winning dish or an excellent wine: the greater the possibility of recognizing the various aspects and peculiarities of a specific piece or recording, the greater the gratification to be gained from it.

 The culture of listening makes it possible to obtain that critical spirit which gives us the mental tools necessary to establish autonomously if and why a specific recording is of a good level, if the audio chain being listened to allows the song to be reproduced at its best and if the sound ambience meets the necessary criteria.

 Music is therefore not only some "daily background" or our "background in everyday life"; it actually becomes a moment of real tasting.

SlowSound implements a teaching method that aims to explore the concepts of sound and to develop the ear: with training, the eardrum and brain allow us to increase the perceptive possibilities and to appreciate the smallest details of the sound picture, thanks to an awareness of the vibrations that surround us and through the development of a more intimate and profound relationship with the world of music.

 Like Slow Food, which has fought to safeguard local food and gastronomic traditions, SlowSound promotes a culture of sound, enhancing the specificities and musical traditions of each place, recording, composer or artist and by creating a link between conscious listening and the enhancement of cultural identities, to preserve and transmit the beauty and richness of sound diversity.

 Beethoven leaves us an illuminating sentence in his 'conversation notebooks' when he claims to have spent his life «mastering the art of sounds». It is a short sentence but it contains a revolutionary message, as it does not refer to music but to sound: for Beethoven the composer it is the person who masters sounds and vibrations who creates music.

 Our motto and our goal could be translated as follows: 30 minutes of music! Stop and take time to “switch off” and sit down for a listening session. Forget music and sounds simply as a soundtrack of the day, as a mere accompaniment for something else, but approach it rather as something full and satisfying that makes our emotions grow every day, through the mental tools which allow us to establish for ourselves the quality of our listening.

 SlowSound is therefore listening, knowledge, vibrations, awareness, aimed at all those who want to taste or even "know how to cook" their own sound: professionals, musicians, Audio enthusiasts, High End, Music lovers.

 To sum up, Slowsound aims to:

• Promote music and a quality listening culture;

• Consolidate the fact that Sound is culture, on a par with Music;

• Raise awareness that «recording is an art form in itself» [Glenn Gould] and that conscious listening allows you to fully understand and experience the message left by composers, performers and sound artists;

Encourage a method and a didactic system that have the aim of delving into the concepts of sound, developing the ear which, like a "muscle" connected to the mind, the eardrum and the brain, allows, through training, to increase perceptive possibilities

• Bring sound and music back as a moment of tasting, away from our hectic lives, taking time to listen to music as you do with a good glass of wine

• Everything is vibration, therefore we wish to highlight the fact that music is emotion in a period: with training, the exploration of the concept of vibration allows us to see the world in a different way, improving and modifying our relationship and perception with space/time/matter and the quality with which we experience it.

 “Matter itself does not exist. All matter is born of and consists only through a force, the one which causes atom particles to vibrate and which holds them together» Max Planck.