Friday, May 21, 2010

Acoustic Sharawadgi

So,a certain essayist by the name of Sir William Temple came up with the term sharawadgi in an essay he wrote in 1685 called 'Upon the Gardens of Epicurus'dealing with the Japanese culture of gardening.And he wrote,

'But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and, though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem.'

And then by the time we reach the 18th century,we have Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue introducing it in their book'Sonic Experience'And they put it like this,
'the sonic wandering of the flaneur listening to the multiple sounds of the city bears the potentiality of encountering such experiences of the sublime, of a formless shape, apparantly disordered, with no intention, that hides its artistic elaboration from eye and ear.'

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