I write from a small wooden flat on Bergstaðastræti, with a window that catches the long winter light when there is any. Before I lived here, I was a sound engineer, mostly for radio and audiobooks, mostly in cities that didn't have much winter. I came north for a year and stayed.
Soft Ear Notes is the journal I keep about what I have learned, in the slow years since I stopped working in sound, about listening. Not listening to music. Not listening to podcasts. Listening to rooms, to bodies, to the small sounds that hold a day. And — more recently — about the small massages and somatic practices that begin with sound and end somewhere else entirely.
What I write about
- Listening as a daily practice — what it asks, what it gives back
- The quiet sounds in a home, and the slow inventory of them
- Humming as a self-massage tool — yes, really
- What happens when you stop using sound to fill, and start using it to notice
What I'm not
I'm not a sound therapist. I'm not a meditation teacher. I'm a former sound engineer who has spent five years quietly studying what attention to sound can do for an ordinary tired body. Anything I write is what I have tried on myself; do with it what you will.
The letter
A short letter every other Wednesday. A new piece, sometimes a sound to sit with, sometimes a practice. Subscribe on the homepage. No upsell, no series.
Writing to me
Easiest at [email protected]. I reply slowly. Long emails about the strange specific sound your refrigerator makes are extremely welcome.