Music of the Sea

Music has always been in our lives, but there was a time when music was not nearly as accessible as it is today. Back then, we had no records or ways to listen to music of our own, so the melodies we heard outside our home were played and replayed in our heads as we played our games, and ran, and laughed, always with the music in our memories.

We imagined music coming out of the different things that populated our house back then, and pretended that the paintings, the chairs, the tables, and anything we saw produced the music we loved so much. Of all of the things we imagined to hear music from, the pieces we had at home from the sea were our favorite. We used the clams, and seashells, as if they were record players. We would sit in front of them and imagined the music coming out of them and going into our little heads.

We collected sea life, and listened to the music we thought they produced. Each of them played different songs for us, whatever we decided, they played, and we always listened as if it was the first time we ever heard music.

One day our parents came with some sea cup sponges, and we had to contain ourselves to not jump on them. They were the closest things we had ever seen to a gramophone. Their fortunate shape, for us, allowed us to listen to their music even better, because they looked like record players. We put the cup sponges on the shelf, pretended to put a record on them, and listened to the sweet sounds coming from our new sea gramophones.

Now, many years later, when music is around me all the time, sometimes I go into the silence of my office and look at the cup sponges my parents bought that day, and listen to their music.