Attentive listening to natural sounds can also expand our understanding of musical meaning. Human music is generally a semantic phenomenon in which the relationships between sounds mean as much as the sounds themselves. But sounds as they occur in nature are not symbols, subjects, or objects. They represent nothing other than themselves. They simply sound. The greatest power and mystery of natural sounds lie in their immediate and non-referential nature. If we listen carefullly enough we may occasionally hear them just as they are.

~“John Luther Adams”:http://johnlutheradams.com/, “Resonance of Place: Confessions of an Out-of-Town Composer”