Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

While listening to the FYSP ipod on shuffle, “I am sitting in a room alone” came about. For some reason i began to fast forward through the song by way of holding down the “next track” button. It caused the song to fast forward in quick skips, and the time between these skips snowballed. The funny thing was, eventually the skips had no seams, it was one. It was still being fast forwarded but I couldn’t tell if I didn’t know I was listening. I just think that it was interesting.

I’ve recently been taking life as a song, and listening to all noises as if they were something that I objectively chose to play. Strangely things have pulse. The library today began to buzz together. There was literally rhythm during some moments, when all the babbling pooled together to create a type of song. Sighs, beeps, typing, small talk, shuffling, sneezes, laughter, feet tapping, the copy machine. Strangely all these things blended into one another. In my active listening my ears began to perk, when I’d hear something faint in the distance my ears would try to hone in on that sound. I never realized how much things reverberate, often I would stop paying attention to a sound as soon as my brain understood what the sound was trying to communicate to me, however noise continues far beyond the initial reaction that caused it. Echoes are amazing, and are absolutely everywhere, even if they only show up for a microscopic chunk of a second.

Don’t even get me started on trying to sleep. The hum of the radiator; immediately my mind makes a major third above the constant pitch of that, and I can’t turn it off. It’s fun to vocally improvise over the sound of a computer buzzing, or the trash truck reversing into the alley behind my dorm room. The Garbage truck is especially interesting. Not only does it succesfully wake me up every morning at six A.M., but when my mind begins to harmonize with it, the dopplar effect screws with me. But actually sounds awesome. I’ll sing a harmonic pitch above it, and then as the truck gets closer the sound will change into dissonance, and often again back into a separate harmony.

Often I think that in the music world, originality doesn’t matter. Every thought that is or will ever be is up there floating in the atmosphere, already created and alive. We as humans have the ability to tune into this and find something. Some of these ideas are easier to come by than others. When we allow ourselves to inhale everything, unfiltered, that is when we have the capacity gain meaning in music on a deeper level. I dont know if I have entered that place, I may find it soon, I may find it never, but hopefully i’m on my way.

So I was thinking about blogging about something completely different, since everyone seems to have covered “Q” and the siren piece already, but I think I’ll just write about Q since it was one of my favorites.  What I liked to much about it was that it was so different from the drone pieces we’ve heard.  Now, I know that a little while ago I would have considered “varying drone pieces” an oxymoron (pronounced the canadian way).  But this piece seemed centered less around overtones and whatnot than a strange sort of airy rhythm.  The oscillators held down the drone while the instruments played around with intonation.  The way all sorts of beating patterns were created really pulled me in.  It’s almost like its creating music, a song, only using random space between the tones, and the whisping of the beats.  Really, really, cool.  

It was hard for me to decide in which piece I wanted to write about this week.  I really enyojed all the pieces in the class, but when I was hearing them again, I wasn’t able to reproduce the response I had towards them in class.  It was hard for me therefore to try to explain what impression this pieces made on me.

I enyojed “Q” very much.  I remember fist listening to it, and for a moment not realizing what was going on.  It took me a couple of seconds to realize that the sound I was focusing on came from the oscillators (dah…)  I started hearing the oscillators as producing a circular sound.  I remember that during the first third or so of the piece I was felling a little bit alarmed, maybe because of the intencity that the piece maintained.

As I started getting into the piece, and because what was going on in the classroom, I starting realizing how hard all my body was vibrating.  My pulse was up.  I had a very strong physical response to this piece, but not a negative one, I didn’t feel opressed or nervous for a change.

If you couldn’t tell from the title, last night’s pieces were pretty intense for me. Both had so much activity within and it was often hard to concentrate on any specific element.

I did enjoy “Q” because of that reason, though. It never got boring; my ear was constantly shifting from tone to overtone and beat to beat. The summary of “Q” notes that “the oscillators spatially contain the instrumentalists while at the same time the instrumentalists tonally contain the oscillators….The oscillators operate as fixed gravitational centers around which the instrumental sounds constantly orbit.” I definitely agree with that image, although it didn’t really seem like the oscillators were being contained as much as they were battering against the instrumentalists’ “orbit”. The beating patterns were so many and so strong that they felt like giant waves covered with sonic spikes, breaking past the reedy instrumental tones and blasting all this pressure in your face. I had this weird sense of multiple-dimension-like hearing; my ears (and body) picked up both the physical vibrations of the beating patterns and the sonic dissonance and overtones stemming from the instrumentalists and pure tones. Occasionally one “dimension” would overpower the other, but I didn’t try to find the other side again–”Q” is such a powerful piece that it would be like trying to cross a flooding river. If that makes any sense.

“Triadic Iteration Lattices” was a lot harder for me to appreciate. I’m slightly phobic of tornadoes, so whenever I hear a siren, sprinting to the basement is all I can think of. Compounded to that was the classic association with air raids and bomb shelters. Thus, listening to this piece was kind of terrifying. It was a much more visual experience than “Q,” and it was hard to disconnect from those visuals and pay attention to the sound itself. Still, the synchronization between the sirens was fascinating–hearing the rise and decay of each siren and then all the caterwauling combined was a pretty breathtaking (and gutwrenching) experience. My ears!

Digging down to the frequencies in between notes, hearing them collide and reinforce one another, and listening to the rhythms that they create and destroy was for me a very uncomfortable experience.  Right from the start, the two oscillators made me squirm, turning my head this way and that as if that would make it resolve.  Q made me think of trying to help someone who is really bad at tuning their guitar – and listening to the collisions of your pure note with theirs, off just enough to jar you.

Despite my discomfort, I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. It challenged me to take the inherent dissonance of the tone and focus on it alone, how it weaves in and out but never completely resolves.  The hiccups in the piece jolted me – everything almost came together… But then they were off again, pulsating and raw. Sometimes I think that listening to a piece like that is more about the feeling you get when it is over, and you can relax and appreciate what you now hear around you (silence)… At any rate, Q was intense.