Post #2: Listening Response

According to William James in Varieties of Religious Experience, “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” Understanding the role of these other levels of consciousness is critical to understanding how our subjective experience–including our experience of art and music–operates.

Some psychologists argue that these deeper levels of consciousness, being not controlled by conscious awareness, are the result of learned associations, adopted through the recognition of patterns in our environment. Thus, it is important to understand that all music operates not only on its own “musical merits” but rather on the extramusical associations it conjures for the listener. In fact, if we approach music through this lens, we must concede that music (and all forms of art) are essentially fluid extensions of our everyday experience. Music does not exist in the high and lofty place we often ascribe to it, but rather music occupies the very spaces in which we live. Appreciation of this fact has lately rendered me more open and excited to explore the world of electronic music, especially as I recently listened for the first time to recordings of Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk and Lucier’s I am sitting in a room.

The Kits Beach Soundwalk is a guided narration of several sound worlds, each with vivid descriptions of the scenery related to those sounds. The narration emphasizes the subjective nature of our experience of sound, highlighting how visual cues distort our perception of what we hear. This is especially true of the beach scene, where the recording highlights different parts of the sound world according to the words of the narrator. In a later scene, the sounds of Mozart played over the radio are described as “twinkling,” another example of the subjective role of associations made between the senses. Even the very presence of a narrator, providing visual cues throughout the experience reinforces the role of learned associations in our experience of art, including linguistic associations, e.g. the association between the spoken word and images of the object being conjured.

In Lucier’s recording, a speaker demonstrates how the sound of his voice is affected by the acoustic space in which he is speaking. By recording successive recordings of the voice in the room, the effect of the space becomes increasingly apparent, accumulating through each iteration. Like Westerkamp’s soundwalk, the space was deliberately chosen to be a space in which many listeners live great portions of their daily lives–a far reach from the vacuous concert hall in which we are used to hearing music performed. I believe this enhances the musical experience as it invites listeners to embrace their own everyday experiences. Rather than setting aside the aforementioned psychological underpinnings that give meaning to art, I am sitting in a room places these at the foreground.

Over the course of 45 minutes, consonant sounds become dulled as vowels are blurred into a homogenous sound. Around 15 minutes, the voice of the room begins to surface, sounding first a low register. Gradually, this voice rises to include other members of the resonant harmonic series. About halfway through the recording, there was a moment when this sound wavered primarily between two notes a perfect fifth apart. With each successive iteration, higher harmonics became more apparent. By the final iteration, most of this sound was concentrated around a high E5. I recall this moment especially vividly. The sound emanating entirely from the natural qualities of the room had no sense of being forced; it sang with a remarkably free tone. As a performer, this experience informs me about the importance of listening to the response of the acoustic space when I want to achieve a similarly free and open sound.

As these recordings reveal, our unconscious mind and even the physical spaces in which we spend our time speak to us in profound ways. They have voices of their own. Understanding their grammar will help us better understand the spaces we occupy and the spaces which occupy us.