Beyond the Book #4 – Move As If You Were Underwater

 No Responses »
Dec 312010
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Move As If You Were Underwater.”

Introduction: slow feels good

Readers of The Next Ten Minutes will be aware that while I am a great advocate for mindfulness meditation, I often struggle to maintain a consistent meditation practice myself. One of the things that I find most difficult about getting myself to meditate regularly is that meditation requires me to slow down from my usual pace. Like most people, I tend to associate motion with productivity. When I’m busy doing things, especially if I’m busily doing several things at once, I feel, well…important.  Moving slowly works against the way we’ve been conditioned to behave. Which is precisely why it’s such a valuable practice. The exercise Move As If You Were Underwater is designed to provide you with a way to experiment with life in the slow lane. Because once you surrender to it, slow feels good. Slow allows you to move through your life with the fluidity and grace of a Tai Chi master.


Life under water

Similarly to the way that the exercise Go Into Another Room sensitized you to the pressure of air against your body, this exercise asks you to imagine the feel of water pressing against your skin. That pressure forces you to move more slowly than you feel you should be able to. You can probably remember the experience of being a child in a swimming pool and trying to reproduce the activity of running underwater, how the pressure of the water transformed that  familiar movement and made you acutely aware of the mechanics of an activity you ordinarily did without thinking about it.


Like most of the exercises in the book, this one aims to reawaken your awareness of automatic behaviors by forcing yourself into an observational mode as you examine the mechanics of your behavior. Or, as Dan Siegel calls it, YODA:  “You Observe and Decouple Automaticity.” “Automaticity” is a way to describe our capacity to behave without conscious awareness of our behaviors. Automaticity is obviously very valuable in many ways. Evolutionarily, the development of the sort of procedural memory that allows us to act without thinking was essential for survival. Because it’s obviously not adaptive to be thinking about the mechanics of running while you’re in the act of trying to out-run a sabre-toothed tiger.

But there is an invisible loss that happens when we transform a learned activity into an automatic behavior. What we lose is the present moment…our mindful awareness of what is actually happening, inside our mind and body and also in the world around us.

In my experience, regaining access to the present moment often requires us to play some sort of cognitive trick on ourselves. Because our minds are extremely well-adapted to do what they do, we have to find ways to bypass that automaticity. Forcing yourself to slow down is one such trick.

Ommmmmmmmm….

Using a mantras can be an important technique in the service of slowing yourself down. Mantras have long served this purpose in many spiritual traditions. And in my view anything can be a mantra so long as it’s used to draw our focus intentional toward a single conscious object. The focus of the mantra doesn’t have to be spiritual (although the outcome of using it may well turn out to be).


In the exercise I encourage you to repeat a simple word or phrase as a way to continually re-direct your attention back to your slow-motion activity. So, if you’re peeling potatoes in slow motion you might simply repeat to yourself: peeling, peeling, peeling. Inevitably your mind will wander. When you notice it has wandered all you need to do is to gently draw your attention back to that mantra, the same way you would bring your focus back to your breath in mindfulness meditation.

Slow food, slow driving

Next time you sit down to dinner with family or friends, take a moment to listen to the sounds emanating from the table. Does it sound something like this?


Slurping and chewing noises are a sure indicator that food is being consumed fast and unconsciously. If, like me, you find yourself distressed at the ways in which we have collectively lost touch with the experience of eating, the slow food movement is the antidote. More than just advocating that we slow down and appreciate our food, slow food proponents advocate that we become more deeply conscious of where our food is coming from and how it is created. In other words, slow is more than just an absence of speed, it’s a way of thinking – deeply and expansively.


You might also try a technique which I learned from cookbook author Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, who writes in The Chinese Kitchen about how her father told her “that we must eat our food first with our eyes, then with our minds, then with our noses, and finally with our mouths.” When I notice myself eating too quickly (as I am prone to do), I try to bring myself back to this simple ritual. Before I take a bite I force myself to slow down and experience the food visually. Then I contemplate the food with my mind: what are the many pathways by which it found its way to my plate? Next I draw my attention to my sense of smell, letting myself “taste” the food with my nose. Finally, slowly, I take a bite. And, having gone through these preliminary steps, the experience of eating is transformed.

Another way to transform our everyday experience into slow-motion is through the technique of “hyper-miling.” This practice – driving in a slow and excruciatingly deliberate manner in order to maximize your car’s gas mileage – was born out of a response to high gas prices. But I think of it less as a money-saving technique than as a form of meditation.


In my personal experiments with hyper-miling, I’ve found that one of the most difficult aspects of the practice are the expectations of others. If you’re going to intentionally drive slowly, you have to directly face the irritation of others on the road. How you hold this awareness can vary. You can cloak yourself in righteous indignation; you can be apologetic.; you can try to block out awareness of everyone else. But no matter what you do, you’re still going to be getting in other people’s way. It’s a bit like sitting down to meditate in the middle of a crowded sidewalk. Which forces you to contemplate the interesting but uncomfortable idea that an act of meditation to be obnoxious can also be a public nuisance.

Underwater music

Tempted though I am to use the SpongeBob song as a theme song for the exercise, in the end I have to go with “Son of a Mermaid.” Not because I’m a great fan of the song itself, but because the guy actually performs it underwater.


As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Memorize a Data Sequence – here.

 

Share

Light a Candle: a solstice exercise

 No Responses »
Dec 222010
 

Note: I wrote this new exercise especially for the solstice.  It was first posted on the Beyond Words Trend Watch blog, which you can find here.

The universal element in all our winter holidays is the absence of natural light. On a very primitive level, we’re all a little bit afraid of the dark and that’s why, as the days become shorter and shorter, we string lights around our homes and light candles. We’re holding off against the growing darkness, both symbolically and literally. But in addition to danger, darkness holds a deep and beautiful creative energy. In this exercise (which should be done after sunset or before sunrise), I invite you to immerse yourself in both the lush beauty of darkness and the fragile miracle of light.

What You’ll Need

  • A room
  • A candle
  • Matches

How to Do It

1. See the light. Start by choosing a room in which you feel safe, one in which you have control over the light switches. Now, before you do anything else, simply sit quietly in the room and observe the light that’s already there. Notice the lights themselves – are they overhead or lamps, fluorescent or standard bulbs? Notice everything you can about each source of light. What color is it? Is it constant or does it fluctuate in intensity? Try to identify every other source of light in the room, even those that are masked by brighter lights. Check the electronic devices – they’re always good for some luminescence. How about the windows? Are street lights or passing cars inserting light into the room?

2. Go over to the dark side. In preparation for this step, make sure you know where your candle and matches are. Identify a safe place where you can light the candle once it’s dark. Then, one by one, eliminate as many sources of light as you can. Sometimes this will simply mean flipping a switch. Other times it will mean turning off or even unplugging appliances. Sometimes it will require you to block out lights that you can’t turn off, by covering them up or pulling the curtains or shades. Note: you’re allowed to back-track a little as you perform this step, turning a lamp back on in order to locate the cord for the appliance that’s still lit up.

3. Curse the darkness. Why? Because it’s fun! Also, because it will help connect viscerally to your primal fear of the dark. Imagine the darkness as an evil force that is trying to swallow you up. Imagine it’s sheltering dragons and other malicious beasts. Once you’ve summoned up as much fear as you can, start cursing the darkness. Think of your voice as a source of light that can penetrate the darkness as you call it the worse names that you can think of.

4. See in the dark. That last step didn’t really work, did it? No matter how much you rage against the dying of the light, the darkness holds steady. So try a different approach. Take a few minutes to simply observe yourself as you sit in the darkness. Observe your thoughts, emotions and perceptions as you sit without trying to fight the darkness at all. What do you notice your mind doing? Is it active or calm, fearful or confident? Then see if you can stop attributing any intention to the darkness and simply notice it. Look into it. Stare into it. Try to see the darkness itself, as if it were a palpable substance. Does your experience of darkness change as you do this? Do you notice your eyes starting to adjust, to be able to make out more detail in the room? Is it possible to notice that change as it happens?

5. Light a candle. Because, as they say, it’s better than cursing the darkness. Locate your candle and matches. Even if your eyes have adjusted so that you can make these objects out, try to do it without looking, as if you were in perfect darkness. Magnify your sense of touch as you push the match against the strike pad, creating the friction that creates the flame. Look at the lit match for a moment before you light the candle. Notice how staring into it actually magnifies the darkness around it. Finally, light the candle. Set it in front of you. For a moment don’t focus on the quality of the light itself. Just take a few deep breaths and notice the way your body feels. What has changed? Then, with soft eyes, let yourself see the light. Notice what your mind wants to do. Does it like to stare straight into the light? Or does it want to use the emanation of the light to look around the room? Do you feel the impulse to jump up and turn more lights back on? Or possibly to blow out the candle and return to darkness? Take a few moments just to notice these impulse and then, when you’re ready, act on whichever one is the most appealing.

Inner darkness

There’s good reason that we’re hard-wired to be anxious about darkness. Darkness steals away our ability to identify danger before it reaches us. In darkness, we have an inherent disadvantage against all those nocturnal creatures whose vision has adapted to the night (and also against humans who are wearing night-vision goggles). Darkness is associated with almost every negative human quality – aggression, ignorance, perversity, etc. To Sigmund Freud, darkness was associated the primal urges that lurked in the unconscious. To Carl Jung, darkness meant the “shadow,” that part of ourselves that we rejected and split off from awareness. Freud was the first to articulate the ways in which we develop defenses against the awareness of this darkness within us. To both Jung and Freud, mental health required some degree of re-integration of these “dark” urges into our conscious minds by acknowledging rather than denying our aggressive impulses. In Jung’s view, owning your shadow is an essential part of becoming a more evolved human being. For Freud, the most profound creativity arose out of the sublimation of primitive, “dark” energy into higher order actions. The issue is not that our inner darkness is a positive thing. It’s that we all inevitably have a dark side, and when we deny it we’re telling ourselves several unsustainable lies. The first is that we are without aggression and hostility. The second is that we are not strong enough to experience dark feelings without acting them out. The irony is that those who most deny the reality of their inner darkness are precisely those who are most likely to act out on those urges. (Which is why variations on the story of the preacher who gets caught with his pants down are so very common.) The truth is that our darkest impulses are bound up with our most vital energy. And allowing ourselves to experience that darkness in a mature way can free up that energy for our use and give us access to our richest creativity.

Variations:

Close your eyes. It’s a funny thing about closing our eyes…there’s so much light happening on the backs of our eyelids. I have no idea what neurological or anatomical features give rise to this internal light show, but whatever the reason it gives us an opportunity to do this a variation on exercise no matter where we are. When you first close your eyes, the experience seems to be one of darkness. But as you settle in you can become aware of the host of visual sensations which arise within your own mind and body. Try using these sensations of light and color as an object of meditation. Take ten minutes or so to focus on the light that you are seeing. Notice everything you can about it. Then (and this is the best part), open your eyes and see if you can catch the imprint of those sensations on the world you see before you.

Just sit in the dark. Surely you know the old joke: How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Never mind, I’ll just sit in the dark. We’ve all got an inner martyr. Bring yours into the open by doing this exercise while enacting the spirit of this joke. Give yourself access to a candle, but don’t light it. Fail to light it resentfully. Magnify your feelings of powerlessness and suffering. Imagine what life looks like to those who those who not only don’t acknowledge their own inner darkness, but also refuse to give themselves access to their inner light. When you start to feel your suffering at its most intense, try to shift your perspective so that you are observing rather the martyr rather than in habiting him or her. What would it take to hold this suffering person with compassion?

Further listening: three great songs about darkness and light

Absolutely the best song ever written about a nightlight


Spiritual darkness, spiritual light

 

Melting into the dark

Share

Hmong New Year

 No Responses »
Dec 172010
 

Last Saturday my family and I were fortunate to be able to attend the Hmong new year celebration here in Missoula. Those who have followed my Being Undiagnosable series will know that while I was in the two-year process of searching for a diagnosis for symptoms which eventually turned out to be Lyme disease, a local Hmong healer offered to perform several healing ceremonies on my behalf. (You can read my account of that experience here.) since that time I’ve kept in periodic touch with Ia, the healer, and her husband Kou. I was thrilled when Kou called to invite me to the celebration and I wanted to post a brief description of the event along with a few pictures and videos.

The celebration took place in the gymnasium of a local elementary school. As we walked in we were immediately engulfed in the spectacularly colorful traditional costumes and the bright sounds coming from the men’s vests, decorated with rows of old French coins which jangled with every movement.

Before the ceremony we were led into the cafeteria, where giant pots of food awaited us. As soon as we walked in, Kou spotted us and welcomed us in.

“Thanks so much for inviting us,” my wife said.

“Of course,” he said simply, “you are family.”

And that’s exactly the way it felt throughout the evening. First we were fed, then we were led into the gymnasium where we watched a wonderful series of musicians and dancers perform. We were told that the dancing would keep going on until at least midnight. We didn’t have the stamina to last that long, but here are some scenes from the time we were there.




Kou and Ia, dancing




Musical performance using a banana leaf


Hmong flute performance



A dance done with a traditional musical instrument

I feel so fortunate to have Kou and Ia consider me a part of their family. I’m so grateful for the support they’ve given me in my illness. I feel held by their entire community.

If you’re interested in knowing more about Hmong culture, here are couple of wonderful books that talk about the Hmong in America. The first, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, will resonate especially with those who have struggled with our fractured healthcare system. The second, The Late Homecomer, is a broader, beautifully poetic portrait of the Hmong experience.

Share

My Lyme Disease is Not The IDSA Lyme Disease

 23 Responses »
Dec 092010
 
Borrellia

On 12/8/2010 an article appeared in the Chicago Tribune entitled, Chronic Lyme disease: A dubious diagnosis. The following is my response.

 

According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, I can’t possibly have Lyme disease.

That doesn’t change the fact that in the Fall of 2008 my health went to hell. It started with weakness. I was a marathon runner, but suddenly it became difficult to bike up the small hill where I picked up my sons from school. Then I started having muscle twitches and spasms, all over my body, all of the time. Parts of my body started going numb. Other parts were intermittently tingly, or would have sudden shooting pains, like electric shocks running through my muscles. I became heavily fatigued so that most afternoons I needed to spend several hours napping. It became harder to think clearly. I lost thirty pounds in a couple of months, for no clear reason. One winter morning I spent a half hour shoveling snow – something I ordinarily enjoy – when I suddenly went dramatically weak, pale, shaky. It took me several hours to recover.

I made an urgent appointment with my doctor. He was certain it was a cardiovascular episode. I was at the cardiologist’s office the next day, doing a stress echocardiogram. Turned out my heart was in great shape. That wasn’t the problem.

What was the problem? I had no idea. And neither did any of the doctors that I saw over the next two years. Not the first neurologist, not the oncologist, not the gastroenterologist, not the rheumatologist, not the allergist. And not the second neurologist, at the Mayo Clinic.

Mayo was able to tell me that I didn’t have ALS, which was a great relief since that’s what my symptoms most closely resembled. Through doctor visits and many, many tests I was also able to rule out cancer, MS, Parkinson’s, Celiac Disease, Polymyositis, and many other more obscure conditions. Whatever was wrong with me looked at least a little like all of those things, but was clearly something different. Something no one seemed to be able to identify.

Somewhere along the line I even had a test for Lyme disease, the ELISA screening test, which came back negative. Made sense to me at the time. Lyme was the last thing I suspected. For one thing I live in Montana, where popular wisdom has it that Lyme does not exist. For another thing, I didn’t have that classic bullseye rash that you’re supposed to get.

I didn’t know at the time that the ELISA produces many false negatives. And I didn’t know that you can get Lyme without having the classic rash pattern. As a result, I didn’t give much thought to the rash that I actually did have, a month or two before my symptoms started.

In the meantime, my entire life was transformed. I had to stop running and doing any other demanding exercise. Work wore me out so I did as little of it as possible. I was consumed with fear, trying to figure out what the hell was going on with me. And I spent a whole lot of money trying to get an answer.

In the summer of 2010, on the recommendation of a friend, I went to my doctor and asked for a more sophisticated (and much more expensive) test for Lyme – the Western Blot.

According to mainstream medical practices, my doctor had no business ordering that test for me. According to the CDC, if a test comes out negative on the ELISA, you don’t have Lyme. Period.

 

Funny thing though…the new test came back positive. For Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. And the test results were unequivocal. They met the CDC standards for reporting Lyme.

Finally, I had a diagnosis. Finally I could start treating the symptoms that had already stolen so much of my life away.

Except for one thing.

I couldn’t, according to the IDSA, actually have Lyme disease.

Here’s why. My doctor (who was skeptical that I could possibly have Lyme) was willing to prescribe me a month’s worth of antibiotics – the IDSA recommended treatment for the disease. I filled the prescription and took the medication faithfully. The result: nothing. I might as well have been taking Tic Tacs. My symptoms continued exactly as they had before.

By the logic of the IDSA, if symptoms corresponding with Lyme don’t respond to the recommended treatment, then the disease isn’t Lyme.

Stop for a moment to consider that argument. Imagine the same logic being applied to any other disease. Say, to treatment for cancer. Try to imagine a conversation between a breast cancer patient and her oncologist going like this:

“I’m sorry Ms. Jones., but since you haven’t responded to the chemotherapy I can only conclude that you don’t actually have cancer. It has to be something else.”

And the next line in the conversation would almost inevitably be:

“I suspect that there might be psychological issues involved, so I’m giving you a referral to a therapist.”

The absurdity is self-evident. But this is exactly what Lyme patients are being told every day.

 

Mis-diagnosis goes both ways.

The Chicago Tribune article conveys the impression that hundreds or even thousands of people are being told that they have Lyme disease when they don’t, that Lyme is being massively over-diagnosed by loony-tune doctors, who then murder their patients by giving them dangerous treatments that they don’t need.

It’s awfully hard to square this accusation with experience of so many people with Lyme, who have spent years going from doctor to doctor, just like I did, who are themselves being mis-diagnosed with everything from arthritis to ALS. Or who are being told that there is nothing wrong with them at all, that their pain and fatigue and cognitive impairments are all in their head.

Non-diagnosis can be just as harmful as a mis-diagnosis.

The truth is that nothing in medicine is as clear as the way IDSA defines Lyme disease. Every illness in the world has variations and subtleties. Every disease manifests itself a little differently in every human being. And every treatment for every illness is variable in its effectiveness.

Except, according to the IDSA, for Lyme.

 

So, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, there’s no way that I can have Lyme disease.

But that doesn’t change the fact that my life has been turned upside down by Lyme. That I continue to experience the same set of ever-shifting symptoms which dramatically limit my life and leave me feel like I’m about to turn 80 rather than 50.

And by comparison with many other people with Lyme, I’ve got it pretty easy. I have some pretty decent days – as long as I get a lot of sleep and don’t work too hard, as long as I don’t try to go running or skiing or to rake leaves or shovel snow or do anything else which will inevitably trigger a reaction.

I’m lucky enough now to have found a doctor who believes that I have Lyme and who is willing to treat it. The treatments haven’t helped much yet, but that’s not surprising. Because the very controversies which the Chicago Tribune describes have paralyzed research into effective Lyme treatment.

The great paradox here is that if we want our doctors to become more adept at diagnosing and treating chronic Lyme, then we have to investigate the experience of those who us who actually have it. If we continue to marginalize patients then it will never be possible to do the research which can truly determine what is and is not an appropriate treatment for the disease.

To put it bluntly: those practitioners who don’t believe in the existence of chronic Lyme are responsible for creating the very problem they are complaining about. Because there’s no way to identify safe diagnostic procedures and treatments without first acknowledging the existence of the disease.

I don’t know of any other disease in which patients are blamed for the failure of their treatment.

And I can’t imagine any other illness about which the argument would be made that ineffective treatment means that the disease doesn’t exist.


Read Other “My Lyme Disease is not the IDSA Lyme Disease” stories:

Ashley

Eric

Molly

Candice

Kim

Alix


Share

Beyond the Book #3 – Go Into Another Room

 No Responses »
Dec 012010
 

This is one in a continuing series of posts which explores in more depth the each of the exercises in The Next Ten Minutes. In this post I discuss some of  the ideas behind the exercise “Go Into Another Room.”


Introduction: acoustics and mindfulness

The exercise Go Into Another Room combines mindfulness practice with a simple psychotherapeutic technique with the goal of bringing us into a present moment awareness of the space we are currently inhabiting.

The mindfulness aspect of the exercise involves focusing our awareness on the spatial and acoustic aspects of the physical rooms we inhabit. The therapeutic technique involves mindfully making a very small change in our behavior and using the experience of change as leverage for a larger shift in our state of mind. I talk about the therapeutic technique in several different parts of the book, so in this post I’ll be exploring our experience of acoustic space and the ways in which acoustic awareness can be a vehicle for greater mindfulness. Because I believe that sound is a particularly effective vehicle with which to access mindfulness.  Like the breath, it’s always there. Even in the quietest room there is sound. Even in the absence of external noise, our own bodies create sound. And focusing our attention on the qualities of the sounds around us brings us into a fuller awareness of the present moment.

Acoustic literacy

I am nothing of an acoustician. I don’t begin to be able to comprehend the mathematics and physics that regulate the way sound behaves in different physical spaces. Nonetheless, hearing is by far my dominant sense and as a result I find that I have an intense intuitive awareness of the acoustic properties of physical spaces.

It’s not an intentional awareness and often it’s not even conscious. I find that it’s a difficult experience to put into words. Part of what makes it difficult is that I’m talking not about the experience of sound itself, but rather about an awareness of the behavior of sound within a given space. The sound of a hand clap in an empty room, to give a simple example, is very different than a hand clap in a fully furnished room. The sound of a footstep is different in a bathroom and in a gymnasium. Even if the original source of the sound is identical, the behavior of that sound in different rooms transforms our experience of it.

The reason for this is reverberation. When sound waves move out from their source, they eventually make contact with the surfaces around them. When they bounce off of those surfaces we hear, in addition to the initial sound, its reflection.

Different surfaces behave differently when sounds hit them. Some tend to absorb sound, some reflect them back. Surfaces at different distances reflect the sound at different time intervals. Different materials absorb or reflect particular frequencies of sound. As I say, the mathematical formulas describing the acoustic behavior of different spaces is extremely complex and beyond my understanding. But those who do understand it have created software which can model many different spaces, as in the examples below, which I created by taking a single sound source then running it through different settings on the reverb plug-in on my computer.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In this example I’ve taken a simple drum beat and repeated it eight times. The difference should be fairly clear even on the worst speakers. The first version is “dry” – no additional reverb has been applied. In the second reverb is applied to create the effect of hearing the sound from a great distance. The third replicates the acoustics of a kitchen. The fourth is a large room. The fifth is a tunnel, the sixth a cathedral, the seventh and exhibition hall and the eighth mimics a martial arts stadium. (For those who are interested, I did this using two of the reverb plug-ins that come with Cubase 5 – Reverence and RoomWorks. I didn’t do anything fancy with the settings, just used the presets that come with these programs.)

Echoic, Anechoic

As I say, my understanding of what’s happening here is primarily intuitive. My ears pick up on these differences and I respond to them. We all perform some version of this extraordinarily complex process. Sort of like bats using echolocation, our minds are constantly making subtle assessments of the relationship between the sources of sounds and the reflections those sounds are creating.

As Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter in the introduction to their wonderful book Spaces Speak, Are You Listening, the ability to sense spatial attributes is not unique to bats and dolphins. It’s hard-wired into our brains. “For example,” they write, “when blindfolded, nearly all of us can approach a wall without touching it just by attending to the way the wall changes the frequency balance of the background noise.” We’re not ordinarily conscious of doing this. But if I blindfolded you and teleported you to the inside of a cathedral, you’d know instantly what sort of space you were in. And if I then teleported you into a bathroom, you’d automatically feel the difference.

Personally, I find that I’m very sensitive to these differences. There are rooms that I can barely stand to be in because of their acoustic properties. And there are other spaces that I completely love. One of the rooms I like the most acoustically

is the music studio that I have created in the basement of my house. It’s a narrow room and before I began using it for music it was acoustically unpleasant…boomy and tight. I treated the walls with a great deal of acoustical foam, which absorbs much of the sound in the room before it reverberates off of the walls (particularly lower, bass frequencies). The effect is a room that, when you walk into it, feels soft and hushed, gently contained. The acoustical treatment has shaped the behavior of sound within the room in a way that makes it much more pleasant. At least to me.

This can be taken to extremes. Blesser and Salter describe the effects of “anechoic chambers,” rooms which have been specially designed so that all surfaces absorb rather than reflect sound waves. “From an aural perspective,” they write, “an ideal anechoic chamber is completely silent and entirely ‘spaceless.’” They describe the sensations of pressure, discomfort, disorientation, even nausea that are created by the absence of sonic reverberation. “The combination of sound isolation and absorption reduces background sound to a level that no longer masks the sound of a listener’s breathing heart or flowing blood.”  Indeed, when John Cage entered the Harvard anechoic chamber in 1948 he reported that rather than hearing silence he heard two distinct sounds which he was told were the sounds of his nervous system and his circulatory system. There is no such thing, he concluded, as perfect silence.


 

I am Standing in a Room

The theme song for this exercise is not a song at all. It is a classic piece of sound art by Alvin Lucier called I am Standing in a Room. (It’s a piece which I’ve listed, along with other minimalist classics, in the “further listening” at the end of the exercise Repeat Yourself.) In this piece, Lucier takes a simple piece of audio (a spoken paragraph) and plays it in a room then re-records the sound as it sounds in the room. He repeats this process over and over until the original sound is transformed by the reverberant properties of the room itself. It’s an extraordinary exploration of the sonic and acoustic principles I’ve been discussing in this post.  An illustration of the technique can be found in the video below. If you’d like to get the entire mesmerizing and surprisingly poignant 45 minute piece, you can find it here.


 

As always, I welcome suggestions for other pieces of music which capture the essence of the exercise.

Further reading

I’ve created an Amazon list which links to each of the suggestions for further reading at the end of the exercise. You can find it here. The specific books for this exercise are:

As always, if you’ve got suggestions for other books on any of the topics in the exercise or in this post, please leave them in a comment.

Further, further reading

More detailed reading on spatial acoustics, borrowed from Blesser and Salter’s website:

 

Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Move As If You Were Underwater – here.

Share
© 2011 The Next Ten Minutes Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha