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:
- Spatial Hearing by Jens Blauert
- The Soundscape by Murray Schafer
- Audio-Vision by Michel Chion
- The Soundscape of Modernity by Emily Thompson
- The Eyes of the Skin by Juhani Pallasmaa
- Auditorium Acoustics and Architectural Design by Michael Barron
- Concert Halls and Opera Houses by Leo Beranek
- This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin
- Architecture of the Air by Christopher Janney
- Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience by Yi-Fu Tuan
- The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
- Critical Listening Skills for Audio Professionals by F. Alton Everest
- The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. Hall
- The Varieties of Sensory Experience by David Howes
- Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong
Read the next post in the Beyond the Book series – Move As If You Were Underwater – here.
