Dust and Blur

There is a dream known to composers. It takes place a few days before the first rehearsal of a new piece. I have had it a few times, and know others who have been haunted by this premonition of utter disaster. The players are gathered, but the sound is complete garbage. At least, we later reassure ourselves, “the first rehearsal”—as brutal as it always is—“resurrects the creative spirit from this nightmare.”

There is another dream. I have had it a couple of times. A lost work of Bach or Mozart is revealed in the dream (I have been blessed by both!). Immemorable on waking (alas) and completely illusory, this dream yet renders an overwhelming and exhausting emotion by its profundity and by its ephemeral passing.

These musical experiences take place in “dream space.” They are conjured somewhere beyond even the “inner ear”—the place where the loved and despised echoes of famous themes conjure themselves up unwelcomingly, the place where romantic imaginations of new music carry us away. They do not breathe the air of the real world, unless you succumb to that obligation to exhale them in a hum or whistle.

Despite being purely psychological, it is easy enough to assert that these visitations are genuine, rather straight-forward musical experiences. While not so much in cascades of pitch and timbre, or even unfolding time, they hold themselves more simply as “musical feelings.” Some would even argue this is closest to the essence of what music really is.

I have found it useful to consider music without space: the fascinating impossibility plays with some hidden nature beyond the veil of the 0th dimension that resists the clasp of the human mind. It explains how the musical moment—in the constellation of your own distinct life, the orbit you are in—has collapsed like a black hole out of the reach of anyone; a secret, inexplicable solitude.

I have found it useful to consider music without time: a snowflake of reflected consonance and dissonance, a statue in stillest winter. The unordered vectors in the structural plans of my new piece, poised motionless on some grid paper, the endless music spawning from the uncollapsed multiverses of all the possible outworkings of an idea.

But even the most abstract dream resists the complete unknown. Our dreaming selves are still trapped in the 3D net between the 0th and 4th dimensions. Is there yet a “musical reality” behind the veil?

It would seem that the universe meditates on the question of music. Answers blossom from all musical traditions and from all natural, temporal, spatial phenomena, the fabric of the world. Pulsing binary star systems and our biological rhythms. But let us look to the edge of the musical universe, back in the deep memories of star formation and emergence of life.

In the depths of the mystic primordial sea swims a fundamental particle, the Planck Time, the strobe illuminating a stop-motion reality at the subdivision of an atomic quanta. All pulse, oscillation, flow, causality, sound are pulled in the direction that time tugs, towards cosmic mess.

At many orders of magnitude larger is the transduction of human perception, thought, feeling—running by the clock of the nervous system. Our minds latently tick, subdividing information streaming in the jet of time.

The strongest of the musical concepts start to surface—time slicing at the micro- and meso-scopic, pitch, and rhythm. A sinusoidal wave—the frequency, the reciprocal value of the duration of a simple oscillation—is our basic colour of sound. With the spanning set of all frequencies in all combinations of magnitudes, we have the complete palette of sound. Like the moveable RGB pixels of an electronic screen, time-modulation of these inexhaustive combinations project all timbre in all rhythm.

Now emerging from the vacuum, this information takes the form of pressure modulation. The phenomena that emerges in material space is its physical transmission. We are submerged in a fluid (take air or water). For us, it is our ear that is most tuned to receive and decode fluctuating pressure rippling through. These propagating waves touch us, the receivers, the sensation funnelled through our receptors and sampled by our brain.

Here the frequencies become both wavelengths, stretched like elastic bands, and rays, dispersing like shoals of herring. The wave-particles spread and smear through space, filling it with all the information needed for sound. Each vector from 20 to 20,000 Hz resonates somewhere along the inner ear where the sound photo is disassembled and reconstructed, just like the fourier algorithm of a computer.

The glitch between immediately successive sounds is integrated cognitively to become seamless. The delay between your two “microphones” timed and the geometry of our environment calculated, mapping the location of the sound to create your spatial recognition. These neural signals then pass through the brain network, through all manner of psychoacoustic labyrinths.

Now emerging from the anechoic void, the fundamental characteristics of real space emerge fully. There is no longer just one path the sound takes from the source to the listener. The sound radiating from the original source now collides with surfaces, creating a dazzling geometry of new reflected rays to the listener.

Sound now inhabits space, and like a wolf in a viola there are dragons in rooms. A wavelength that stretches perfectly the length or height of a room glows in a resonant “room mode.” And in a room of harmonically corresponding dimensions, it booms. Here is the sculptural form that holds sound. It is every space inhabited by a physical medium, and at its perfection, it is a blessed sound-producing vessel, a “music space.”

Even in the most shapeless of spaces there is hidden complexity. The human experience of “acoustics” is the disentangling of this complexity. The direct path that is taken from the source to our ear (if there is a direct path without any obstruction to be taken) always arrives first. All other paths from the source are detours. An empty room is a hall of mirrors. Yet no real surface is perfectly reflective and the scattering dissipates the sound and it is absorbed over the intricate textures in the space.

The sound that makes these diverted journeys to our ears is “indirect sound.” Here is our most fundamental character of sound in space. Here is the dust hanging in the air; here is the blur of the lens. We perceive indirect sound subliminally, in three ways.

Indirect sound adds energy: summation and reinforcement from reflections to the direct sound that arrives at the ear.

Indirect sound adds smudge: the rays tarried from multiple reflection paths taken to reach the receiver and prolongs the life of the vibrations.

Indirect sound adds dimensionality: a synthesis of depth, projection, immersion, envelopment from triangulating each reflected sound image.

There is a counterpoint of effect between the balance and combination of each trait. Sounds transfigure in a space—the vitality of presence, the beauty of halo, the warmth of broad embrace. And so the history of music arises through the craft of the small, intricate spaces of instruments and the encapsulating spaces they sound in. Most poignantly perhaps is how by projecting our own voice in a space, we hear something of ourselves as it is heard from the outside.

In architecture, the effect of these three parameters can arise spontaneously, symptomatically, or artificially. Rooms can create all manner of illusions and distortions: flutter echo, image shift, anomalous amplification, long reverberations with high clarity, spatial exactitude, complete immersion, and blank, frightening disorientation. The biological tools we use to navigate our world for survival are the same we use to understand ideas of expression, creation, art.

My references to music are indirect and tangential. I have not attempted to quantify its beginnings or ends, its reason. It is vague and mysterious. Neither have I dared to ponder at the slow evolutionary glacier—the myth of ourselves as beings. Instead, in attempting to define its physical horizons, we gaze upon the landscape of endless rising and setting suns, always wondering at music’s cosmic rebirth.

Our inner world seems some inverted projection of the real world, the reason why there is no evading the spatial-temporal reality, even in a dream. At least this way a dream might still be filled with inexplicable music.