Blog

  • XLI (birthday reflection)

    Yesterday was my birthday. The cosmic milestone numbered 41 has been encountered and joyfully embraced — even though this number is seldom greatly celebrated. The round, existentially charged classic preceding it (40) and the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything following it (42) easily overshadow it. Nevertheless, forty-one is a prime number, which is charming in its own special way. If I live to be one hundred and one, I’m now exactly halfway through my prime number sequence.

    Yesterday, many people sent me birthday wishes on social media, participating in a ritual that grows more touching each year. Many well-wishers I haven’t even seen in a long time, yet I smiled at each of their names. Clearly, many find it worth celebrating that, long ago and quite unexpectedly, I was born! Of course, my birth wasn’t a surprise to my parents, but the true nature of what happened only became clear to me much later. Existence is total and irreversible: once you have been born, you cannot become unborn again.

    As children, we always pondered what we would become when we grew up. Usually, there were about a handful of possible answers. I knew from quite a young age that I would become a musician. As a teenager, I wrote hundreds of songs on guitar. A little later, I learned how to make electronic music with samplers and synths. For the last 12 years, I’ve dedicated myself to mastering the handpan. And in the past couple of years, I’ve focused on contemplating space, echoes, and echoes of echoes. My musicianship is constantly flowing towards something new — new sounds or new ways of thinking about or experiencing music. It’s an immense relief that becoming a musician didn’t end at some specific point!

    Yet we are always in the process of becoming something, atom by atom, something different from what we initially were. A tiny particle vibrating in emptiness has become part of the being (me) writing this very sentence.

    In the impulse behind this text, there is joy, gratitude, and love. On the morning of my birthday, I was awakened by singing. My wife and daughter had set breakfast in our backyard at the edge of the forest. Birds were singing, and the sun was shining. Being able to reach the age represented by the thirteenth prime number, drink tea, and eat cape gooseberries with loved ones is absolutely incredible!

    This writing also carries sadness. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be honest. The reasons probably don’t need further explanation — there are surely enough of them in each of our hearts upon reflection.

    Our world has somehow become the way it is. We have become the way we are. However, the most important thing isn’t how we’ve arrived at this point, but what our hearts turn toward — what we will become next.

  • A photographic ear

    We cannot shut down our hearing at will, or crop certain sounds out of our auditory field, the way we can close our eyes or turn our heads to block unwanted sights. Still, we often expect a certain raw, unfiltered fidelity between the acoustic world and our experience of sound — I call this sonance.

    Yet this experience is far from raw. It is full of interpretation, adjustment, and meaning-making. Listening is not a photographic record of the acoustic properties of a space at a given moment. Through concentration and focus, we can “zoom in” on particular qualities of sonance, discerning distances, directions, material textures, even the temperature or humidity of a space — simply by listening.

    Michael Carnes, musician and developer behind Exponential Audio and the classic Lexicon 960L algorithms, observes the same phenomenon: “I’m quite convinced we don’t hear it [reverb] photographically.”

    For Carnes, reverb is more about feeling and experience — about sonance — than it is about capturing a perfect acoustic snapshot of a moment.

    Sound and light often behave similarly, bouncing off surfaces, creating resonant colors, blurred rainbows, diffused gradients, and geometric phasing patterns. Yet in other ways, they are radically different. Light reaches our eyes instantly and absolutely. Sound, by contrast, is always already disappearing — arriving, passing through us, fading into memory.

    Leonardo da Vinci did not consider music a high form of art compared to painting, precisely because of its ephemeral nature. Visual arts, for him, could capture something lasting of human existence. Probably he would have preferred convolution over algorithmic reverb — the former recreating room acoustics based on real-life recordings, while the latter seeks not mathematical precision, but a reconstruction of sonance: the felt experience of being within a space.

    With sonance, there is always the initial arrival of sound (presonance), the living presence of sound (resonance), and the inevitable fading away (desonance). And the complete and final non-existence, absonance.

    Carnes describes this ephemerality beautifully: “If we’re listening carefully, we can reconstruct a lot of what may have happened, but there’s a level of detail that’s forever lost.”

    This is the beauty of echosophy: the art of listening not just to sounds, but to our own being as it arises and fades in time and space. By opening our ears to the world and listening closely, we become space.

  • A listening resonance

    We often think that when we are listening, we are perceiving the resonances out there in the world. It does make sense. Sound travels to us, after all.

    But Jean-Luc Nancy offers another perspective: when we listen, we open ourselves to the world and let it resonate in us. We don’t really hear the world, so much as what echoes within us.

    All that appears in our awareness is an echo of the world, shaped by the resonances in the subtle structures of our being.

    To what extent are our thoughts simply automatic resonances captured from the world? Is there a boundary between internal and external resonances — or do we just call the more subtle resonances internal?

    What if we are just very resonant matter and the awareness is out there, everywhere, in the world? This is a panpsychist perspective: perhaps consciousness is a property of space itself, and we are its instruments.

    We experience our being as stable because our structure has a stable tuning. We catch the world’s winds like an aeolian harp, and resound with the chord that arises naturally from our form.

    That resonance is our presence in the world. We sound it out until it becomes part of the space that created us.

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