Tag: echosophy

  • 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.

  • Echo guides you home

    People are looking for a home in experience – or rather an experience that feels like a home. When they are at home, they are not out there, separated from their origin. They have returned to something that allows them to be at ease. (By “home” I mean an existential home, not the actual home, or a nostalgic childhood home, of individuals.)

    A religious experience can be described as a homecoming, a return, a definitive answer to the fundamental ubitas, a recurring and insisting “where am I?”. When one returns home, one does not need to leave anymore. The existential location has been defined not in contrast to the surroundings, or by geographic coordinates, but by experience itself. It is an affirming answer to the question: “Do you know where you are?”

    The irony of “looking for one’s true self” is that people look inward when they should be looking out in the universe. Only by witnessing their own existence through their own being can they actually recognize that they exist in the world, as a mind and a body.

    To find home, follow the echo of your self.

    “It’s all in your mind”, is an explanation often given by New-Age folks, Neo-Platonists, or Cyber-Gnostic Matrix fans. These ideas can be either dismissed as individualist solipsism (“all of this exist in MY mind”), or more rarely understood as a limitation set by a mind that is dampening its resonating potential with complicated and overlapping feedback loops that cancel out their own resonance; in much simpler words: we can potentially find everything by tracing back our mind, but too many conceptual explanations obscure the direct experience.

    Finding a home in one’s own experience is allowing the self to merge together with the resonance of the world. In this experience the individual disappears and becomes one with the phenomenal world. This experience may be considered ‘religious’ because it transcends all ready-made concepts, and without an ego in the way, the experience might evoke a sensation of ‘being in God’ or ‘being the ultimate truth’ — although verbalising or defining the experience conceptually will inevitably push it further back from the unhinged openness it requires.

    To find home, follow the echo of your self. Follow the echo, and keep your mind quiet.