Tag: echosophy

  • Re: What Is an Echo?

    What is an echo?

    A shift in time, a disintegrating waveform record of time and space, a return of an old friend.

    What is an echo?

    An observation of recurrence, an inner reflection of the world out there, an outer and inner resonance.

    What is an echo?

    A constant rise and fading of the sonorous, an observer relating to the where-and-when, an arriving and a leaving of a lingering question in the ear of someone who listens deeply:

    what is an echo?

  • Altered Spaces, Altered States

    When I write that a sound is more delicate than a theoretical concept, I mean that it contains information about the surroundings in which it exists, and it can’t really be considered without all that information. The sound of a handclap activates the space around it, making its resonant and reverberant potential reveal itself — it doesn’t really exist without the space around it.

    There are ways to manipulate or suppress the acoustic properties of a room by using complex materials or architectural designs. A fully treated, non-echoic chamber will feel extremely strange for most people because non-echoic spaces hardly ever occur in the natural world. A highly reverberating and echoing space, on the other hand, can strike us with awe and inspire us with complex, even religious experiences. Next to a large echoing structure we can feel the presence of something larger than us.

    Echo and reverb both locate the listener in time and space. By changing the acoustic properties of a space, we can introduce various effects to the mind. The development of experimental sound design methods during the last century has allowed artists to express themselves not only through their instruments but also through virtual spatial effects, such as reverb and delay.

    As a musician, I know that reverbs and delays can introduce an exciting dimension to any sound. They add texture, create rhythmic effects, and most importantly — a sense of instruments and sounds being somewhere, in relation to us.

    The composer Edgar Varèse wrote in 1936, “When new instruments will allow me to write music as I conceive it, taking the place of the linear counterpoint, the movement of sound masses, of shifting planes, will be clearly perceived.”

    Varèse dreamt of artistic expression, but I believe he wanted to express a certain aspect of being in the spatiotemporal world. We now have the tools to create and recreate imaginary echoes and reverbs at will.

  • Echo and the Eye

    An echo is our own perception of a returning wave. Listening to it is hearing our own hearing happening somewhere, somewhen.

    Listening is a totally different process than recording a sound. If we use a mechanical device to record a wave and its echo (to separate ourselves from the observer’s point of view), we capture a pattern of the wave — an image. But there is no way to truly experience a sound or an echo without experiencing it in time. We may look at spectrograms, but it is the temporal unfolding that makes listening such a delicate tool for observing — lose your focus for a second, and you might miss it…

    Perhaps it is due to the speed of light and the biological structure of our eye that we tend to associate seeing with what happens right now. But from studying visual illusions, we also know that our mind is easily fooled. We might see movement in a still image or make wrong assumptions about the dimensions of the world. But the visual world does not echo in the same way as the sonorous world.

    Jean-Luc Nancy remarks in Listening: “Whereas visible or tactile presence occurs in a motionless ‘at the same time,’ sonorous presence is an essentially mobile ‘at the same time…’”

    For Nancy, listening is observing the internal resonance of a sound within us. To experience listening, we have to co-exist with the sound for its whole duration. A text or an image doesn’t impose a fixed timeline for our perception, although it may hint at one. But a sound, with its echoes, always has a strong temporal correlation. You can’t change the timing (tempo) of the sound without changing its properties; a sound is not as translatable as theoretical concepts — it is much more delicate than that.