I am sitting in a room

My friend John told me about this recently, but it took me a while to work up the nerve to listen to it. It’s an interesting bit of experimental music. It’s also 45 minutes long, so don’t feel you have to sit through the whole thing. You get a pretty good idea of where it’s going just a few minutes in. I was astonished how distorted it was by about seven minutes, utterly unintelligible at twelve.

I’ve got it running in the background. Right now, it sounds like blurry chords.

It’s an interesting way of thinking about human voices, though. Even while speaking, our voices are made up of different frequencies. The room echoes back some frequencies more readily than others, and by the end of this piece that’s what you’re hearing, notes that were always present in his voice, selected by the properties of the room.

The notes are all there, even when we don’t perceive them.

It’s getting more and more drone-like. It reminds me of this harmonica I had as a kid that would make eerie mooing noises if one didn’t blow into it with enough force. I suspect we’re headed toward even the rhythm of speech disappearing.