ASoundthatFloatsintheAir
One sound resonates in this stillness, a thin trickle of water clearly depicted, a silvered ghost David Toop
Joseph Conrad said, “The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.”
So if you hear something weird and scary —run away!
Then, try to decipher its meaning.
Tadeo and I were traveling with the windows down, listening to Philip Glass’s Dracula, on the desolate and darkened road behind La Boca dam. The sonority of the quartet floated on the wind like a latent threat.
Among the silences of Glass we heard a strange noise coming from the trees, where there was no sign of life. It seemed to be superimposed on our reality: square, digital, like an 8-bit sound. Tadeo and I turned to look at each other; we felt our blood freeze in our veins, and—although the car kept moving forward—we were paralyzed for an instant.
The first thing we did was to turn up the windows and put on some other music in order to change the mood: The Postal Service, to make the air molecules collide more smoothly. I broke the silence: “I heard a robotic voice, like a vocoder,” I said to Tadeo. In my head I compared it to a pixelated road, or to the fractal moment when a DMT trip goes down. To Tadeo it sounded as if a wormhole had opened and we had come into contact with a sound from another time.
In the end, we agreed that we had gone through a transdimensional sound event
In spite of that, in my head I was still scheming how to justify that sound. If it were a hoax, Scooby-Doo and Mystery Inc. would have solved the mystery by now, but so far I don’t know how to explain it.
Ethnomusicologist John Blacking says that sound messages can be understood by people who have been exposed to the relational processes of the sound-creating mind in question. That is, we can only understand what we have previously heard. Or as Wittgenstein says, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”1 If musician David Toop, neurologist Oliver Sacks, and writer James F. Cooper were in the car, they would each have different theories of what happened, with one not negating the other Toop would say that the ear becomes attuned to distant signals:
“The listener eavesdrops on the ghostly, on the time lag, and is, in this sense, a medium who perceives and connects with that which underlies the visible forms of the world.”
“As in The Last of the Mohicans,” Cooper would say. “In that book, I tell the story of the sonorous events experienced by the characters in wooden landscapes. No footfall was free from the snap of a dry branch; no rustle of a leaf, free from suspicion. Threatening noises coming from all directions. Even if the sounds were sometimes understood, their ability to confuse was so powerful that only a supernatural origin functioned as an explanation.”
Cold sweats, galloping nerves, confusion.
“We’d better change the subject, Mr Cooper,” I would say
“It’s also possible that it didn’t exist at all, because when it comes to sound, anything is possible!” Sacks would exclaim. He would later conclude that the noise was
1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, TractatusLogico-Philosophicus, trans D F Pears and B F McGuinness (London and New York: 2001), 68.
a collective hallucination created by the dynamics of the music, accompanied by the silent atmosphere outside and the fatigue of a long day of taking pictures.
My more exaggerated self would say:
—Listening is perception and listening is a way of altering reality. The transformation of acoustic impulses into nerve energy that takes place in the organ of Corti is a translation we make from the world of sounds to give them meaning, and all translation involves an interpretation.
That day on the dark road, while listening to Dracula, Tadeo and I heard an unearthly voice coming from the forest. We never understood whether it was an artificial intelligence lost in spacetime, our own suggestion, or a very strange animal.
Sound is an elusive event and listening is an act that seeks to believe in order to create.