SoundisAlwaysPast
Just as the image of the moon reaches us with a one-second delay owing to the distance light travels to reach our eyes, a sound travels 344 milliseconds to reach our ears.
Like the moon, does sound come to us already being in the past?
I walk up the Rambla de Catalunya to take bus number 6. As I move forward, the music gets louder and louder: in Plaça Catalunya a salsa band is playing with smiles on their faces. As I turn in the direction of Fontanella, I discover that the bouncing of the sound off the walls causes enough of a delay that I can hear an extra thump. From this point I hear that apparition they callecho,or rather its shadow
A wormhole opens up in which I can experience two times at once.
A leather patch is struck, the acoustics vibration it causes is captured by a membrane capable of converting it into electrical impulses, which travel along a copper wire. The signal is processed and sent to loudspeakers which, through reflection and refraction, amplify the signal and expel it in all directions. I can hear them clearly. Then I hear the sound waves bounce off the Hard Rock Café building a few milliseconds apart, as though with each conga beat the future is revealed to me.
The sound event that unveils what is to come.
“Those who heard it [the first rock and roll song in history] suddenly entered the future. The music on that record seemed to come from the ether and literally floated on the waves of the Maryland air That, ladies and gentlemen, was rock and roll arriving
with the calm slowness of the truly unforeseen,” said Enrique Vila-Matas at the 2015 Guadalajara International Book Fair 1
I was standing on the old coffee plantation of the Esquipulas-Guayabal ejido in Chiapas, which was buried by the eruption of the Chichonal volcano in 1982. I was playing short phrases on an ocarina, with long pauses to catch my breath, without haste.
Shortly after, I heard the phrase repeated on the small hill ahead of me. At first I assumed that someone was passing by and I increased my phrase’s complexity to see if they were playing along, and indeed they were. At some point it seemed strange to me that someone would stay there for so long, repeating the same phrase they heard, because in fact that’s what they did: returning to me a phrase identical to mine, without adding anything, without seeking to play or show off with something unexpected.
Emilio Oribe describes fanal (or beacon)memory as an auditory experiment that can be performed when listening to music and that compels our brain to function in two temporalities: time A, the present, when the instruments play the music; and time B, from the immediate future, recognized as already having been experienced and following what is played in time A.2
The repetition arriving from the other mountain made me experience fanalmemory and to come to know the sound-in-becoming without having previously heard it. I played a phrase with the certainty that it would be returned to me identically: the sound unfolded, the ocarina deciphering the future.
On my way back to Nuevo Guayabal I met some people who were near the mountain, and I asked if any of them was the one who repeated what I had been playing on the ocarina, to which someone replied, “Ah yes, yes, we heard. But that must be the lyrebird.”
1 Canal 44, DiscursodeEnriqueVila-Matas|Inauguraciónfil2015,Youtube video, 17:53 min, November 28, 2015
2 Emilio Oribe, Teoríadelnous(Buenos Aires and Montevideo: Sociedad Amigos del Libro Rioplatense, 1934), 35, 36.
Searching on YouTube I found a video of a lyrebird imitating a camera shutter, a saw, a car alarm, etc. Then I saw another one in which they explain that during mating season the male builds a kind of stage to sing and show off his plumage.
The bird repeated the phrase to appropriate the ocarina. In this back-and-forth of identical phrases, the sound object confronted itself, as if that first object were created in the future. As I played the ocarina and knew of its imminent repetition, I felt the future in my fingers. The lyrebird made me responsible for our fate.
The object in the mirror, life at two different times… Play ► Play ►
I searched through the recordings of that time I went to Nuevo Guayabal, hoping to find a register of the bird with the ocarina, but I couldn’t find it. In any case, I thought it would be interesting—especially considering that elusive, unrepeatable sound event—to share with you a recording of that trip, even if the bird does not appear in it.
[Sound Cloud]
The Sound Event is Vaporous, Unrepeatable
One day upon waking up I heard a mass of reverberations coming from the kitchen; I felt that this sound was cushioning my ears. Some time later, my roommate insisted that it was the Cocteau Twins. Several times afterwards he would send me the song he was sure I had heard that morning, and would even send me others, none of which was the sound mass I had heard.
The song doesn’t exist anymore? It wasn’t that band? Could it be that I did listen to it, but since I’m not in the same context—of waking up one beautiful morning—the song doesn’t cause the same effect in me? How is it possible to experience once again a sound event of which there is no longer a precise memory?
The unrepeatable sound event, the object in memory, as in the memory of lips saying, “I love you.”
I was talking on my cell phone and noticed that the speaker was letting out a puff of air. I put my lips as close as I could to her acousmatic voice (923 kilometers away from earth, frequencies inaudible to humans). She says, “I love you,” and her cell phone transforms the acoustic impulses into digital data that reach my cell phone, which decodes them and transforms them into what a few nanoseconds ago was her voice. My cell phone plays it back intact and my perception overrides temporal distance. The speaker releases the air that reaches my mouth, as if her breath had traveled those 923 kilometers and the molecules that now collide with my lips were the same ones that she moved with hers.
Sound is always past.