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BY DAVID ROTHENBERG
Quicksound
There is a little pond upstate by the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. I don’t think it really has a name but it’s near the junction named Boston Corners. It’s a spot Sean O'Grady, Lindsay Stern, Edwin Frank, and I found after we came down from a hike up Brace Mountain. We found this little body of water just off the road that just seemed kind of beguiling, so I tossed the hydrophone in, pressed record, turned it on, and began to listen.
I wanted to show them that just about any pond could offer surprising and beautiful sounds.
A lot of what we first hear is standard rhythmic photosynthesis, mostly plants. Then occasionally there is a little water boatman vibrational penis action and then one squirting sound that’s probably a backswimmer, which looks like an upside-down boatman, or one of those pond Kobolds we sometimes worry about.
When the group stopped to record that little pond at Boston Corners, we didn’t expect much. “Get off that man’s land,” Sean even worried. This was clearly a place on private property. Still, I did want to show off my quest to my friends. “Let’s just drop the hydrophone in, plug in the speaker, and see if there’s anything interesting.”
At first it was the usual crackles of breathing plants, that primeval sound, but then there was some stridulation. Bugs rubbing parts of their bodies against other parts. And one baffling pwoof sound.
Just under three minutes in there came a section with shape, beauty, and form. Beginning middle and end, but still a fragment of eternity.
I wanted to transform it.
Listening to the natural rhythms innate in the recording, I ran it through an effect that literally adds tonality to the beats through a process called ‘resonating.’ So now in my story we have both a metaphorical reach for resonance and a technical form of resonance. It’s the same word. I resonate the crackle , so it becomes just a little bit more accessible as music.
And this process helps me resonate more with the sound of the pond as found. Resonance specifically is taking a sound and tuning certain frequencies within it. Now some resonators are based on real thrums, like drumbeats, string plucks, xylophone hits or wooden marimba thunks, but others are more abstract, based on math not materials. Those are the plugins I prefer, these little add-ons to the music software, because they extract a harmony from the sound. I tweak the frequencies, it sounds alive, tonal, musical, but not so obvious, not like any actual instrument seen, touched, or heard in the actual world.
Another voice was needed.
I sent it to Laurie Anderson, one of the wisest experimenters in words and sound of our time. She said, “It is perfect,” and I smiled. Then she sounded a bit like Teddy Roosevelt at the brink of the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is.”
Next it went to Isabel Rossellini, the great actress who recently has been dressing up as various cardboard critics and enacting the most gruesome animal mating rituals. I thought she would be impressed by the notion of tiny water bugs vibrating their penises to make a sound as loud as a whale. “Please, send me more sounds!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t know what to do with this.”
It was time to look beyond. What performer would think such sounds are typical?
Around the beginning of the pandemic, I was supposed to travel to Norway to a gathering of the Society for Artistic Research. Like so much else, this event was not to be. One of the people I arranged to meet there was a Turkish philosopher/poet named Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu, who contacted me through her mutual friend the artist and rock musician Alexandra Duvekot of the band Blue Crime. They were both living in Amsterdam.
Ilgin wrote to me of the concept of the “artist-philosopher” and her plans to create a School for Artist Philosophers in Norway.
She thought I might be one of them, and I basically agreed.
Since we were unable to meet, I thought I might as well send her this Boston Corners pond recording. Perhaps an art-philosophical perspective would shed light on what could be done with it.
Immediately Ilgin told me about one of her favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, who wrote poetically on the aquatic and the liquid. She wrote a watery text called Agua Viva, hard to classify like so much of what I like to read, a book that tries to articulate the stream of life, what it is that makes water alive:
The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs…. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magician tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices.
Lispector could be writing about the photosynthetic rhythms of sundrenched swamp plants. This wild music, she's going for it, aching toward a new language.
I want to turn the pond language into music and lure you into it.
Armed with insight from Lispector, Ilgin had her own take on the Boston Corners Pond. She didn’t care if anyone said it was ‘perfect as it is.’ Depends on how much you trust the world as it appears.
Ilgin was not afraid of this sound. She had no skin in the game and was ready to try anything. This is what she did with it:
Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and a few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again, and my idea.
It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love. The few-minute resonance that seemed perfect on its own… until Ilgin discovered it.
The last note is lower than the low. Here are the words the pond sound drew out of her:
To go
To go over this quicksand of quicksound
The sound teaches me
Now….
I love you too
Let’s make drama
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh—çıngıl çıngıl
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
There is no gap—
Pulls me over
Pushes me away
Pull me over
Push me away
When?
Tell me when?
I say, when
The sound says
now.
I hadn’t then met Ilgin in person, but we began to talk online all the time. She was ready at once to be transformed by these sounds, as they immediately suggested to her new ideas and dissonant words.
As long as I was trapped at home, I needed to bounce ideas, and possibilities, off those I don’t know and who are more excited about the world than I.
The poetic is what resonates with life but does not follow the explanatory thread. We try to play in unison but don’t really want to. There has to be unevenness. The beat must never be so regular that it bores us. The swirl of sound must make us tremble.
These edgy sounds run in the background. They are the soundtrack for our journey together into an art-philosophy that only exists here and now. We have been sentenced to placelessness .
Because we cannot meet—Let’s make drama.
We’re lucky to have this wonderful voice that has not yet decided how it wants to sing. This was her first recording. Over time the texts grew more into songs.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film The Silence reveals the way the world sounds to an eight-year-old blind boy in Tajikistan. Khorshid earns his living tuning stringed instruments like the rebab and tar, but he is easily distracted, as he wanders the street and is easily lured away by beautiful voices and strangely tingling sounds. His mother advises him to put cotton in his ears or plug them up with his fingers as he rides the bus, lest he follow the beautiful voices of girls or strumming strings .
When his ears are stopped up, he hears the burbling sound of water inside his head, and as we the audience watch the film, we are easily seduced by the power of sound and the beautiful smiles and colors of the Tajik people, awash with simplicity while reeling from the ravages of the Afghan War. The film was made in 1998, but looks and sounds as if it could have come from anytime, as it reminds us who see how even the most mundane of sounds can, if we attend to them, make us shiver.
I wish I could play these pond sounds for Clarice Lispector to hear what she might make of them.
The tingling all over. The rhythm of the pond. This is what I want you to feel and be shivered by. You’ll never know what makes these sounds until you realize what they can do to you.
The great electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram has this to say about resonance in her book An Individual Note (1972):
Great art presents us with such a rich and perfectly controlled wavepattern that its intermodulation with our own pattern provides us with new aspects of reality…. These induced resonances in all wavebands remain with us, if renewed by memory and repeated experience…. Have you ever tried musing in front of a flickering fire? The coals form fascinating, grotesque shapes, some fiery red, some sullen black. Tongues of flame, blue and yellow, create crazy rhythms as they dance. You cannot predict what will happen next, yet you feel beneath it all a consuming pulse…. The crazy beat of the flames incites you to join them in a song: so each pathway becomes a musical phrase, each boulder a musical chord. The crescendo reaches a climax as the craggy pinnacle plunges crumbling to its death. The flickering flame is extinguished and all is as silent as dust.
Oram too was trying to explain how sometimes the artificial can sound so natural, in an uncanny way, becoming more real than sounds out there made by physical means.
Resonance as an offering can come to you in many ways. The sound, massaged or direct, can transform you even if you are afraid of the unknown. I’m always listening for what I haven’t quite heard before. It might then seem I am usually bored with life but aren’t we all? Enough already, we have played enough, composed enough, written enough to fill the world with excess noise. Why go on? We’re still searching for something we haven’t yet found.
How far can resonance reach? How much can one series of strange sounds resonate with everyone else’s worries and pains? I doubt it can go so far; indeed, I wish I could explain to you the meaning and value of the greatest things.
I always admired David Sudnow’s two books on how to learn to improvise on the piano. The famous one is called Ways of the Hand in which he tries to articulate how you are supposed to move your hands on the keyboard and know exactly what you are doing without being able to explain it, pushing for the known unknown that all those who believe in improvisation yearn for.
Few people remember his other book, that he wrote simultaneously, called Talk’s Body, where he tries to improvise on the piano keyboard then immediately shifts to the typewriter keyboard to improvise with words. He writes about life, about playing music, about listening to the world:
You listen to the voice to hear its nervousness.
You listen to identify the language.
You listen to see if you are interested.
You listen to be able to repeat it later…
You listen to show you are listening.
You listen for your turn to talk…
no thought only thinking no melody only melodying
no itness, no thingness, only processes of sounds
it’s all a matter of form, becoming public for others
talk talks itself into too many objects…
a swarm of harmonies
dense sounds, rich with implication….
sounds quiver in certain surroundings.
Nomads with Invisible Stories
Jaron Lanier has collected every possible wind instrument in every possible size. The world’s largest flute down to the world’s smallest. Saxophones that can never leave the house. Lanier believes musical instruments are the most advanced tools any society has produced, because they allow us to express ideas that we do not conceive, but can only realize together with the technology, extending our bodies and thoughts into the world.
They make meaning out of the patterns of sound. These rhythms and melodies turn experience into something to love. We evolve that into language and talk about everything, but in the end it is the music we remember most.
I do just a few things to my sound files. I change the speed, the pitch, change the level of resonance, and the dial between dry sound and effected sound. Resonance vs dry/wet mix, these are not the same variables. With these simple tools I inhabit the sonic world of the pond.
Resonance is both a philosophical concept and a specific musical tool. That’s one way precise actions can point toward the universal thrum. This is something humans can do: find order in the results of evolution colliding with the firmament of the physical and chemical world. The pond has all of that.
I ask Ilgin what the sounds of the pond mean to her. She is young but has seen so much, from Cappadocia to Kathmandu, from Paris to Oslo. Her art transcends genre. I ask her how she got to the words she used:
It is dim and cold
It feels secure since the sounds do not cease
They fall like a curtain of binary code, delivering this empty room where you can dwell by yourself
As if there is anything interesting to tell
That’s probably why I kept on saying the sound does not listen to me
It’s quite absurd, among all the possible existing life forms, wearing the human; wearing a zero
This has been pissing me off since I was little,
And the pond recalls it for a tiny bit, that seems funny
That’s when I say, ‘I love you,’ to the pond, ‘let’s make drama’
I’m now a bit more relieved, following absurdity, there comes freedom
I think of the f(x) that I am and how empty I could be without the sound
All I can do is to let the outside and the inside merge without disrupting.
The chasm between us 'keeps me on hold, makes me realize there is no gap to think by pulling me over and pushing me away'
Suspension.
Release.
I start backtracking the steps that brought me to the Sound
(with a capital S)
My feet disappear as the ground is removed
Reading words was hammering my mind
Writing words was slamming me on cliffs
Saying words was spitting soot
I left there
And I reached the Sound
It’s getting softer.
Now I’m wondering how to voice the ethereal power in the soft—
The magnetic pull in the lullaby
Whatever I will do, I want to keep the rawness, the wilderness, and the immediacy
On a different chord a question bounces, What would the pond think?
We have to hear meaning in it if we want the beauty of the pond to matter as much as it needs to in order to save us.
This is an extract from the book Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg, available here.
Quicksound
There is a little pond upstate by the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. I don’t think it really has a name but it’s near the junction named Boston Corners. It’s a spot Sean O'Grady, Lindsay Stern, Edwin Frank, and I found after we came down from a hike up Brace Mountain. We found this little body of water just off the road that just seemed kind of beguiling, so I tossed the hydrophone in, pressed record, turned it on, and began to listen.
I wanted to show them that just about any pond could offer surprising and beautiful sounds.
A lot of what we first hear is standard rhythmic photosynthesis, mostly plants. Then occasionally there is a little water boatman vibrational penis action and then one squirting sound that’s probably a backswimmer, which looks like an upside-down boatman, or one of those pond Kobolds we sometimes worry about.
When the group stopped to record that little pond at Boston Corners, we didn’t expect much. “Get off that man’s land,” Sean even worried. This was clearly a place on private property. Still, I did want to show off my quest to my friends. “Let’s just drop the hydrophone in, plug in the speaker, and see if there’s anything interesting.”
At first it was the usual crackles of breathing plants, that primeval sound, but then there was some stridulation. Bugs rubbing parts of their bodies against other parts. And one baffling pwoof sound.
Just under three minutes in there came a section with shape, beauty, and form. Beginning middle and end, but still a fragment of eternity.
I wanted to transform it.
Listening to the natural rhythms innate in the recording, I ran it through an effect that literally adds tonality to the beats through a process called ‘resonating.’ So now in my story we have both a metaphorical reach for resonance and a technical form of resonance. It’s the same word. I resonate the crackle , so it becomes just a little bit more accessible as music.
And this process helps me resonate more with the sound of the pond as found. Resonance specifically is taking a sound and tuning certain frequencies within it. Now some resonators are based on real thrums, like drumbeats, string plucks, xylophone hits or wooden marimba thunks, but others are more abstract, based on math not materials. Those are the plugins I prefer, these little add-ons to the music software, because they extract a harmony from the sound. I tweak the frequencies, it sounds alive, tonal, musical, but not so obvious, not like any actual instrument seen, touched, or heard in the actual world.
Another voice was needed.
I sent it to Laurie Anderson, one of the wisest experimenters in words and sound of our time. She said, “It is perfect,” and I smiled. Then she sounded a bit like Teddy Roosevelt at the brink of the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is.”
Next it went to Isabel Rossellini, the great actress who recently has been dressing up as various cardboard critics and enacting the most gruesome animal mating rituals. I thought she would be impressed by the notion of tiny water bugs vibrating their penises to make a sound as loud as a whale. “Please, send me more sounds!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t know what to do with this.”
It was time to look beyond. What performer would think such sounds are typical?
Around the beginning of the pandemic, I was supposed to travel to Norway to a gathering of the Society for Artistic Research. Like so much else, this event was not to be. One of the people I arranged to meet there was a Turkish philosopher/poet named Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu, who contacted me through her mutual friend the artist and rock musician Alexandra Duvekot of the band Blue Crime. They were both living in Amsterdam.
Ilgin wrote to me of the concept of the “artist-philosopher” and her plans to create a School for Artist Philosophers in Norway.
She thought I might be one of them, and I basically agreed.
Since we were unable to meet, I thought I might as well send her this Boston Corners pond recording. Perhaps an art-philosophical perspective would shed light on what could be done with it.
Immediately Ilgin told me about one of her favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, who wrote poetically on the aquatic and the liquid. She wrote a watery text called Agua Viva, hard to classify like so much of what I like to read, a book that tries to articulate the stream of life, what it is that makes water alive:
The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs…. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magician tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices.
Lispector could be writing about the photosynthetic rhythms of sundrenched swamp plants. This wild music, she's going for it, aching toward a new language.
I want to turn the pond language into music and lure you into it.
Armed with insight from Lispector, Ilgin had her own take on the Boston Corners Pond. She didn’t care if anyone said it was ‘perfect as it is.’ Depends on how much you trust the world as it appears.
Ilgin was not afraid of this sound. She had no skin in the game and was ready to try anything. This is what she did with it:
Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and a few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again, and my idea.
It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love. The few-minute resonance that seemed perfect on its own… until Ilgin discovered it.
The last note is lower than the low. Here are the words the pond sound drew out of her:
To go
To go over this quicksand of quicksound
The sound teaches me
Now….
I love you too
Let’s make drama
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh—çıngıl çıngıl
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
There is no gap—
Pulls me over
Pushes me away
Pull me over
Push me away
When?
Tell me when?
I say, when
The sound says
now.
I hadn’t then met Ilgin in person, but we began to talk online all the time. She was ready at once to be transformed by these sounds, as they immediately suggested to her new ideas and dissonant words.
As long as I was trapped at home, I needed to bounce ideas, and possibilities, off those I don’t know and who are more excited about the world than I.
The poetic is what resonates with life but does not follow the explanatory thread. We try to play in unison but don’t really want to. There has to be unevenness. The beat must never be so regular that it bores us. The swirl of sound must make us tremble.
These edgy sounds run in the background. They are the soundtrack for our journey together into an art-philosophy that only exists here and now. We have been sentenced to placelessness .
Because we cannot meet—Let’s make drama.
We’re lucky to have this wonderful voice that has not yet decided how it wants to sing. This was her first recording. Over time the texts grew more into songs.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film The Silence reveals the way the world sounds to an eight-year-old blind boy in Tajikistan. Khorshid earns his living tuning stringed instruments like the rebab and tar, but he is easily distracted, as he wanders the street and is easily lured away by beautiful voices and strangely tingling sounds. His mother advises him to put cotton in his ears or plug them up with his fingers as he rides the bus, lest he follow the beautiful voices of girls or strumming strings .
When his ears are stopped up, he hears the burbling sound of water inside his head, and as we the audience watch the film, we are easily seduced by the power of sound and the beautiful smiles and colors of the Tajik people, awash with simplicity while reeling from the ravages of the Afghan War. The film was made in 1998, but looks and sounds as if it could have come from anytime, as it reminds us who see how even the most mundane of sounds can, if we attend to them, make us shiver.
I wish I could play these pond sounds for Clarice Lispector to hear what she might make of them.
The tingling all over. The rhythm of the pond. This is what I want you to feel and be shivered by. You’ll never know what makes these sounds until you realize what they can do to you.
The great electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram has this to say about resonance in her book An Individual Note (1972):
Great art presents us with such a rich and perfectly controlled wavepattern that its intermodulation with our own pattern provides us with new aspects of reality…. These induced resonances in all wavebands remain with us, if renewed by memory and repeated experience…. Have you ever tried musing in front of a flickering fire? The coals form fascinating, grotesque shapes, some fiery red, some sullen black. Tongues of flame, blue and yellow, create crazy rhythms as they dance. You cannot predict what will happen next, yet you feel beneath it all a consuming pulse…. The crazy beat of the flames incites you to join them in a song: so each pathway becomes a musical phrase, each boulder a musical chord. The crescendo reaches a climax as the craggy pinnacle plunges crumbling to its death. The flickering flame is extinguished and all is as silent as dust.
Oram too was trying to explain how sometimes the artificial can sound so natural, in an uncanny way, becoming more real than sounds out there made by physical means.
Resonance as an offering can come to you in many ways. The sound, massaged or direct, can transform you even if you are afraid of the unknown. I’m always listening for what I haven’t quite heard before. It might then seem I am usually bored with life but aren’t we all? Enough already, we have played enough, composed enough, written enough to fill the world with excess noise. Why go on? We’re still searching for something we haven’t yet found.
How far can resonance reach? How much can one series of strange sounds resonate with everyone else’s worries and pains? I doubt it can go so far; indeed, I wish I could explain to you the meaning and value of the greatest things.
I always admired David Sudnow’s two books on how to learn to improvise on the piano. The famous one is called Ways of the Hand in which he tries to articulate how you are supposed to move your hands on the keyboard and know exactly what you are doing without being able to explain it, pushing for the known unknown that all those who believe in improvisation yearn for.
Few people remember his other book, that he wrote simultaneously, called Talk’s Body, where he tries to improvise on the piano keyboard then immediately shifts to the typewriter keyboard to improvise with words. He writes about life, about playing music, about listening to the world:
You listen to the voice to hear its nervousness.
You listen to identify the language.
You listen to see if you are interested.
You listen to be able to repeat it later…
You listen to show you are listening.
You listen for your turn to talk…
no thought only thinking no melody only melodying
no itness, no thingness, only processes of sounds
it’s all a matter of form, becoming public for others
talk talks itself into too many objects…
a swarm of harmonies
dense sounds, rich with implication….
sounds quiver in certain surroundings.
Nomads with Invisible Stories
Jaron Lanier has collected every possible wind instrument in every possible size. The world’s largest flute down to the world’s smallest. Saxophones that can never leave the house. Lanier believes musical instruments are the most advanced tools any society has produced, because they allow us to express ideas that we do not conceive, but can only realize together with the technology, extending our bodies and thoughts into the world.
They make meaning out of the patterns of sound. These rhythms and melodies turn experience into something to love. We evolve that into language and talk about everything, but in the end it is the music we remember most.
I do just a few things to my sound files. I change the speed, the pitch, change the level of resonance, and the dial between dry sound and effected sound. Resonance vs dry/wet mix, these are not the same variables. With these simple tools I inhabit the sonic world of the pond.
Resonance is both a philosophical concept and a specific musical tool. That’s one way precise actions can point toward the universal thrum. This is something humans can do: find order in the results of evolution colliding with the firmament of the physical and chemical world. The pond has all of that.
I ask Ilgin what the sounds of the pond mean to her. She is young but has seen so much, from Cappadocia to Kathmandu, from Paris to Oslo. Her art transcends genre. I ask her how she got to the words she used:
It is dim and cold
It feels secure since the sounds do not cease
They fall like a curtain of binary code, delivering this empty room where you can dwell by yourself
As if there is anything interesting to tell
That’s probably why I kept on saying the sound does not listen to me
It’s quite absurd, among all the possible existing life forms, wearing the human; wearing a zero
This has been pissing me off since I was little,
And the pond recalls it for a tiny bit, that seems funny
That’s when I say, ‘I love you,’ to the pond, ‘let’s make drama’
I’m now a bit more relieved, following absurdity, there comes freedom
I think of the f(x) that I am and how empty I could be without the sound
All I can do is to let the outside and the inside merge without disrupting.
The chasm between us 'keeps me on hold, makes me realize there is no gap to think by pulling me over and pushing me away'
Suspension.
Release.
I start backtracking the steps that brought me to the Sound
(with a capital S)
My feet disappear as the ground is removed
Reading words was hammering my mind
Writing words was slamming me on cliffs
Saying words was spitting soot
I left there
And I reached the Sound
It’s getting softer.
Now I’m wondering how to voice the ethereal power in the soft—
The magnetic pull in the lullaby
Whatever I will do, I want to keep the rawness, the wilderness, and the immediacy
On a different chord a question bounces, What would the pond think?
We have to hear meaning in it if we want the beauty of the pond to matter as much as it needs to in order to save us.
This is an extract from the book Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg, available here.
David Rothenberg is a musician and philosopher and the author of multiple books including Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful, Nightingales in Berlin, Whale Music. His two previous books of poetry are Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes and Invisible Mountains. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House with Marilyn Crispell on ECM, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and Faultlines. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Music at The New Jersey Institute ofTechnology.
BY DAVID ROTHENBERG
Quicksound
There is a little pond upstate by the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. I don’t think it really has a name but it’s near the junction named Boston Corners. It’s a spot Sean O'Grady, Lindsay Stern, Edwin Frank, and I found after we came down from a hike up Brace Mountain. We found this little body of water just off the road that just seemed kind of beguiling, so I tossed the hydrophone in, pressed record, turned it on, and began to listen.
I wanted to show them that just about any pond could offer surprising and beautiful sounds.
A lot of what we first hear is standard rhythmic photosynthesis, mostly plants. Then occasionally there is a little water boatman vibrational penis action and then one squirting sound that’s probably a backswimmer, which looks like an upside-down boatman, or one of those pond Kobolds we sometimes worry about.
When the group stopped to record that little pond at Boston Corners, we didn’t expect much. “Get off that man’s land,” Sean even worried. This was clearly a place on private property. Still, I did want to show off my quest to my friends. “Let’s just drop the hydrophone in, plug in the speaker, and see if there’s anything interesting.”
At first it was the usual crackles of breathing plants, that primeval sound, but then there was some stridulation. Bugs rubbing parts of their bodies against other parts. And one baffling pwoof sound.
Just under three minutes in there came a section with shape, beauty, and form. Beginning middle and end, but still a fragment of eternity.
I wanted to transform it.
Listening to the natural rhythms innate in the recording, I ran it through an effect that literally adds tonality to the beats through a process called ‘resonating.’ So now in my story we have both a metaphorical reach for resonance and a technical form of resonance. It’s the same word. I resonate the crackle , so it becomes just a little bit more accessible as music.
And this process helps me resonate more with the sound of the pond as found. Resonance specifically is taking a sound and tuning certain frequencies within it. Now some resonators are based on real thrums, like drumbeats, string plucks, xylophone hits or wooden marimba thunks, but others are more abstract, based on math not materials. Those are the plugins I prefer, these little add-ons to the music software, because they extract a harmony from the sound. I tweak the frequencies, it sounds alive, tonal, musical, but not so obvious, not like any actual instrument seen, touched, or heard in the actual world.
Another voice was needed.
I sent it to Laurie Anderson, one of the wisest experimenters in words and sound of our time. She said, “It is perfect,” and I smiled. Then she sounded a bit like Teddy Roosevelt at the brink of the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is.”
Next it went to Isabel Rossellini, the great actress who recently has been dressing up as various cardboard critics and enacting the most gruesome animal mating rituals. I thought she would be impressed by the notion of tiny water bugs vibrating their penises to make a sound as loud as a whale. “Please, send me more sounds!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t know what to do with this.”
It was time to look beyond. What performer would think such sounds are typical?
Around the beginning of the pandemic, I was supposed to travel to Norway to a gathering of the Society for Artistic Research. Like so much else, this event was not to be. One of the people I arranged to meet there was a Turkish philosopher/poet named Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu, who contacted me through her mutual friend the artist and rock musician Alexandra Duvekot of the band Blue Crime. They were both living in Amsterdam.
Ilgin wrote to me of the concept of the “artist-philosopher” and her plans to create a School for Artist Philosophers in Norway.
She thought I might be one of them, and I basically agreed.
Since we were unable to meet, I thought I might as well send her this Boston Corners pond recording. Perhaps an art-philosophical perspective would shed light on what could be done with it.
Immediately Ilgin told me about one of her favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, who wrote poetically on the aquatic and the liquid. She wrote a watery text called Agua Viva, hard to classify like so much of what I like to read, a book that tries to articulate the stream of life, what it is that makes water alive:
The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs…. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magician tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices.
Lispector could be writing about the photosynthetic rhythms of sundrenched swamp plants. This wild music, she's going for it, aching toward a new language.
I want to turn the pond language into music and lure you into it.
Armed with insight from Lispector, Ilgin had her own take on the Boston Corners Pond. She didn’t care if anyone said it was ‘perfect as it is.’ Depends on how much you trust the world as it appears.
Ilgin was not afraid of this sound. She had no skin in the game and was ready to try anything. This is what she did with it:
Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and a few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again, and my idea.
It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love. The few-minute resonance that seemed perfect on its own… until Ilgin discovered it.
The last note is lower than the low. Here are the words the pond sound drew out of her:
To go
To go over this quicksand of quicksound
The sound teaches me
Now….
I love you too
Let’s make drama
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh—çıngıl çıngıl
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
There is no gap—
Pulls me over
Pushes me away
Pull me over
Push me away
When?
Tell me when?
I say, when
The sound says
now.
I hadn’t then met Ilgin in person, but we began to talk online all the time. She was ready at once to be transformed by these sounds, as they immediately suggested to her new ideas and dissonant words.
As long as I was trapped at home, I needed to bounce ideas, and possibilities, off those I don’t know and who are more excited about the world than I.
The poetic is what resonates with life but does not follow the explanatory thread. We try to play in unison but don’t really want to. There has to be unevenness. The beat must never be so regular that it bores us. The swirl of sound must make us tremble.
These edgy sounds run in the background. They are the soundtrack for our journey together into an art-philosophy that only exists here and now. We have been sentenced to placelessness .
Because we cannot meet—Let’s make drama.
We’re lucky to have this wonderful voice that has not yet decided how it wants to sing. This was her first recording. Over time the texts grew more into songs.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film The Silence reveals the way the world sounds to an eight-year-old blind boy in Tajikistan. Khorshid earns his living tuning stringed instruments like the rebab and tar, but he is easily distracted, as he wanders the street and is easily lured away by beautiful voices and strangely tingling sounds. His mother advises him to put cotton in his ears or plug them up with his fingers as he rides the bus, lest he follow the beautiful voices of girls or strumming strings .
When his ears are stopped up, he hears the burbling sound of water inside his head, and as we the audience watch the film, we are easily seduced by the power of sound and the beautiful smiles and colors of the Tajik people, awash with simplicity while reeling from the ravages of the Afghan War. The film was made in 1998, but looks and sounds as if it could have come from anytime, as it reminds us who see how even the most mundane of sounds can, if we attend to them, make us shiver.
I wish I could play these pond sounds for Clarice Lispector to hear what she might make of them.
The tingling all over. The rhythm of the pond. This is what I want you to feel and be shivered by. You’ll never know what makes these sounds until you realize what they can do to you.
The great electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram has this to say about resonance in her book An Individual Note (1972):
Great art presents us with such a rich and perfectly controlled wavepattern that its intermodulation with our own pattern provides us with new aspects of reality…. These induced resonances in all wavebands remain with us, if renewed by memory and repeated experience…. Have you ever tried musing in front of a flickering fire? The coals form fascinating, grotesque shapes, some fiery red, some sullen black. Tongues of flame, blue and yellow, create crazy rhythms as they dance. You cannot predict what will happen next, yet you feel beneath it all a consuming pulse…. The crazy beat of the flames incites you to join them in a song: so each pathway becomes a musical phrase, each boulder a musical chord. The crescendo reaches a climax as the craggy pinnacle plunges crumbling to its death. The flickering flame is extinguished and all is as silent as dust.
Oram too was trying to explain how sometimes the artificial can sound so natural, in an uncanny way, becoming more real than sounds out there made by physical means.
Resonance as an offering can come to you in many ways. The sound, massaged or direct, can transform you even if you are afraid of the unknown. I’m always listening for what I haven’t quite heard before. It might then seem I am usually bored with life but aren’t we all? Enough already, we have played enough, composed enough, written enough to fill the world with excess noise. Why go on? We’re still searching for something we haven’t yet found.
How far can resonance reach? How much can one series of strange sounds resonate with everyone else’s worries and pains? I doubt it can go so far; indeed, I wish I could explain to you the meaning and value of the greatest things.
I always admired David Sudnow’s two books on how to learn to improvise on the piano. The famous one is called Ways of the Hand in which he tries to articulate how you are supposed to move your hands on the keyboard and know exactly what you are doing without being able to explain it, pushing for the known unknown that all those who believe in improvisation yearn for.
Few people remember his other book, that he wrote simultaneously, called Talk’s Body, where he tries to improvise on the piano keyboard then immediately shifts to the typewriter keyboard to improvise with words. He writes about life, about playing music, about listening to the world:
You listen to the voice to hear its nervousness.
You listen to identify the language.
You listen to see if you are interested.
You listen to be able to repeat it later…
You listen to show you are listening.
You listen for your turn to talk…
no thought only thinking no melody only melodying
no itness, no thingness, only processes of sounds
it’s all a matter of form, becoming public for others
talk talks itself into too many objects…
a swarm of harmonies
dense sounds, rich with implication….
sounds quiver in certain surroundings.
Nomads with Invisible Stories
Jaron Lanier has collected every possible wind instrument in every possible size. The world’s largest flute down to the world’s smallest. Saxophones that can never leave the house. Lanier believes musical instruments are the most advanced tools any society has produced, because they allow us to express ideas that we do not conceive, but can only realize together with the technology, extending our bodies and thoughts into the world.
They make meaning out of the patterns of sound. These rhythms and melodies turn experience into something to love. We evolve that into language and talk about everything, but in the end it is the music we remember most.
I do just a few things to my sound files. I change the speed, the pitch, change the level of resonance, and the dial between dry sound and effected sound. Resonance vs dry/wet mix, these are not the same variables. With these simple tools I inhabit the sonic world of the pond.
Resonance is both a philosophical concept and a specific musical tool. That’s one way precise actions can point toward the universal thrum. This is something humans can do: find order in the results of evolution colliding with the firmament of the physical and chemical world. The pond has all of that.
I ask Ilgin what the sounds of the pond mean to her. She is young but has seen so much, from Cappadocia to Kathmandu, from Paris to Oslo. Her art transcends genre. I ask her how she got to the words she used:
It is dim and cold
It feels secure since the sounds do not cease
They fall like a curtain of binary code, delivering this empty room where you can dwell by yourself
As if there is anything interesting to tell
That’s probably why I kept on saying the sound does not listen to me
It’s quite absurd, among all the possible existing life forms, wearing the human; wearing a zero
This has been pissing me off since I was little,
And the pond recalls it for a tiny bit, that seems funny
That’s when I say, ‘I love you,’ to the pond, ‘let’s make drama’
I’m now a bit more relieved, following absurdity, there comes freedom
I think of the f(x) that I am and how empty I could be without the sound
All I can do is to let the outside and the inside merge without disrupting.
The chasm between us 'keeps me on hold, makes me realize there is no gap to think by pulling me over and pushing me away'
Suspension.
Release.
I start backtracking the steps that brought me to the Sound
(with a capital S)
My feet disappear as the ground is removed
Reading words was hammering my mind
Writing words was slamming me on cliffs
Saying words was spitting soot
I left there
And I reached the Sound
It’s getting softer.
Now I’m wondering how to voice the ethereal power in the soft—
The magnetic pull in the lullaby
Whatever I will do, I want to keep the rawness, the wilderness, and the immediacy
On a different chord a question bounces, What would the pond think?
We have to hear meaning in it if we want the beauty of the pond to matter as much as it needs to in order to save us.
This is an extract from the book Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg, available here.
Quicksound
There is a little pond upstate by the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. I don’t think it really has a name but it’s near the junction named Boston Corners. It’s a spot Sean O'Grady, Lindsay Stern, Edwin Frank, and I found after we came down from a hike up Brace Mountain. We found this little body of water just off the road that just seemed kind of beguiling, so I tossed the hydrophone in, pressed record, turned it on, and began to listen.
I wanted to show them that just about any pond could offer surprising and beautiful sounds.
A lot of what we first hear is standard rhythmic photosynthesis, mostly plants. Then occasionally there is a little water boatman vibrational penis action and then one squirting sound that’s probably a backswimmer, which looks like an upside-down boatman, or one of those pond Kobolds we sometimes worry about.
When the group stopped to record that little pond at Boston Corners, we didn’t expect much. “Get off that man’s land,” Sean even worried. This was clearly a place on private property. Still, I did want to show off my quest to my friends. “Let’s just drop the hydrophone in, plug in the speaker, and see if there’s anything interesting.”
At first it was the usual crackles of breathing plants, that primeval sound, but then there was some stridulation. Bugs rubbing parts of their bodies against other parts. And one baffling pwoof sound.
Just under three minutes in there came a section with shape, beauty, and form. Beginning middle and end, but still a fragment of eternity.
I wanted to transform it.
Listening to the natural rhythms innate in the recording, I ran it through an effect that literally adds tonality to the beats through a process called ‘resonating.’ So now in my story we have both a metaphorical reach for resonance and a technical form of resonance. It’s the same word. I resonate the crackle , so it becomes just a little bit more accessible as music.
And this process helps me resonate more with the sound of the pond as found. Resonance specifically is taking a sound and tuning certain frequencies within it. Now some resonators are based on real thrums, like drumbeats, string plucks, xylophone hits or wooden marimba thunks, but others are more abstract, based on math not materials. Those are the plugins I prefer, these little add-ons to the music software, because they extract a harmony from the sound. I tweak the frequencies, it sounds alive, tonal, musical, but not so obvious, not like any actual instrument seen, touched, or heard in the actual world.
Another voice was needed.
I sent it to Laurie Anderson, one of the wisest experimenters in words and sound of our time. She said, “It is perfect,” and I smiled. Then she sounded a bit like Teddy Roosevelt at the brink of the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is.”
Next it went to Isabel Rossellini, the great actress who recently has been dressing up as various cardboard critics and enacting the most gruesome animal mating rituals. I thought she would be impressed by the notion of tiny water bugs vibrating their penises to make a sound as loud as a whale. “Please, send me more sounds!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t know what to do with this.”
It was time to look beyond. What performer would think such sounds are typical?
Around the beginning of the pandemic, I was supposed to travel to Norway to a gathering of the Society for Artistic Research. Like so much else, this event was not to be. One of the people I arranged to meet there was a Turkish philosopher/poet named Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu, who contacted me through her mutual friend the artist and rock musician Alexandra Duvekot of the band Blue Crime. They were both living in Amsterdam.
Ilgin wrote to me of the concept of the “artist-philosopher” and her plans to create a School for Artist Philosophers in Norway.
She thought I might be one of them, and I basically agreed.
Since we were unable to meet, I thought I might as well send her this Boston Corners pond recording. Perhaps an art-philosophical perspective would shed light on what could be done with it.
Immediately Ilgin told me about one of her favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, who wrote poetically on the aquatic and the liquid. She wrote a watery text called Agua Viva, hard to classify like so much of what I like to read, a book that tries to articulate the stream of life, what it is that makes water alive:
The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs…. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magician tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices.
Lispector could be writing about the photosynthetic rhythms of sundrenched swamp plants. This wild music, she's going for it, aching toward a new language.
I want to turn the pond language into music and lure you into it.
Armed with insight from Lispector, Ilgin had her own take on the Boston Corners Pond. She didn’t care if anyone said it was ‘perfect as it is.’ Depends on how much you trust the world as it appears.
Ilgin was not afraid of this sound. She had no skin in the game and was ready to try anything. This is what she did with it:
Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and a few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again, and my idea.
It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love. The few-minute resonance that seemed perfect on its own… until Ilgin discovered it.
The last note is lower than the low. Here are the words the pond sound drew out of her:
To go
To go over this quicksand of quicksound
The sound teaches me
Now….
I love you too
Let’s make drama
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh—çıngıl çıngıl
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
There is no gap—
Pulls me over
Pushes me away
Pull me over
Push me away
When?
Tell me when?
I say, when
The sound says
now.
I hadn’t then met Ilgin in person, but we began to talk online all the time. She was ready at once to be transformed by these sounds, as they immediately suggested to her new ideas and dissonant words.
As long as I was trapped at home, I needed to bounce ideas, and possibilities, off those I don’t know and who are more excited about the world than I.
The poetic is what resonates with life but does not follow the explanatory thread. We try to play in unison but don’t really want to. There has to be unevenness. The beat must never be so regular that it bores us. The swirl of sound must make us tremble.
These edgy sounds run in the background. They are the soundtrack for our journey together into an art-philosophy that only exists here and now. We have been sentenced to placelessness .
Because we cannot meet—Let’s make drama.
We’re lucky to have this wonderful voice that has not yet decided how it wants to sing. This was her first recording. Over time the texts grew more into songs.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film The Silence reveals the way the world sounds to an eight-year-old blind boy in Tajikistan. Khorshid earns his living tuning stringed instruments like the rebab and tar, but he is easily distracted, as he wanders the street and is easily lured away by beautiful voices and strangely tingling sounds. His mother advises him to put cotton in his ears or plug them up with his fingers as he rides the bus, lest he follow the beautiful voices of girls or strumming strings .
When his ears are stopped up, he hears the burbling sound of water inside his head, and as we the audience watch the film, we are easily seduced by the power of sound and the beautiful smiles and colors of the Tajik people, awash with simplicity while reeling from the ravages of the Afghan War. The film was made in 1998, but looks and sounds as if it could have come from anytime, as it reminds us who see how even the most mundane of sounds can, if we attend to them, make us shiver.
I wish I could play these pond sounds for Clarice Lispector to hear what she might make of them.
The tingling all over. The rhythm of the pond. This is what I want you to feel and be shivered by. You’ll never know what makes these sounds until you realize what they can do to you.
The great electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram has this to say about resonance in her book An Individual Note (1972):
Great art presents us with such a rich and perfectly controlled wavepattern that its intermodulation with our own pattern provides us with new aspects of reality…. These induced resonances in all wavebands remain with us, if renewed by memory and repeated experience…. Have you ever tried musing in front of a flickering fire? The coals form fascinating, grotesque shapes, some fiery red, some sullen black. Tongues of flame, blue and yellow, create crazy rhythms as they dance. You cannot predict what will happen next, yet you feel beneath it all a consuming pulse…. The crazy beat of the flames incites you to join them in a song: so each pathway becomes a musical phrase, each boulder a musical chord. The crescendo reaches a climax as the craggy pinnacle plunges crumbling to its death. The flickering flame is extinguished and all is as silent as dust.
Oram too was trying to explain how sometimes the artificial can sound so natural, in an uncanny way, becoming more real than sounds out there made by physical means.
Resonance as an offering can come to you in many ways. The sound, massaged or direct, can transform you even if you are afraid of the unknown. I’m always listening for what I haven’t quite heard before. It might then seem I am usually bored with life but aren’t we all? Enough already, we have played enough, composed enough, written enough to fill the world with excess noise. Why go on? We’re still searching for something we haven’t yet found.
How far can resonance reach? How much can one series of strange sounds resonate with everyone else’s worries and pains? I doubt it can go so far; indeed, I wish I could explain to you the meaning and value of the greatest things.
I always admired David Sudnow’s two books on how to learn to improvise on the piano. The famous one is called Ways of the Hand in which he tries to articulate how you are supposed to move your hands on the keyboard and know exactly what you are doing without being able to explain it, pushing for the known unknown that all those who believe in improvisation yearn for.
Few people remember his other book, that he wrote simultaneously, called Talk’s Body, where he tries to improvise on the piano keyboard then immediately shifts to the typewriter keyboard to improvise with words. He writes about life, about playing music, about listening to the world:
You listen to the voice to hear its nervousness.
You listen to identify the language.
You listen to see if you are interested.
You listen to be able to repeat it later…
You listen to show you are listening.
You listen for your turn to talk…
no thought only thinking no melody only melodying
no itness, no thingness, only processes of sounds
it’s all a matter of form, becoming public for others
talk talks itself into too many objects…
a swarm of harmonies
dense sounds, rich with implication….
sounds quiver in certain surroundings.
Nomads with Invisible Stories
Jaron Lanier has collected every possible wind instrument in every possible size. The world’s largest flute down to the world’s smallest. Saxophones that can never leave the house. Lanier believes musical instruments are the most advanced tools any society has produced, because they allow us to express ideas that we do not conceive, but can only realize together with the technology, extending our bodies and thoughts into the world.
They make meaning out of the patterns of sound. These rhythms and melodies turn experience into something to love. We evolve that into language and talk about everything, but in the end it is the music we remember most.
I do just a few things to my sound files. I change the speed, the pitch, change the level of resonance, and the dial between dry sound and effected sound. Resonance vs dry/wet mix, these are not the same variables. With these simple tools I inhabit the sonic world of the pond.
Resonance is both a philosophical concept and a specific musical tool. That’s one way precise actions can point toward the universal thrum. This is something humans can do: find order in the results of evolution colliding with the firmament of the physical and chemical world. The pond has all of that.
I ask Ilgin what the sounds of the pond mean to her. She is young but has seen so much, from Cappadocia to Kathmandu, from Paris to Oslo. Her art transcends genre. I ask her how she got to the words she used:
It is dim and cold
It feels secure since the sounds do not cease
They fall like a curtain of binary code, delivering this empty room where you can dwell by yourself
As if there is anything interesting to tell
That’s probably why I kept on saying the sound does not listen to me
It’s quite absurd, among all the possible existing life forms, wearing the human; wearing a zero
This has been pissing me off since I was little,
And the pond recalls it for a tiny bit, that seems funny
That’s when I say, ‘I love you,’ to the pond, ‘let’s make drama’
I’m now a bit more relieved, following absurdity, there comes freedom
I think of the f(x) that I am and how empty I could be without the sound
All I can do is to let the outside and the inside merge without disrupting.
The chasm between us 'keeps me on hold, makes me realize there is no gap to think by pulling me over and pushing me away'
Suspension.
Release.
I start backtracking the steps that brought me to the Sound
(with a capital S)
My feet disappear as the ground is removed
Reading words was hammering my mind
Writing words was slamming me on cliffs
Saying words was spitting soot
I left there
And I reached the Sound
It’s getting softer.
Now I’m wondering how to voice the ethereal power in the soft—
The magnetic pull in the lullaby
Whatever I will do, I want to keep the rawness, the wilderness, and the immediacy
On a different chord a question bounces, What would the pond think?
We have to hear meaning in it if we want the beauty of the pond to matter as much as it needs to in order to save us.
This is an extract from the book Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg, available here.
David Rothenberg is a musician and philosopher and the author of multiple books including Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful, Nightingales in Berlin, Whale Music. His two previous books of poetry are Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes and Invisible Mountains. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House with Marilyn Crispell on ECM, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and Faultlines. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Music at The New Jersey Institute ofTechnology.
BY DAVID ROTHENBERG
Quicksound
There is a little pond upstate by the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. I don’t think it really has a name but it’s near the junction named Boston Corners. It’s a spot Sean O'Grady, Lindsay Stern, Edwin Frank, and I found after we came down from a hike up Brace Mountain. We found this little body of water just off the road that just seemed kind of beguiling, so I tossed the hydrophone in, pressed record, turned it on, and began to listen.
I wanted to show them that just about any pond could offer surprising and beautiful sounds.
A lot of what we first hear is standard rhythmic photosynthesis, mostly plants. Then occasionally there is a little water boatman vibrational penis action and then one squirting sound that’s probably a backswimmer, which looks like an upside-down boatman, or one of those pond Kobolds we sometimes worry about.
When the group stopped to record that little pond at Boston Corners, we didn’t expect much. “Get off that man’s land,” Sean even worried. This was clearly a place on private property. Still, I did want to show off my quest to my friends. “Let’s just drop the hydrophone in, plug in the speaker, and see if there’s anything interesting.”
At first it was the usual crackles of breathing plants, that primeval sound, but then there was some stridulation. Bugs rubbing parts of their bodies against other parts. And one baffling pwoof sound.
Just under three minutes in there came a section with shape, beauty, and form. Beginning middle and end, but still a fragment of eternity.
I wanted to transform it.
Listening to the natural rhythms innate in the recording, I ran it through an effect that literally adds tonality to the beats through a process called ‘resonating.’ So now in my story we have both a metaphorical reach for resonance and a technical form of resonance. It’s the same word. I resonate the crackle , so it becomes just a little bit more accessible as music.
And this process helps me resonate more with the sound of the pond as found. Resonance specifically is taking a sound and tuning certain frequencies within it. Now some resonators are based on real thrums, like drumbeats, string plucks, xylophone hits or wooden marimba thunks, but others are more abstract, based on math not materials. Those are the plugins I prefer, these little add-ons to the music software, because they extract a harmony from the sound. I tweak the frequencies, it sounds alive, tonal, musical, but not so obvious, not like any actual instrument seen, touched, or heard in the actual world.
Another voice was needed.
I sent it to Laurie Anderson, one of the wisest experimenters in words and sound of our time. She said, “It is perfect,” and I smiled. Then she sounded a bit like Teddy Roosevelt at the brink of the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is.”
Next it went to Isabel Rossellini, the great actress who recently has been dressing up as various cardboard critics and enacting the most gruesome animal mating rituals. I thought she would be impressed by the notion of tiny water bugs vibrating their penises to make a sound as loud as a whale. “Please, send me more sounds!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t know what to do with this.”
It was time to look beyond. What performer would think such sounds are typical?
Around the beginning of the pandemic, I was supposed to travel to Norway to a gathering of the Society for Artistic Research. Like so much else, this event was not to be. One of the people I arranged to meet there was a Turkish philosopher/poet named Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu, who contacted me through her mutual friend the artist and rock musician Alexandra Duvekot of the band Blue Crime. They were both living in Amsterdam.
Ilgin wrote to me of the concept of the “artist-philosopher” and her plans to create a School for Artist Philosophers in Norway.
She thought I might be one of them, and I basically agreed.
Since we were unable to meet, I thought I might as well send her this Boston Corners pond recording. Perhaps an art-philosophical perspective would shed light on what could be done with it.
Immediately Ilgin told me about one of her favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, who wrote poetically on the aquatic and the liquid. She wrote a watery text called Agua Viva, hard to classify like so much of what I like to read, a book that tries to articulate the stream of life, what it is that makes water alive:
The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs…. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magician tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices.
Lispector could be writing about the photosynthetic rhythms of sundrenched swamp plants. This wild music, she's going for it, aching toward a new language.
I want to turn the pond language into music and lure you into it.
Armed with insight from Lispector, Ilgin had her own take on the Boston Corners Pond. She didn’t care if anyone said it was ‘perfect as it is.’ Depends on how much you trust the world as it appears.
Ilgin was not afraid of this sound. She had no skin in the game and was ready to try anything. This is what she did with it:
Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and a few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again, and my idea.
It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love. The few-minute resonance that seemed perfect on its own… until Ilgin discovered it.
The last note is lower than the low. Here are the words the pond sound drew out of her:
To go
To go over this quicksand of quicksound
The sound teaches me
Now….
I love you too
Let’s make drama
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh—çıngıl çıngıl
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
There is no gap—
Pulls me over
Pushes me away
Pull me over
Push me away
When?
Tell me when?
I say, when
The sound says
now.
I hadn’t then met Ilgin in person, but we began to talk online all the time. She was ready at once to be transformed by these sounds, as they immediately suggested to her new ideas and dissonant words.
As long as I was trapped at home, I needed to bounce ideas, and possibilities, off those I don’t know and who are more excited about the world than I.
The poetic is what resonates with life but does not follow the explanatory thread. We try to play in unison but don’t really want to. There has to be unevenness. The beat must never be so regular that it bores us. The swirl of sound must make us tremble.
These edgy sounds run in the background. They are the soundtrack for our journey together into an art-philosophy that only exists here and now. We have been sentenced to placelessness .
Because we cannot meet—Let’s make drama.
We’re lucky to have this wonderful voice that has not yet decided how it wants to sing. This was her first recording. Over time the texts grew more into songs.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film The Silence reveals the way the world sounds to an eight-year-old blind boy in Tajikistan. Khorshid earns his living tuning stringed instruments like the rebab and tar, but he is easily distracted, as he wanders the street and is easily lured away by beautiful voices and strangely tingling sounds. His mother advises him to put cotton in his ears or plug them up with his fingers as he rides the bus, lest he follow the beautiful voices of girls or strumming strings .
When his ears are stopped up, he hears the burbling sound of water inside his head, and as we the audience watch the film, we are easily seduced by the power of sound and the beautiful smiles and colors of the Tajik people, awash with simplicity while reeling from the ravages of the Afghan War. The film was made in 1998, but looks and sounds as if it could have come from anytime, as it reminds us who see how even the most mundane of sounds can, if we attend to them, make us shiver.
I wish I could play these pond sounds for Clarice Lispector to hear what she might make of them.
The tingling all over. The rhythm of the pond. This is what I want you to feel and be shivered by. You’ll never know what makes these sounds until you realize what they can do to you.
The great electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram has this to say about resonance in her book An Individual Note (1972):
Great art presents us with such a rich and perfectly controlled wavepattern that its intermodulation with our own pattern provides us with new aspects of reality…. These induced resonances in all wavebands remain with us, if renewed by memory and repeated experience…. Have you ever tried musing in front of a flickering fire? The coals form fascinating, grotesque shapes, some fiery red, some sullen black. Tongues of flame, blue and yellow, create crazy rhythms as they dance. You cannot predict what will happen next, yet you feel beneath it all a consuming pulse…. The crazy beat of the flames incites you to join them in a song: so each pathway becomes a musical phrase, each boulder a musical chord. The crescendo reaches a climax as the craggy pinnacle plunges crumbling to its death. The flickering flame is extinguished and all is as silent as dust.
Oram too was trying to explain how sometimes the artificial can sound so natural, in an uncanny way, becoming more real than sounds out there made by physical means.
Resonance as an offering can come to you in many ways. The sound, massaged or direct, can transform you even if you are afraid of the unknown. I’m always listening for what I haven’t quite heard before. It might then seem I am usually bored with life but aren’t we all? Enough already, we have played enough, composed enough, written enough to fill the world with excess noise. Why go on? We’re still searching for something we haven’t yet found.
How far can resonance reach? How much can one series of strange sounds resonate with everyone else’s worries and pains? I doubt it can go so far; indeed, I wish I could explain to you the meaning and value of the greatest things.
I always admired David Sudnow’s two books on how to learn to improvise on the piano. The famous one is called Ways of the Hand in which he tries to articulate how you are supposed to move your hands on the keyboard and know exactly what you are doing without being able to explain it, pushing for the known unknown that all those who believe in improvisation yearn for.
Few people remember his other book, that he wrote simultaneously, called Talk’s Body, where he tries to improvise on the piano keyboard then immediately shifts to the typewriter keyboard to improvise with words. He writes about life, about playing music, about listening to the world:
You listen to the voice to hear its nervousness.
You listen to identify the language.
You listen to see if you are interested.
You listen to be able to repeat it later…
You listen to show you are listening.
You listen for your turn to talk…
no thought only thinking no melody only melodying
no itness, no thingness, only processes of sounds
it’s all a matter of form, becoming public for others
talk talks itself into too many objects…
a swarm of harmonies
dense sounds, rich with implication….
sounds quiver in certain surroundings.
Nomads with Invisible Stories
Jaron Lanier has collected every possible wind instrument in every possible size. The world’s largest flute down to the world’s smallest. Saxophones that can never leave the house. Lanier believes musical instruments are the most advanced tools any society has produced, because they allow us to express ideas that we do not conceive, but can only realize together with the technology, extending our bodies and thoughts into the world.
They make meaning out of the patterns of sound. These rhythms and melodies turn experience into something to love. We evolve that into language and talk about everything, but in the end it is the music we remember most.
I do just a few things to my sound files. I change the speed, the pitch, change the level of resonance, and the dial between dry sound and effected sound. Resonance vs dry/wet mix, these are not the same variables. With these simple tools I inhabit the sonic world of the pond.
Resonance is both a philosophical concept and a specific musical tool. That’s one way precise actions can point toward the universal thrum. This is something humans can do: find order in the results of evolution colliding with the firmament of the physical and chemical world. The pond has all of that.
I ask Ilgin what the sounds of the pond mean to her. She is young but has seen so much, from Cappadocia to Kathmandu, from Paris to Oslo. Her art transcends genre. I ask her how she got to the words she used:
It is dim and cold
It feels secure since the sounds do not cease
They fall like a curtain of binary code, delivering this empty room where you can dwell by yourself
As if there is anything interesting to tell
That’s probably why I kept on saying the sound does not listen to me
It’s quite absurd, among all the possible existing life forms, wearing the human; wearing a zero
This has been pissing me off since I was little,
And the pond recalls it for a tiny bit, that seems funny
That’s when I say, ‘I love you,’ to the pond, ‘let’s make drama’
I’m now a bit more relieved, following absurdity, there comes freedom
I think of the f(x) that I am and how empty I could be without the sound
All I can do is to let the outside and the inside merge without disrupting.
The chasm between us 'keeps me on hold, makes me realize there is no gap to think by pulling me over and pushing me away'
Suspension.
Release.
I start backtracking the steps that brought me to the Sound
(with a capital S)
My feet disappear as the ground is removed
Reading words was hammering my mind
Writing words was slamming me on cliffs
Saying words was spitting soot
I left there
And I reached the Sound
It’s getting softer.
Now I’m wondering how to voice the ethereal power in the soft—
The magnetic pull in the lullaby
Whatever I will do, I want to keep the rawness, the wilderness, and the immediacy
On a different chord a question bounces, What would the pond think?
We have to hear meaning in it if we want the beauty of the pond to matter as much as it needs to in order to save us.
This is an extract from the book Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg, available here.
Quicksound
There is a little pond upstate by the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. I don’t think it really has a name but it’s near the junction named Boston Corners. It’s a spot Sean O'Grady, Lindsay Stern, Edwin Frank, and I found after we came down from a hike up Brace Mountain. We found this little body of water just off the road that just seemed kind of beguiling, so I tossed the hydrophone in, pressed record, turned it on, and began to listen.
I wanted to show them that just about any pond could offer surprising and beautiful sounds.
A lot of what we first hear is standard rhythmic photosynthesis, mostly plants. Then occasionally there is a little water boatman vibrational penis action and then one squirting sound that’s probably a backswimmer, which looks like an upside-down boatman, or one of those pond Kobolds we sometimes worry about.
When the group stopped to record that little pond at Boston Corners, we didn’t expect much. “Get off that man’s land,” Sean even worried. This was clearly a place on private property. Still, I did want to show off my quest to my friends. “Let’s just drop the hydrophone in, plug in the speaker, and see if there’s anything interesting.”
At first it was the usual crackles of breathing plants, that primeval sound, but then there was some stridulation. Bugs rubbing parts of their bodies against other parts. And one baffling pwoof sound.
Just under three minutes in there came a section with shape, beauty, and form. Beginning middle and end, but still a fragment of eternity.
I wanted to transform it.
Listening to the natural rhythms innate in the recording, I ran it through an effect that literally adds tonality to the beats through a process called ‘resonating.’ So now in my story we have both a metaphorical reach for resonance and a technical form of resonance. It’s the same word. I resonate the crackle , so it becomes just a little bit more accessible as music.
And this process helps me resonate more with the sound of the pond as found. Resonance specifically is taking a sound and tuning certain frequencies within it. Now some resonators are based on real thrums, like drumbeats, string plucks, xylophone hits or wooden marimba thunks, but others are more abstract, based on math not materials. Those are the plugins I prefer, these little add-ons to the music software, because they extract a harmony from the sound. I tweak the frequencies, it sounds alive, tonal, musical, but not so obvious, not like any actual instrument seen, touched, or heard in the actual world.
Another voice was needed.
I sent it to Laurie Anderson, one of the wisest experimenters in words and sound of our time. She said, “It is perfect,” and I smiled. Then she sounded a bit like Teddy Roosevelt at the brink of the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is.”
Next it went to Isabel Rossellini, the great actress who recently has been dressing up as various cardboard critics and enacting the most gruesome animal mating rituals. I thought she would be impressed by the notion of tiny water bugs vibrating their penises to make a sound as loud as a whale. “Please, send me more sounds!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t know what to do with this.”
It was time to look beyond. What performer would think such sounds are typical?
Around the beginning of the pandemic, I was supposed to travel to Norway to a gathering of the Society for Artistic Research. Like so much else, this event was not to be. One of the people I arranged to meet there was a Turkish philosopher/poet named Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu, who contacted me through her mutual friend the artist and rock musician Alexandra Duvekot of the band Blue Crime. They were both living in Amsterdam.
Ilgin wrote to me of the concept of the “artist-philosopher” and her plans to create a School for Artist Philosophers in Norway.
She thought I might be one of them, and I basically agreed.
Since we were unable to meet, I thought I might as well send her this Boston Corners pond recording. Perhaps an art-philosophical perspective would shed light on what could be done with it.
Immediately Ilgin told me about one of her favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, who wrote poetically on the aquatic and the liquid. She wrote a watery text called Agua Viva, hard to classify like so much of what I like to read, a book that tries to articulate the stream of life, what it is that makes water alive:
The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs…. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magician tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices.
Lispector could be writing about the photosynthetic rhythms of sundrenched swamp plants. This wild music, she's going for it, aching toward a new language.
I want to turn the pond language into music and lure you into it.
Armed with insight from Lispector, Ilgin had her own take on the Boston Corners Pond. She didn’t care if anyone said it was ‘perfect as it is.’ Depends on how much you trust the world as it appears.
Ilgin was not afraid of this sound. She had no skin in the game and was ready to try anything. This is what she did with it:
Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and a few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again, and my idea.
It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love. The few-minute resonance that seemed perfect on its own… until Ilgin discovered it.
The last note is lower than the low. Here are the words the pond sound drew out of her:
To go
To go over this quicksand of quicksound
The sound teaches me
Now….
I love you too
Let’s make drama
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh—çıngıl çıngıl
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
There is no gap—
Pulls me over
Pushes me away
Pull me over
Push me away
When?
Tell me when?
I say, when
The sound says
now.
I hadn’t then met Ilgin in person, but we began to talk online all the time. She was ready at once to be transformed by these sounds, as they immediately suggested to her new ideas and dissonant words.
As long as I was trapped at home, I needed to bounce ideas, and possibilities, off those I don’t know and who are more excited about the world than I.
The poetic is what resonates with life but does not follow the explanatory thread. We try to play in unison but don’t really want to. There has to be unevenness. The beat must never be so regular that it bores us. The swirl of sound must make us tremble.
These edgy sounds run in the background. They are the soundtrack for our journey together into an art-philosophy that only exists here and now. We have been sentenced to placelessness .
Because we cannot meet—Let’s make drama.
We’re lucky to have this wonderful voice that has not yet decided how it wants to sing. This was her first recording. Over time the texts grew more into songs.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film The Silence reveals the way the world sounds to an eight-year-old blind boy in Tajikistan. Khorshid earns his living tuning stringed instruments like the rebab and tar, but he is easily distracted, as he wanders the street and is easily lured away by beautiful voices and strangely tingling sounds. His mother advises him to put cotton in his ears or plug them up with his fingers as he rides the bus, lest he follow the beautiful voices of girls or strumming strings .
When his ears are stopped up, he hears the burbling sound of water inside his head, and as we the audience watch the film, we are easily seduced by the power of sound and the beautiful smiles and colors of the Tajik people, awash with simplicity while reeling from the ravages of the Afghan War. The film was made in 1998, but looks and sounds as if it could have come from anytime, as it reminds us who see how even the most mundane of sounds can, if we attend to them, make us shiver.
I wish I could play these pond sounds for Clarice Lispector to hear what she might make of them.
The tingling all over. The rhythm of the pond. This is what I want you to feel and be shivered by. You’ll never know what makes these sounds until you realize what they can do to you.
The great electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram has this to say about resonance in her book An Individual Note (1972):
Great art presents us with such a rich and perfectly controlled wavepattern that its intermodulation with our own pattern provides us with new aspects of reality…. These induced resonances in all wavebands remain with us, if renewed by memory and repeated experience…. Have you ever tried musing in front of a flickering fire? The coals form fascinating, grotesque shapes, some fiery red, some sullen black. Tongues of flame, blue and yellow, create crazy rhythms as they dance. You cannot predict what will happen next, yet you feel beneath it all a consuming pulse…. The crazy beat of the flames incites you to join them in a song: so each pathway becomes a musical phrase, each boulder a musical chord. The crescendo reaches a climax as the craggy pinnacle plunges crumbling to its death. The flickering flame is extinguished and all is as silent as dust.
Oram too was trying to explain how sometimes the artificial can sound so natural, in an uncanny way, becoming more real than sounds out there made by physical means.
Resonance as an offering can come to you in many ways. The sound, massaged or direct, can transform you even if you are afraid of the unknown. I’m always listening for what I haven’t quite heard before. It might then seem I am usually bored with life but aren’t we all? Enough already, we have played enough, composed enough, written enough to fill the world with excess noise. Why go on? We’re still searching for something we haven’t yet found.
How far can resonance reach? How much can one series of strange sounds resonate with everyone else’s worries and pains? I doubt it can go so far; indeed, I wish I could explain to you the meaning and value of the greatest things.
I always admired David Sudnow’s two books on how to learn to improvise on the piano. The famous one is called Ways of the Hand in which he tries to articulate how you are supposed to move your hands on the keyboard and know exactly what you are doing without being able to explain it, pushing for the known unknown that all those who believe in improvisation yearn for.
Few people remember his other book, that he wrote simultaneously, called Talk’s Body, where he tries to improvise on the piano keyboard then immediately shifts to the typewriter keyboard to improvise with words. He writes about life, about playing music, about listening to the world:
You listen to the voice to hear its nervousness.
You listen to identify the language.
You listen to see if you are interested.
You listen to be able to repeat it later…
You listen to show you are listening.
You listen for your turn to talk…
no thought only thinking no melody only melodying
no itness, no thingness, only processes of sounds
it’s all a matter of form, becoming public for others
talk talks itself into too many objects…
a swarm of harmonies
dense sounds, rich with implication….
sounds quiver in certain surroundings.
Nomads with Invisible Stories
Jaron Lanier has collected every possible wind instrument in every possible size. The world’s largest flute down to the world’s smallest. Saxophones that can never leave the house. Lanier believes musical instruments are the most advanced tools any society has produced, because they allow us to express ideas that we do not conceive, but can only realize together with the technology, extending our bodies and thoughts into the world.
They make meaning out of the patterns of sound. These rhythms and melodies turn experience into something to love. We evolve that into language and talk about everything, but in the end it is the music we remember most.
I do just a few things to my sound files. I change the speed, the pitch, change the level of resonance, and the dial between dry sound and effected sound. Resonance vs dry/wet mix, these are not the same variables. With these simple tools I inhabit the sonic world of the pond.
Resonance is both a philosophical concept and a specific musical tool. That’s one way precise actions can point toward the universal thrum. This is something humans can do: find order in the results of evolution colliding with the firmament of the physical and chemical world. The pond has all of that.
I ask Ilgin what the sounds of the pond mean to her. She is young but has seen so much, from Cappadocia to Kathmandu, from Paris to Oslo. Her art transcends genre. I ask her how she got to the words she used:
It is dim and cold
It feels secure since the sounds do not cease
They fall like a curtain of binary code, delivering this empty room where you can dwell by yourself
As if there is anything interesting to tell
That’s probably why I kept on saying the sound does not listen to me
It’s quite absurd, among all the possible existing life forms, wearing the human; wearing a zero
This has been pissing me off since I was little,
And the pond recalls it for a tiny bit, that seems funny
That’s when I say, ‘I love you,’ to the pond, ‘let’s make drama’
I’m now a bit more relieved, following absurdity, there comes freedom
I think of the f(x) that I am and how empty I could be without the sound
All I can do is to let the outside and the inside merge without disrupting.
The chasm between us 'keeps me on hold, makes me realize there is no gap to think by pulling me over and pushing me away'
Suspension.
Release.
I start backtracking the steps that brought me to the Sound
(with a capital S)
My feet disappear as the ground is removed
Reading words was hammering my mind
Writing words was slamming me on cliffs
Saying words was spitting soot
I left there
And I reached the Sound
It’s getting softer.
Now I’m wondering how to voice the ethereal power in the soft—
The magnetic pull in the lullaby
Whatever I will do, I want to keep the rawness, the wilderness, and the immediacy
On a different chord a question bounces, What would the pond think?
We have to hear meaning in it if we want the beauty of the pond to matter as much as it needs to in order to save us.
This is an extract from the book Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg, available here.
David Rothenberg is a musician and philosopher and the author of multiple books including Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful, Nightingales in Berlin, Whale Music. His two previous books of poetry are Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes and Invisible Mountains. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House with Marilyn Crispell on ECM, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and Faultlines. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Music at The New Jersey Institute ofTechnology.
BY DAVID ROTHENBERG
Quicksound
There is a little pond upstate by the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. I don’t think it really has a name but it’s near the junction named Boston Corners. It’s a spot Sean O'Grady, Lindsay Stern, Edwin Frank, and I found after we came down from a hike up Brace Mountain. We found this little body of water just off the road that just seemed kind of beguiling, so I tossed the hydrophone in, pressed record, turned it on, and began to listen.
I wanted to show them that just about any pond could offer surprising and beautiful sounds.
A lot of what we first hear is standard rhythmic photosynthesis, mostly plants. Then occasionally there is a little water boatman vibrational penis action and then one squirting sound that’s probably a backswimmer, which looks like an upside-down boatman, or one of those pond Kobolds we sometimes worry about.
When the group stopped to record that little pond at Boston Corners, we didn’t expect much. “Get off that man’s land,” Sean even worried. This was clearly a place on private property. Still, I did want to show off my quest to my friends. “Let’s just drop the hydrophone in, plug in the speaker, and see if there’s anything interesting.”
At first it was the usual crackles of breathing plants, that primeval sound, but then there was some stridulation. Bugs rubbing parts of their bodies against other parts. And one baffling pwoof sound.
Just under three minutes in there came a section with shape, beauty, and form. Beginning middle and end, but still a fragment of eternity.
I wanted to transform it.
Listening to the natural rhythms innate in the recording, I ran it through an effect that literally adds tonality to the beats through a process called ‘resonating.’ So now in my story we have both a metaphorical reach for resonance and a technical form of resonance. It’s the same word. I resonate the crackle , so it becomes just a little bit more accessible as music.
And this process helps me resonate more with the sound of the pond as found. Resonance specifically is taking a sound and tuning certain frequencies within it. Now some resonators are based on real thrums, like drumbeats, string plucks, xylophone hits or wooden marimba thunks, but others are more abstract, based on math not materials. Those are the plugins I prefer, these little add-ons to the music software, because they extract a harmony from the sound. I tweak the frequencies, it sounds alive, tonal, musical, but not so obvious, not like any actual instrument seen, touched, or heard in the actual world.
Another voice was needed.
I sent it to Laurie Anderson, one of the wisest experimenters in words and sound of our time. She said, “It is perfect,” and I smiled. Then she sounded a bit like Teddy Roosevelt at the brink of the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is.”
Next it went to Isabel Rossellini, the great actress who recently has been dressing up as various cardboard critics and enacting the most gruesome animal mating rituals. I thought she would be impressed by the notion of tiny water bugs vibrating their penises to make a sound as loud as a whale. “Please, send me more sounds!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t know what to do with this.”
It was time to look beyond. What performer would think such sounds are typical?
Around the beginning of the pandemic, I was supposed to travel to Norway to a gathering of the Society for Artistic Research. Like so much else, this event was not to be. One of the people I arranged to meet there was a Turkish philosopher/poet named Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu, who contacted me through her mutual friend the artist and rock musician Alexandra Duvekot of the band Blue Crime. They were both living in Amsterdam.
Ilgin wrote to me of the concept of the “artist-philosopher” and her plans to create a School for Artist Philosophers in Norway.
She thought I might be one of them, and I basically agreed.
Since we were unable to meet, I thought I might as well send her this Boston Corners pond recording. Perhaps an art-philosophical perspective would shed light on what could be done with it.
Immediately Ilgin told me about one of her favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, who wrote poetically on the aquatic and the liquid. She wrote a watery text called Agua Viva, hard to classify like so much of what I like to read, a book that tries to articulate the stream of life, what it is that makes water alive:
The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs…. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magician tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices.
Lispector could be writing about the photosynthetic rhythms of sundrenched swamp plants. This wild music, she's going for it, aching toward a new language.
I want to turn the pond language into music and lure you into it.
Armed with insight from Lispector, Ilgin had her own take on the Boston Corners Pond. She didn’t care if anyone said it was ‘perfect as it is.’ Depends on how much you trust the world as it appears.
Ilgin was not afraid of this sound. She had no skin in the game and was ready to try anything. This is what she did with it:
Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and a few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again, and my idea.
It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love. The few-minute resonance that seemed perfect on its own… until Ilgin discovered it.
The last note is lower than the low. Here are the words the pond sound drew out of her:
To go
To go over this quicksand of quicksound
The sound teaches me
Now….
I love you too
Let’s make drama
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh—çıngıl çıngıl
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
There is no gap—
Pulls me over
Pushes me away
Pull me over
Push me away
When?
Tell me when?
I say, when
The sound says
now.
I hadn’t then met Ilgin in person, but we began to talk online all the time. She was ready at once to be transformed by these sounds, as they immediately suggested to her new ideas and dissonant words.
As long as I was trapped at home, I needed to bounce ideas, and possibilities, off those I don’t know and who are more excited about the world than I.
The poetic is what resonates with life but does not follow the explanatory thread. We try to play in unison but don’t really want to. There has to be unevenness. The beat must never be so regular that it bores us. The swirl of sound must make us tremble.
These edgy sounds run in the background. They are the soundtrack for our journey together into an art-philosophy that only exists here and now. We have been sentenced to placelessness .
Because we cannot meet—Let’s make drama.
We’re lucky to have this wonderful voice that has not yet decided how it wants to sing. This was her first recording. Over time the texts grew more into songs.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film The Silence reveals the way the world sounds to an eight-year-old blind boy in Tajikistan. Khorshid earns his living tuning stringed instruments like the rebab and tar, but he is easily distracted, as he wanders the street and is easily lured away by beautiful voices and strangely tingling sounds. His mother advises him to put cotton in his ears or plug them up with his fingers as he rides the bus, lest he follow the beautiful voices of girls or strumming strings .
When his ears are stopped up, he hears the burbling sound of water inside his head, and as we the audience watch the film, we are easily seduced by the power of sound and the beautiful smiles and colors of the Tajik people, awash with simplicity while reeling from the ravages of the Afghan War. The film was made in 1998, but looks and sounds as if it could have come from anytime, as it reminds us who see how even the most mundane of sounds can, if we attend to them, make us shiver.
I wish I could play these pond sounds for Clarice Lispector to hear what she might make of them.
The tingling all over. The rhythm of the pond. This is what I want you to feel and be shivered by. You’ll never know what makes these sounds until you realize what they can do to you.
The great electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram has this to say about resonance in her book An Individual Note (1972):
Great art presents us with such a rich and perfectly controlled wavepattern that its intermodulation with our own pattern provides us with new aspects of reality…. These induced resonances in all wavebands remain with us, if renewed by memory and repeated experience…. Have you ever tried musing in front of a flickering fire? The coals form fascinating, grotesque shapes, some fiery red, some sullen black. Tongues of flame, blue and yellow, create crazy rhythms as they dance. You cannot predict what will happen next, yet you feel beneath it all a consuming pulse…. The crazy beat of the flames incites you to join them in a song: so each pathway becomes a musical phrase, each boulder a musical chord. The crescendo reaches a climax as the craggy pinnacle plunges crumbling to its death. The flickering flame is extinguished and all is as silent as dust.
Oram too was trying to explain how sometimes the artificial can sound so natural, in an uncanny way, becoming more real than sounds out there made by physical means.
Resonance as an offering can come to you in many ways. The sound, massaged or direct, can transform you even if you are afraid of the unknown. I’m always listening for what I haven’t quite heard before. It might then seem I am usually bored with life but aren’t we all? Enough already, we have played enough, composed enough, written enough to fill the world with excess noise. Why go on? We’re still searching for something we haven’t yet found.
How far can resonance reach? How much can one series of strange sounds resonate with everyone else’s worries and pains? I doubt it can go so far; indeed, I wish I could explain to you the meaning and value of the greatest things.
I always admired David Sudnow’s two books on how to learn to improvise on the piano. The famous one is called Ways of the Hand in which he tries to articulate how you are supposed to move your hands on the keyboard and know exactly what you are doing without being able to explain it, pushing for the known unknown that all those who believe in improvisation yearn for.
Few people remember his other book, that he wrote simultaneously, called Talk’s Body, where he tries to improvise on the piano keyboard then immediately shifts to the typewriter keyboard to improvise with words. He writes about life, about playing music, about listening to the world:
You listen to the voice to hear its nervousness.
You listen to identify the language.
You listen to see if you are interested.
You listen to be able to repeat it later…
You listen to show you are listening.
You listen for your turn to talk…
no thought only thinking no melody only melodying
no itness, no thingness, only processes of sounds
it’s all a matter of form, becoming public for others
talk talks itself into too many objects…
a swarm of harmonies
dense sounds, rich with implication….
sounds quiver in certain surroundings.
Nomads with Invisible Stories
Jaron Lanier has collected every possible wind instrument in every possible size. The world’s largest flute down to the world’s smallest. Saxophones that can never leave the house. Lanier believes musical instruments are the most advanced tools any society has produced, because they allow us to express ideas that we do not conceive, but can only realize together with the technology, extending our bodies and thoughts into the world.
They make meaning out of the patterns of sound. These rhythms and melodies turn experience into something to love. We evolve that into language and talk about everything, but in the end it is the music we remember most.
I do just a few things to my sound files. I change the speed, the pitch, change the level of resonance, and the dial between dry sound and effected sound. Resonance vs dry/wet mix, these are not the same variables. With these simple tools I inhabit the sonic world of the pond.
Resonance is both a philosophical concept and a specific musical tool. That’s one way precise actions can point toward the universal thrum. This is something humans can do: find order in the results of evolution colliding with the firmament of the physical and chemical world. The pond has all of that.
I ask Ilgin what the sounds of the pond mean to her. She is young but has seen so much, from Cappadocia to Kathmandu, from Paris to Oslo. Her art transcends genre. I ask her how she got to the words she used:
It is dim and cold
It feels secure since the sounds do not cease
They fall like a curtain of binary code, delivering this empty room where you can dwell by yourself
As if there is anything interesting to tell
That’s probably why I kept on saying the sound does not listen to me
It’s quite absurd, among all the possible existing life forms, wearing the human; wearing a zero
This has been pissing me off since I was little,
And the pond recalls it for a tiny bit, that seems funny
That’s when I say, ‘I love you,’ to the pond, ‘let’s make drama’
I’m now a bit more relieved, following absurdity, there comes freedom
I think of the f(x) that I am and how empty I could be without the sound
All I can do is to let the outside and the inside merge without disrupting.
The chasm between us 'keeps me on hold, makes me realize there is no gap to think by pulling me over and pushing me away'
Suspension.
Release.
I start backtracking the steps that brought me to the Sound
(with a capital S)
My feet disappear as the ground is removed
Reading words was hammering my mind
Writing words was slamming me on cliffs
Saying words was spitting soot
I left there
And I reached the Sound
It’s getting softer.
Now I’m wondering how to voice the ethereal power in the soft—
The magnetic pull in the lullaby
Whatever I will do, I want to keep the rawness, the wilderness, and the immediacy
On a different chord a question bounces, What would the pond think?
We have to hear meaning in it if we want the beauty of the pond to matter as much as it needs to in order to save us.
This is an extract from the book Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg, available here.
Quicksound
There is a little pond upstate by the Massachusetts and Connecticut borders. I don’t think it really has a name but it’s near the junction named Boston Corners. It’s a spot Sean O'Grady, Lindsay Stern, Edwin Frank, and I found after we came down from a hike up Brace Mountain. We found this little body of water just off the road that just seemed kind of beguiling, so I tossed the hydrophone in, pressed record, turned it on, and began to listen.
I wanted to show them that just about any pond could offer surprising and beautiful sounds.
A lot of what we first hear is standard rhythmic photosynthesis, mostly plants. Then occasionally there is a little water boatman vibrational penis action and then one squirting sound that’s probably a backswimmer, which looks like an upside-down boatman, or one of those pond Kobolds we sometimes worry about.
When the group stopped to record that little pond at Boston Corners, we didn’t expect much. “Get off that man’s land,” Sean even worried. This was clearly a place on private property. Still, I did want to show off my quest to my friends. “Let’s just drop the hydrophone in, plug in the speaker, and see if there’s anything interesting.”
At first it was the usual crackles of breathing plants, that primeval sound, but then there was some stridulation. Bugs rubbing parts of their bodies against other parts. And one baffling pwoof sound.
Just under three minutes in there came a section with shape, beauty, and form. Beginning middle and end, but still a fragment of eternity.
I wanted to transform it.
Listening to the natural rhythms innate in the recording, I ran it through an effect that literally adds tonality to the beats through a process called ‘resonating.’ So now in my story we have both a metaphorical reach for resonance and a technical form of resonance. It’s the same word. I resonate the crackle , so it becomes just a little bit more accessible as music.
And this process helps me resonate more with the sound of the pond as found. Resonance specifically is taking a sound and tuning certain frequencies within it. Now some resonators are based on real thrums, like drumbeats, string plucks, xylophone hits or wooden marimba thunks, but others are more abstract, based on math not materials. Those are the plugins I prefer, these little add-ons to the music software, because they extract a harmony from the sound. I tweak the frequencies, it sounds alive, tonal, musical, but not so obvious, not like any actual instrument seen, touched, or heard in the actual world.
Another voice was needed.
I sent it to Laurie Anderson, one of the wisest experimenters in words and sound of our time. She said, “It is perfect,” and I smiled. Then she sounded a bit like Teddy Roosevelt at the brink of the Grand Canyon: “Leave it as it is.”
Next it went to Isabel Rossellini, the great actress who recently has been dressing up as various cardboard critics and enacting the most gruesome animal mating rituals. I thought she would be impressed by the notion of tiny water bugs vibrating their penises to make a sound as loud as a whale. “Please, send me more sounds!” she exclaimed. “But I don’t know what to do with this.”
It was time to look beyond. What performer would think such sounds are typical?
Around the beginning of the pandemic, I was supposed to travel to Norway to a gathering of the Society for Artistic Research. Like so much else, this event was not to be. One of the people I arranged to meet there was a Turkish philosopher/poet named Ilgin Deniz Akseloğlu, who contacted me through her mutual friend the artist and rock musician Alexandra Duvekot of the band Blue Crime. They were both living in Amsterdam.
Ilgin wrote to me of the concept of the “artist-philosopher” and her plans to create a School for Artist Philosophers in Norway.
She thought I might be one of them, and I basically agreed.
Since we were unable to meet, I thought I might as well send her this Boston Corners pond recording. Perhaps an art-philosophical perspective would shed light on what could be done with it.
Immediately Ilgin told me about one of her favorite writers, Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, who wrote poetically on the aquatic and the liquid. She wrote a watery text called Agua Viva, hard to classify like so much of what I like to read, a book that tries to articulate the stream of life, what it is that makes water alive:
The liturgy of dissonant swarms of insects that rise from cloudy and pestilent bogs…. I hear cymbals and trumpets and drums that fill the air with noises and tumult, muffling then the silence of the sun disc and its prodigy. I want a cloak woven with threads of solar gold. The sun is the magician tension of silence. In my trek to the mysteries I hear the carnivorous plant that laments times immemorial: and I have obscene nightmares buffeted by sickly winds. I am enchanted, seduced, tossed by furtive voices.
Lispector could be writing about the photosynthetic rhythms of sundrenched swamp plants. This wild music, she's going for it, aching toward a new language.
I want to turn the pond language into music and lure you into it.
Armed with insight from Lispector, Ilgin had her own take on the Boston Corners Pond. She didn’t care if anyone said it was ‘perfect as it is.’ Depends on how much you trust the world as it appears.
Ilgin was not afraid of this sound. She had no skin in the game and was ready to try anything. This is what she did with it:
Bass tones, human interjections, and the perfect three minutes of unassailable pond. The beat of the plants and a few animals, just at the right points. Above I see harmony, perfection, proof of concept again, and my idea.
It’s the rightness of pond music, most likely never to be so rightly heard again. The birth of collaboration, the sequester of love. The few-minute resonance that seemed perfect on its own… until Ilgin discovered it.
The last note is lower than the low. Here are the words the pond sound drew out of her:
To go
To go over this quicksand of quicksound
The sound teaches me
Now….
I love you too
Let’s make drama
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh—çıngıl çıngıl
>>>>>>>aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh
There is no gap—
Pulls me over
Pushes me away
Pull me over
Push me away
When?
Tell me when?
I say, when
The sound says
now.
I hadn’t then met Ilgin in person, but we began to talk online all the time. She was ready at once to be transformed by these sounds, as they immediately suggested to her new ideas and dissonant words.
As long as I was trapped at home, I needed to bounce ideas, and possibilities, off those I don’t know and who are more excited about the world than I.
The poetic is what resonates with life but does not follow the explanatory thread. We try to play in unison but don’t really want to. There has to be unevenness. The beat must never be so regular that it bores us. The swirl of sound must make us tremble.
These edgy sounds run in the background. They are the soundtrack for our journey together into an art-philosophy that only exists here and now. We have been sentenced to placelessness .
Because we cannot meet—Let’s make drama.
We’re lucky to have this wonderful voice that has not yet decided how it wants to sing. This was her first recording. Over time the texts grew more into songs.
Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s film The Silence reveals the way the world sounds to an eight-year-old blind boy in Tajikistan. Khorshid earns his living tuning stringed instruments like the rebab and tar, but he is easily distracted, as he wanders the street and is easily lured away by beautiful voices and strangely tingling sounds. His mother advises him to put cotton in his ears or plug them up with his fingers as he rides the bus, lest he follow the beautiful voices of girls or strumming strings .
When his ears are stopped up, he hears the burbling sound of water inside his head, and as we the audience watch the film, we are easily seduced by the power of sound and the beautiful smiles and colors of the Tajik people, awash with simplicity while reeling from the ravages of the Afghan War. The film was made in 1998, but looks and sounds as if it could have come from anytime, as it reminds us who see how even the most mundane of sounds can, if we attend to them, make us shiver.
I wish I could play these pond sounds for Clarice Lispector to hear what she might make of them.
The tingling all over. The rhythm of the pond. This is what I want you to feel and be shivered by. You’ll never know what makes these sounds until you realize what they can do to you.
The great electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram has this to say about resonance in her book An Individual Note (1972):
Great art presents us with such a rich and perfectly controlled wavepattern that its intermodulation with our own pattern provides us with new aspects of reality…. These induced resonances in all wavebands remain with us, if renewed by memory and repeated experience…. Have you ever tried musing in front of a flickering fire? The coals form fascinating, grotesque shapes, some fiery red, some sullen black. Tongues of flame, blue and yellow, create crazy rhythms as they dance. You cannot predict what will happen next, yet you feel beneath it all a consuming pulse…. The crazy beat of the flames incites you to join them in a song: so each pathway becomes a musical phrase, each boulder a musical chord. The crescendo reaches a climax as the craggy pinnacle plunges crumbling to its death. The flickering flame is extinguished and all is as silent as dust.
Oram too was trying to explain how sometimes the artificial can sound so natural, in an uncanny way, becoming more real than sounds out there made by physical means.
Resonance as an offering can come to you in many ways. The sound, massaged or direct, can transform you even if you are afraid of the unknown. I’m always listening for what I haven’t quite heard before. It might then seem I am usually bored with life but aren’t we all? Enough already, we have played enough, composed enough, written enough to fill the world with excess noise. Why go on? We’re still searching for something we haven’t yet found.
How far can resonance reach? How much can one series of strange sounds resonate with everyone else’s worries and pains? I doubt it can go so far; indeed, I wish I could explain to you the meaning and value of the greatest things.
I always admired David Sudnow’s two books on how to learn to improvise on the piano. The famous one is called Ways of the Hand in which he tries to articulate how you are supposed to move your hands on the keyboard and know exactly what you are doing without being able to explain it, pushing for the known unknown that all those who believe in improvisation yearn for.
Few people remember his other book, that he wrote simultaneously, called Talk’s Body, where he tries to improvise on the piano keyboard then immediately shifts to the typewriter keyboard to improvise with words. He writes about life, about playing music, about listening to the world:
You listen to the voice to hear its nervousness.
You listen to identify the language.
You listen to see if you are interested.
You listen to be able to repeat it later…
You listen to show you are listening.
You listen for your turn to talk…
no thought only thinking no melody only melodying
no itness, no thingness, only processes of sounds
it’s all a matter of form, becoming public for others
talk talks itself into too many objects…
a swarm of harmonies
dense sounds, rich with implication….
sounds quiver in certain surroundings.
Nomads with Invisible Stories
Jaron Lanier has collected every possible wind instrument in every possible size. The world’s largest flute down to the world’s smallest. Saxophones that can never leave the house. Lanier believes musical instruments are the most advanced tools any society has produced, because they allow us to express ideas that we do not conceive, but can only realize together with the technology, extending our bodies and thoughts into the world.
They make meaning out of the patterns of sound. These rhythms and melodies turn experience into something to love. We evolve that into language and talk about everything, but in the end it is the music we remember most.
I do just a few things to my sound files. I change the speed, the pitch, change the level of resonance, and the dial between dry sound and effected sound. Resonance vs dry/wet mix, these are not the same variables. With these simple tools I inhabit the sonic world of the pond.
Resonance is both a philosophical concept and a specific musical tool. That’s one way precise actions can point toward the universal thrum. This is something humans can do: find order in the results of evolution colliding with the firmament of the physical and chemical world. The pond has all of that.
I ask Ilgin what the sounds of the pond mean to her. She is young but has seen so much, from Cappadocia to Kathmandu, from Paris to Oslo. Her art transcends genre. I ask her how she got to the words she used:
It is dim and cold
It feels secure since the sounds do not cease
They fall like a curtain of binary code, delivering this empty room where you can dwell by yourself
As if there is anything interesting to tell
That’s probably why I kept on saying the sound does not listen to me
It’s quite absurd, among all the possible existing life forms, wearing the human; wearing a zero
This has been pissing me off since I was little,
And the pond recalls it for a tiny bit, that seems funny
That’s when I say, ‘I love you,’ to the pond, ‘let’s make drama’
I’m now a bit more relieved, following absurdity, there comes freedom
I think of the f(x) that I am and how empty I could be without the sound
All I can do is to let the outside and the inside merge without disrupting.
The chasm between us 'keeps me on hold, makes me realize there is no gap to think by pulling me over and pushing me away'
Suspension.
Release.
I start backtracking the steps that brought me to the Sound
(with a capital S)
My feet disappear as the ground is removed
Reading words was hammering my mind
Writing words was slamming me on cliffs
Saying words was spitting soot
I left there
And I reached the Sound
It’s getting softer.
Now I’m wondering how to voice the ethereal power in the soft—
The magnetic pull in the lullaby
Whatever I will do, I want to keep the rawness, the wilderness, and the immediacy
On a different chord a question bounces, What would the pond think?
We have to hear meaning in it if we want the beauty of the pond to matter as much as it needs to in order to save us.
This is an extract from the book Secret Sounds of Ponds by David Rothenberg, available here.
David Rothenberg is a musician and philosopher and the author of multiple books including Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful, Nightingales in Berlin, Whale Music. His two previous books of poetry are Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes and Invisible Mountains. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House with Marilyn Crispell on ECM, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and Faultlines. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Music at The New Jersey Institute ofTechnology.