On Resonance

The wind has no sound

I am tempted to suggest composition as design. However, wary of the counter-productive allure of having the sonorous understood through another discipline, remediated through another sensorial perception, I will attempt to address the qualities and the experience of sound directly.

A composition is a material proposition. If a piece of music falls flat, the proposition was a weak one. The line between the artist’s intention and their movement feels unclear. A strong proposition is precise, enlivened by a decisiveness towards what one chooses to do, out of what they can do.

And because music is often approached (as the artist) and remembered (as the listener) through movements and decisions, there is a material quality that gets left out: decay. We may refer to Morton Feldman’s writing on decay:

The attack of a sound is not its character. Actually, what we hear is the attack and not the sound. Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing — leaving us rather than coming toward us. (from ‘Give My Regards to Eighth Street’)

The attack comes first — every strike on the piano’s keys, every thud of the mallet on a cymbal, every buzz of the lips against the trombone — but the attack is not the sound; it is not even that which makes the sound. The sound is what you hear, and what you hear is carried by air or by moisture, by devices and wires, by radio waves. No less material, what you hear is spirited by things like memory, or cultural and biographical association, whether the effect may be conscious or sub-conscious. Sounds are conducted, amplified, contorted, suppressed or obscured by a myriad of factors we may never fully be able to identify. A sound’s decay encompasses this mystery.

What I am most drawn to in Feldman’s description of decay is the vectorial nature he identifies in it. We like to think of sound as coming toward us, of ourselves as receivers of the sound whether in eagerness or by happenstance, but Feldman discerns another directional relationship; one of departure, the sound leaving us as we hear it. Sonic decay thus occurs not only spatially, as the phenomenon of reverberation is, but also temporally and organically, making it an important materiality in analyzing how sound exists, and how we exist with sound.

Not too long ago Armen and I were fortunate enough to spend some time in the central highlands of Vietnam, a place where things linger for longer: the rain and the mist, the smell of fresh herbs, the taste of coffee, the open-air community center karaoke. And other sounds, too, seemed to prolong their farewell. We were walking on a slightly upwards-sloping residential street and had just taken a turn towards a steep offshoot downhill, with the feeling we would be able to find a bite to eat somewhere further along, when we heard the most beautiful, resonating pitch. It was gentle, pure, and it dwelled in the air effortlessly; too intimate to be a church bell, too random, in that part of town, to be some kind of musician’s performance or practice. Lucky us, that pitch was followed by a sweep of different pitches, but not many; we heard three. It was a wind chime, hung at the edge of a rather large but simple house, obscured from the passerby’s view by a vine-laced fence.

The wind chime, with its intentioned pitches, is a delicate reminder: the wind has no sound. What we hear is the matter of resistance, when the windows rattle, when the leaves rustle; even what we know as the howling of the wind is the vibration caused by pressure differences and vortices as wind flows through structures like trees, buildings, cables. The wind chime, an object steeped in ancient Chinese cosmology, produces not the sound of the wind but a momentary interpretation of one’s location, not only geographically or spatially, but also historically¹, ancestrally, even energetically. And, with its extreme simplicity, it presents a most profound proposition: infinite possibilities through a mere six metal tubes. Fixed by design, and designed to move in response to one element, but such is the element of which no two are the same, if one’s start and end may even be distinguished from another. Could a span of winds be numbered? It feels unnatural to pluralize wind.

What we heard in the wind chime, above all, was resonance. Its pitches possessed so much resonance that it overwhelmed the sounds created by construction going on in a building close by. By that, I mean not that it covered up the sound of the hammering and drilling, but that because of the fullness of its resonance, it permeated into its surrounding soundscape, which also included the flutter of birds chirping. It rendered the construction noise not obsolete but in correspondence.

A sound that is resonant does not allow itself to be heard in isolation; a sine wave played in a completely empty room draws your attention to the pure, empty space in which the sound resides. The resonant sound harnesses anything else in its proximity into coexistence, adding to the suspension within the listener’s attention. Here is the vectorial nature of resonance: resonance is you following the sound. While decay is a relationship of departure, resonance is one of approach.

The world is so big,

Jing

1. Walter Benjamin wrote in October 2002, published in “Dispatches on Survival and Resistance”: People everywhere— under very different conditions— are asking themselves— where are we? The question is historical not geographical. What are we living through? Where are we being taken? What have we lost? How to continue without a plausible vision of the future? Why have we lost any view of what is beyond a lifetime?